Couple take on Prop. 8

Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo had hoped for years to get married, but as they watched anti-same-sex marriage campaign material proliferate in their Burbank community, the obstacles facing them became clear.

More than a dozen “Yes on 8” signs — supporting the 2008 initiative that would define marriage as a union between a man and a woman — cropped up in one neighbor’s yard as the election approached.

“It was a slap in the face every time you left for work, and it was a slap in the face every time you came home,” Katami said.

But when the campaigning was over, and the state’s law prohibiting their union was passed, the couple decided to challenge it.

Together with a lesbian couple from Berkeley, the men are part of a federal lawsuit in San Francisco claiming that the same-sex marriage ban is unconstitutional because it discriminates against a minority group.

Proposition 8, the couple said, was too troubling of an affront on their rights to allow it to stand, particularly after they had built a relationship together and fallen in love like any other couple.

“It’s a natural next step to be married, but we couldn’t, and I think that’s the biggest issue,” Katami said

The pair met online in 2001, and as their lives and interests drew them closer they began to realize that they “just clicked,” they said.

Zarrillo, 36, remembers going to Katami’s classes at Equinox Fitness Club, struggling as Katami kept up the pace and made gym-goers sweat.

Katami, 37, was Zarrillo’s gateway to the Los Angeles area after he moved west from New Jersey, introducing him to friends and touring him around the region.

They traveled together — to Italy and Australia — exploring sites like the Great Barrier Reef and building friendships that followed them home.

In 2004, they bought a house in the Burbank community of Magnolia Park, and two years later, on Katami’s 34th birthday, Zarrillo dropped to one knee and proposed in front of their friends.

But as they received congratulations and celebrated what could have been a milestone in their lives, it was clear that their dreams of having a legal marriage in California were unrealistic, they said.