With that, the wheels of a Hollywood-style proposal were set in motion. But not before Ms. Gist and Ms. Brown, who is also a producer on “Our Kind of People,” figured out who they are as a couple. “We’re such lesbians,” Ms. Gist said. “We started this thing where we’d turn off all the lights and slow dance every night,” sometimes at Ms. Brown’s house in Long Beach, others at Ms. Gist’s Hollywood loft. In 2019, when they moved to Los Feliz together, they set up an “emotional office” on their balcony. “We sit up there and talk about the day and play our music.” One song, Willie Nelson’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” always made the playlist.
On Aug. 24, 2019, Ms. Brown drove Ms. Gist to IPIC Theaters in West Hollywood, where she had agreed to speak on a panel for aspiring filmmakers. “She told me, smartly, that I would be speaking to a young mentee of hers,” she said. “She knew I wouldn’t cancel on a young woman.” When Ms. Brown picked her up, “Willie Nelson was pouring out of the speakers.”
Inside the movie house, the curtain was raised to a screen of Barack Obama and a soundtrack of Etta James’s “At Last.” “I thought, whoever this woman is who made this film, she’s brilliant!” Ms. Gist said. “She put all my favorite things together.” Then she saw her own face onscreen. At the end of the seven-minute film Ms. Brown had made about their romance, 20 friends who had hidden in the theater popped up. Ms. Brown proposed; Ms. Gist said a tearful yes.
On Sept. 11, Ms. Brown and Ms. Gist were married at Borthwick Castle in North Middleton, Scotland, by Gillian Robertson, a Scottish celebrant, and taking part was their friend Albert Loya, who became a Universal Life Church minister for the occasion. Ms. Gist wore a crystal-embedded Berta gown. Ms. Brown wore a custom-made traditional kilt. Marrying in Scotland was important to them: “As a gay person in an interracial relationship, it means everything to get married in the white, Catholic, conservative place I grew up,” Ms. Brown said. “Also against the backdrop of a castle that has remnants of one of the most bad-ass women to walk the globe, Mary Queen of Scots.”
Their wedding day, by contrast, was pure tenderness. “We’re so madly in love,” Ms. Gist said.
