“The Chi” creator Lena Waithe and her longtime girlfriend Alana Mayo quietly tied the knot in San Francisco.
“We snuck and did it, you know,” Waithe, 35, told guest host John Legend on “The Ellen Degeneres Show” on Friday. “We didn’t really make any announcements or a big … you know.”
The actress-writer explained that the couple was in San Francisco and spontaneously decided to get married at the courthouse in front of a bust of Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the U.S.
“It was her idea, like all good things are, and she was just driving and she saw the courthouse and she said, ‘We should get married there,’ and I said, ‘Cool, I’m down,'” Waithe said.
When describing the significance of marrying in front of the sculpture of Milk, she said, “It was a humbling day, you know, to marry someone so amazing, but also to really appreciate all the work that so many people have put in for us to be able to do that … Everybody should be able to do that.”
Waithe, who was the first black woman to win an Emmy for writing on Netflix’s “Master of None,” and Mayo, the head of production at Michael B. Jordan’s studio Outlier Society Productions, got engaged over Thanksgiving weekend in 2017.
She told People in March 2018 that she didn’t know when they would tie the knot, but when they did it would be “super small, crazy small.”
She added, “It’s almost like an excuse to have fun with our friends.”
Congratulations to the newlyweds.