Tommy Dorfman confirms secret marriage
Tommy Dorfman got married last year.
The '13 Reasons Why' star - who came out as trans three years ago - got engaged to her partner Elise just two months after they started dating in 2021 but they always knew they wanted a low-key wedding out of the spotlight, and when it came to it, they made a spur of the moment decision to exchange vows a few months ago.
In an essay for Vogue, Tommy - who was previously married to Peter Zurkuhlen - wrote: "We decided that, at some point down the line, we would just elope. Elise never aspired to be a bride in the traditional sense - she didn’t have fantasies of walking down the aisle or large swaths of people staring at her and her future partner as they performed the spectacle and theatrics of marriage.
"Simply put, she just didn’t feel the need for a big event, and since I had already had that experience at my first wedding with 300-plus guests, I happily obliged. Our love had formed and grown in a contained bubble, so why couldn’t our marriage be on the same terms?...
"We had some ideas of when we might elope but nothing was firm, so when the day came, it was even a surprise to us. In the fall of 2023, sitting perched above the shoreline in Malibu, Elise and I joked about same-day marriages, egging each other on.
"The bit turned more serious when I took to Google and actually learned there was a concierge service for this in Los Angeles (of course there was) and California was the only state that offered confidential marriage services, meaning our papers wouldn’t be in the public record and nobody would know we got married.
"A few hours later, a man showed up at our hotel in Santa Monica, took photos of us on our iPhones and a disposable camera I bought at CVS that morning, and we ended the day at a concert without telling a soul what we’d done."
When the couple returned home to Brooklyn, they decided to celebrate their marriage in a "meaningful way" by arranging a photoshoot with photographer Hunter Abrams, giving the pair the opportunity to wear the wedding dresses they had bought some time before but hadn't taken to their elopement.
Tommy continued: "It wasn’t until we got back to Brooklyn that we felt the urge to mark our marriage in a more meaningful way. While it didn’t feel like something we needed to flaunt publicly in any way, it was still the biggest moment in our lives together and we yearned for the memory of our love—and these beautiful dresses we bought—to be immortalised.
"We also wanted at some point to share our love with our friends, family, and the world. Hunter [Abrams] was the first person we thought of to photograph us: a close friend of mine for years, they fostered a safe and cozy environment for our first family portraits."
The 31-year-old star and her wife decided to go public with their marriage news so they could share their photos with the world.
Alongside photos from the wedding, Tommy explained: "A few months later, we got photos from Hunter and at that moment, we decided we wanted to share them with our friends and family and celebrate our love more publicly.
"While we won’t live our lives online in any way that isn’t well-protected, we do see the benefit of celebrating our love with the world—and, frankly, the importance of people seeing trans and queer love en vogue."
