I’m a queer designer working in health innovation, trained to notice what happens when systems aren’t built for the people who rely on them most. I’m often thinking about that in the context of healthcare, technology, and design, but while planning my own wedding, that question became deeply personal. As love, law, and health started colliding in real time, I found myself asking: what does marriage protection actually look like, and what might still be missing?
I met my soon-to-be-wife, Melanie, in 2018 during my freshman year at Temple University. We clicked immediately—shared values, a preference to people-watch at parties, and a deep love for Philadelphia, specifically the Eagles.
Fast forward to January 2025: I’m standing at the bottom of a frozen waterfall in Vermont, with Melanie on one knee in front of me. It was an instant yes, happy tears freezing to our faces.
Now, with just a few weeks until our wedding, we’ve been deep in the kinds of joyful decisions every couple dreams about: tailoring a suit, finding the dress, curating playlists, deciding on flowers. The normal wedding chaos felt light, even fun.
But another feeling quietly threaded itself through everything: fear.
A Wedding in the Shadow of Obergefell
June 26, 2025 commemorated the 10-year anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that guaranteed marriage equality to same-sex couples. Just two months after that anniversary, we woke up to the news that the Supreme Court was formally asked to overturn Obergefell.
Former Kentucky clerk Kim Davis—who once refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples—argued that her religious beliefs shielded her from personal liability and that Obergefell was “egregiously wrong.” In 2025 alone, at least nine states have introduced legislation aimed at restricting marriage equality or pushing the Supreme Court to reverse it.
On November 10, 2025, the Court declined to take Davis’s case. A sigh of relief, but a temporary one. After Roe’s reversal and with Justice Thomas openly calling for Obergefell to be revisited, no queer couple can safely assume permanence.
Trying to plan a wedding under that kind of uncertainty has been paralyzing at times. We wondered: Should we rush to city hall? Cancel our dream plans? Prepare for the worst? It felt like our autonomy was being stripped.
The answer we landed on was complicated: a temporary exhale, a long-term vigilance.
Meet Angela Giampolo: Philly Gay Lawyer
I started wondering what protections marriage actually provides, and what might still be missing. That curiosity led me to Angela Giampolo.
LGBTQ+ legal expert Angela Giampolo has spent nearly two decades building legal systems specifically for queer individuals, partners, and families. She founded her law practice 18 years ago to serve “the LGBTQ+ community and those who love us,” because she saw a need for full-spectrum legal services delivered in a queer-affirming environment. LGBTQ+ people slip, fall, go bankrupt, buy homes, start businesses, and navigate complex systems — yet traditional firms only carved out narrow “LGBTQ+ practice areas.”
Growing up in Quebec, where marriage confers only four legal privileges compared to 1,138 privileges in the U.S., made the stakes painfully clear to Angela. Yet many couples—especially LGBTQ+ couples—assume those protections activate automatically. They don’t. Without intentional legal planning, spouses may not have the power to carry out each other’s wishes in moments that matter most.
That gap is exactly what Angela set out to close when she built Giampolo Law Group and Philly Gay Lawyer.
The Uncertainty of the World
In my first meeting with Angela, she didn’t begin with statutes or worst-case scenarios. She started with a familiar question she asks every client: What are your concerns about the uncertainty of the world we’re living in?
The responses she hears are wide-ranging and deeply human. Will my spouse still get my benefits? Could someone take away our adopted child? If trans identities are banned, could my marriage be invalidated? If things escalate, do we need a go-bag? An exit plan? A country to flee to?
Some couples liquidate assets. Some convert savings to crypto for mobility. Some trace their fears back to generational trauma—Holocaust survivors, refugees, genocide.
Angela doesn’t dismiss any of it. Her goal is to help people feel prepared, instead of scared.
“I entered law school in 2004 and had the aha moment of, wow, these 1,138 state and federal privileges touch on every aspect of our life, from immigration to healthcare to inheritance to Medicaid, you name it… but there is zero power inherent in marriage. Not gay marriages, not straight marriages. I feel like we got marriage equality 10 years ago and there was another collective sigh of, oh, we're good. We breathed in legitimacy for the first time and mistook that feeling for power when there never was. And now that the legitimacy is being ripped away violently, we're left realizing we have no power. And there's a return to these [legal] documents when we never should have turned away from them.”
That reality becomes even sharper on a global scale. Even today, LGBTQ+ marriages are recognized in only 38 out of 195 countries. Because of this, Angela views every LGBTQ+ married couple as “inherently unmarried because globally, ultimately, and statistically overall, you are.”
As she answered my questions, I felt the tension I’d been carrying during wedding planning widen into full view. Joy and fear do not cancel each other out. They exist in parallel. Designing a wedding during legal instability means designing for joy and for safety. Part of queer resilience is knowing our love is powerful enough to demand protection, even in the face of uncertainty.
Designing Legal Systems for Real People
Angela’s entire approach mirrors a design process I’m acutely familiar with:
- Iterative — 18 years of listening to lived experiences and refining accordingly.
- Human-centered — no 47-page questionnaires, ever.
- Accessible — weekly meetings, no homework.
- Metaphorical — instruction manuals, moats, co-CEOs of your life.
- Future-proofed — a newly designed definition of “spouse” anticipating marriage rollbacks.
This isn’t just lawyering. It is design: intentional, relational, intuitive.
As a designer myself, I recognized how deliberately her work builds systems that people can actually use, especially under stress. Angela is designing legal resilience as an act of community care. She frames such planning not as death preparation, but as life continuity tools for marginalized communities.
Legal stability is part of the architecture of health, and instability is a public health issue. When the legal foundation under a family unit wobbles, the body absorbs that uncertainty. This is exactly where design intersects with health: by creating tools that reduce friction, increase clarity, and give people a sense of agency in systems not built for them.
It opened a larger question for me about what protection could look like if lawyers, designers, public health experts, and community members were building systems together.
Hope, Resilience, and the Rulebook We Write Ourselves
Listening to Angela reminded me of something queer people have always known: We’ve never waited for the law to save us. We built our own systems. People are preparing, protecting each other, asking questions. That gives me hope.
Resilience isn’t about surviving catastrophe. It’s taking advantage of every opportunity to prepare with clarity so you can live fully right now. And design allows us to imagine futures beyond crisis.
Planning this wedding has taught me that love is a form of design—a deliberate act of building stability and care in a world that doesn’t guarantee either.
When Mel and I walk down the aisle in a few weeks, we’ll be carrying both the joy of choosing each other and the power we’ve deliberately built together. That, to me, feels like the future queer families deserve.
Steps Queer Couples Should Take Now
Angela recommends what she calls the “9+1” model for queer family protection—ten documents that create legal power where marriage does not.
- Premarital Agreement (Prenup): Not about mistrust, but about writing the instruction manual for your marriage. Angela explained it like this: “Everyone already has a prenup. Either you wrote it or the state did.”
- Healthcare Power of Attorney + HIPAA Release: A healthcare power of attorney ensures queer couples can legally make health decisions for their partner, regardless of any potential threats to the validity of same sex marriage. Additionally, listing your spouse on your HIPAA Release documents ensures they will receive complete information about your health to make a sound decision.
- Advance Directive: Also known as a living will, this document serves as instructions to your health care providers about your end-of-life care and wishes. It ensures your medical choices are respected, removes the burden from loved ones during an emotional time, and helps prevent conflict among your loved ones.
- Hospital Visitation Authorization (HVA): This document is an opportunity to detail who you do and do not want to have visitation rights if you are in the hospital. Inclusion of a HVA ensures that your spouse can be by your side, regardless of hospital policy or state law.
- HVA2 — Global Visitation List: Same rules for above, but on a global scale. If you are in the hospital in a country where same sex marriage is not recognized, this document will grant your spouse visitation rights.
- Durable Power of Attorney: Essential during detainment, hospitalization, or sudden incapacity.
- Last Will and Testament
- Joint Revocable Trust: Historically used by LGBTQ couples to recreate marriage before equality. Angela calls it “the moat around the castle.”
- Pet Care Agent: Designates pet guardianship, directions for care, and money for ongoing needs.
- Disposition of Remains Agent: Statutorily appoints who can speak to funeral directors — preventing devastating scenarios where hostile relatives take over.
For more information and resources on protecting your marriage and legal rights, visit Angela’s website: www.giampololaw.com/blog/