It was Valentine’s Day at San Francisco’s City Hall. White princess wedding gowns floated throughout the rotunda. Photographers fluffed veils and posed brides and grooms against the Corinthian columns in search of an angle that matched the figurines on a tiered cake.

On a gilded balcony overlooking the scene, Beverly and Suzanne Ford were among the many same-sex couples who renewed their vows in a public ceremony officiated by Mayor London Breed. The event Wednesday was a celebration of the 20-year anniversary of a landmark moment in the battle for same-sex marriage in California.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.