Defining Marriage - Gay/LGBT News & Chat

The dramatic conclusion! Will James and I ever get married? The answer may surprise you. (Probably not.) Plus: what's next? Well, now you can finally buy the print edition of the book! If you're enjoyed the podcast or the ebook, a dead-tree edition of Defining Marriage might make a wonderful gift, should a gift-giving opportunity arise in the near future. You can pick it up right now on Amazon.

For years, national leaders told Josh Boschee that North Dakota had no place in the marriage equality movement. “It’s not where the battlefield is,” they told him. It was just conventional wisdom that his state would never be a player, and he wouldn’t have a role. And so he was resigned to sitting the fight out. “We’re just going to hope and pray that the other states take care of it for us,” he said. But as one state after another won the freedom to marry, the conventional wisdom made less and less sense. And he saw the harm of waiting on the sidelines — for example, his neighbors, Celeste and Amber, were expecting a third child in a few weeks but couldn’t appear together on their own kids’ birth certificates. Sure, the national groups said North Dakota needed to wait. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized: “You know what? We don't need the national groups. We'll just do it on our own.” Over the course of just a few decades, marriage had gone from an impossible joke to an attainable goal, even in the most unlikely of states. It was a messy process, unpredictable and littered with setbacks. But it was also a process of growth, of improvement, of coming together for the betterment of all involved. Just like marriage itself.

At first glance, it might not seem like Thalia Zepatos had a personal stake in the marriage equality movement. After all, she was straight, with no kids of her own. But she had also experienced the pain of second-class treatment. It was during a particularly violent campaign for nondiscrimination protections, during which staffers’ offices were broken into, Thalia’s car was followed, and innocent queer bystanders were attacked and killed by skinheads. After that experience, Thalia was determined to end such abusive treatment. She saw that progress had been slow and that public opinion wasn’t moving fast enough, and so she dedicated the next few years of her life to searching for a better way to show voters why the freedom to marry mattered. And then, at last, she discovered a solution: a message that was so obvious it was right in front of everyone all along. Her research showed that it worked — but it had yet to be tested in an actual election. By 2012, there was no time for further testing. Four states had marriage bans on the ballot, and Thalia had convinced campaign managers in all four states to adopt her new strategy. They were about to find out whether it would work.

Senator Ed Murray had a roadmap to win equality in Washington. It would take years, and for much of that time, nobody believed he could do it. That’s because a key ingredient of his plan was time and patience. Rather than pushing for full marriage, Ed wanted to take a slow-motion approach, gradually educating legislators about marriage over the course of years before putting a marriage bill in front of them. Impatient allies didn’t see the point. But Ed’s strategy was vindicated one day in 2012 when he was sitting in his office with his partner Michael, both of them collecting themselves after an emotional testimony about why their long relationship deserved equal treatment under the law. In walked Mary Margaret Haugen, a longtime legislator with a conservative district. She had voted against marriage equality in the past, but today, she told them, she had changed her mind. It was simply the right thing to do, she realized, even though it meant she would probably lose her seat. That’s when it was clear that the tide had turned. People who would never have supported the freedom to marry before now found themselves switching sides, even if it came at a great cost. “We have been on a long journey,” Governor Christine Gregoire said. After years of work, she said, the marriage bill was “the final step. It is the right step. We have finally said yes to marriage equality.” But it wasn’t the final step after all. Instantly, anti-gay groups began gathering signatures to put their definition of marriage on the ballot that November. Winning over the conscience of the legislature was a multi-decade effort; now, Ed had eleven months to win over the conscience of the whole state.

If you wandered down to a Midtown union hall in Manhattan one night in 2011, you might’ve encountered an unusual sight: Broadway stars, decked out in tuxedos and cocktail dresses, calling voters all over New York. They’d just left an awards dinner early, and without stopping to change they had descended on a marriage equality phone bank — as they had been doing for weeks. It was the work of Jenny Kanelos, a small-town girl who’d moved to the big city just a few years earlier. In her wildest dreams, she couldn’t have envisioned herself leading a movement. But just a few years earlier, she’d volunteered to work on the Obama campaign, and discovered within herself an untapped well of power. Jenny found that she possessed two secret weapons: an intense commitment to justice, and a community of allies ready to follow her into battle. She teamed up with her friends Gavin Creel and Rory O’Malley — themselves stars of the stage — and before she knew it, they were leading a rally in the middle of Times Square, drawing massive crowds to phone banks, and delivering boxes full of signatures to the Capitol. But organizing alone wouldn’t be enough to win equality. Despite the groundswell that Jenny and her friends led, legislators dismissed the public support and voted down a marriage bill. Now New York was about to find out what happens when Jenny gets pissed.

It seemed too improbable to be true: the lawyers who fought Bush v. Gore teaming up to fight Prop 8. And if that wasn’t strange enough, the company they were keeping was absolutely insane: lefty activist Rob Reiner; Bush Campaign Manager Ken Mehlman; screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. Orchestrating this strange alliance was Chad Griffin, who was until recently an outsider to marriage equality. He’d been brought in to advise the Prop 8 campaign, and the cause had become his passion. Now, the political operative turned his attention to the freedom to marry, and he had a daring new strategy. It was so daring, in fact, that the conventional wisdom at the time was that it was a terrible idea. Longtime leaders let him know in no uncertain terms that his federal lawsuit could do far more harm than good, and that there was little trust for his conservative allies. Their objections were completely reasonable, given that they’d weathered painful setbacks in the fight, from the destruction of relationships to legal roadblocks to the death of loved ones in the midst of battle. This new strategy was wrong, they explained, and so were the people behind it. The whole thing broke all the rules. But Chad was convinced that breaking the rules was the only way to win.

One week, Amy was just a newlywed from Cleveland. The next, she was leading an international protest movement, drawing millions of people into the streets. It started with a simple email from her friend Willow, and the suggestion that people channel their outrage over Prop 8 into impromptu local marches. Amy casually posted the suggestion on her website, forwarded an email about it to some friends, and went to bed. That’s how Join the Impact was born. In a sense, it came along at just the right moment. After Prop 8 passed, the LGBT community and its allies had been plunged into a collective state of grief, furious and mournful and feeling entirely powerless. Everyone was looking for a place to channel their emotions. Amy and Willow found themselves deputized as global grief counselors. But the two women soon found that leading an international liberation movement can be a little exhausting.

The plan, Tim and Juan agreed, was to wait until spring. That’s when Tim’s brother returned from serving in Iraq and could serve as best man at the wedding, just as Tim had done for him. A family-heavy wedding was non-negotiable for Tim, but for Juan it was a bit more problematic. His family still struggled with his homosexuality. Tired of waiting for their struggle to be over, he’d cut them out of his life. After they met, Tim’s family had taken Juan in as one of their own, embracing the man who made Tim so happy. They couldn’t wait to be married in a few months. But then they woke up the day after the election to discover that Prop 8 had passed, and marriage was off the table. Any other couple might’ve mourned and settled for a civil union. But Juan was resolute. The ban may have passed, but one way or another, they he was getting that license. They were about to discover just how powerful family and the drive to marry can be.

The crowd that gathered outside the California Supreme Court in May of 2008 let out a cheer that you could hear clear across the city when they got the news: the court had just overturned the state’s marriage ban. Same-sex couples could finally marry. What followed was a summer of sheer bliss, with 18,000 couples typing the knot. But looming on the horizon was Proposition 8. The idea that anyone could take marriage equality away was simply too painful for many people to confront. But leaders like Kate Kendell were doing everything they could to sound the alarm. Faulty polling, lackluster fundraising, and a backwards campaign strategy were just a few of the red flags. Longtime grassroots organizers like Molly McKay were aghast to see a campaign that wanted nothing to do with them or their years of experience. While the campaign sputtered and organizers struggled, the clock was counting down to what was looking increasingly like the end of marriage.

Gavin Newsom was mayor of San Francisco for just one month before he pissed off the President of the United States. But that was the goal. After President George Bush called for a constitutional marriage ban in his State of the Union, San Francisco’s newly-elected mayor racked his brains for an appropriately defiant response. He was sure he’d hit on the perfect solution when he got the idea to start let gays and lesbians marry. To his surprise, the plan encountered strong resistance from queer leaders, including those within his own staff. The timing was wrong, they told him; it was too risky; as a straight man, it wasn’t his fight. But he stuck to his principles, and soon there were lines of same-sex couples ringing San Francisco City Hall, broadcast internationally and propelling marriage equality into the spotlight like never before. Then came the backlash, both in the form of more marriage bans across the country and repercussions to Newsom’s career. Was it worth it? “It's never the right time to do the right thing when it comes to politics and politicians,” he told me years later. “Which means it's always the right time to do the right thing.”

March 7, 2000: Election night. Proposition 22 had just passed by a landslide, banning marriage equality for same-sex couples across California. So why were the gay and lesbian couples at the No on 22 headquarters celebrating? Campaign Manager Mike Marshall knew from the start that the odds were stacked overwhelmingly against him, but he hadn’t realized just how badly until he was deep in the campaign. (It probably should have been a warning sign that he was the only one who applied for the job to run it.) In 2000, marriage equality advocates weren’t just out-gunned and out-financed — they barely even existed. Disorganized and exhausted by the AIDS crisis, the LGBT community had zero infrastructure in place to fight for marriage. But if anyone could change that, it was Mike. He’d come out as gay while working in Eastern Europe for an organization that builds political infrastructure in countries decimated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. If he could help rebuild Romania, how much harder could it be to organize a bunch of California queers? Mike adopted a strategy that, at the time, sounded nuts: winning the election wasn’t his top priority. Instead, the campaign would provide cover to build statewide infrastructure so that they could run again, and hopefully win, a decade later. But explaining the secret plan to an incredulous community wasn’t going to be easy.

Banning marriage in California wasn’t just a political ploy for Senator Pete Knight. It was personal. His brother had died from AIDS-related illness. His son David had come out of the closet in 1996. “I don’t know how these things happen,” Pete Knight told a reporter who asked about his family. “I don’t know how it happened to my brother, and I don’t know how it happened to David. I don’t know how you explain it.” And so he put fourteen words before voters: “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” At the time, there was virtually no state leadership in California to stop him. But there were some scrappy grassroots organizers who could at least put up a fight: Mark Levine, who employed sly stagecraft in Los Angeles to give the appearance of a unified front. And in San Francisco, there was Molly McKay and Davina Kotulski, turning heads as they rode down Market Street on a motorcycle in full wedding garb. They may not have been able to marry yet. But they were ready to get engaged — not just with a person, but with a movement.

In the mid-1990s, a lawyer named Kathryn Lehman helped write the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which then easily passed into law and stood in the way of nationwide marriage equality for nearly two decades. At the time, she was working for Congressman Henry Hyde, who insisted that same-sex couples demeaned the institution of marriage. But although it wasn’t common knowledge at the time, Hyde had secretly cheated on his wife. And Lehman was about to marry a man, despite being a lesbian. The opponents of equality didn’t just have bizarre ideas about gays being immoral or curable. They had deep personal conflicts when it came to their own relationships, to the point that they carried on affairs and used straight weddings to cover their homosexuality. When it came to defending marriage, the inmates were running the asylum. How could so many people have been so wrong? And what finally convinced Lehman to come out of the closet, put heterosexuality behind her, and start working to undo the damage she’d done years earlier by writing DOMA?

They said it was unwinnable. The lawsuit that Genora Woods and Ninia Baehr filed against the state of Hawaii started off simply enough: as an ear infection. Ninia had an earache and needed to see a doctor, but she couldn’t access Genora’s health coverage since the state refused to consider them married. So they sued the state. But longtime LGBT activists refused to join the two women in battling Hawaii. The timing was all wrong, they were told. They’d set the cause back by a generation. The case was “unwinnable.” They should just settle for civil unions, a weak compromise. But that was before Ninia and Genora started racking up wins. In one court after another, justices heard their argument — that treating same-sex couples differently under the law was unconstitutional — and handed them a victory.

As Andrew Sullivan, junior editor at The New Republic in 1989 saw it, marriage could transform gay people’s lives. Not only would it clear a path for full equality, as Evan Wolfson had argued in his thesis a few years earlier, but it could protect the gay community from the AIDS epidemic by fostering more careful sex. It was a cultural inoculation in the absence of a real vaccine. But to radical queers, marriage was itself a virus, a tool of the oppressor that, if adopted by homosexuals, would degrade their very identity from the inside out. And to conservatives, gay marriage was an assault on decency. If AIDS was “nature’s retribution for violating the laws of nature,” as Pat Buchanan said in 1992, surely heterosexuals were entitled to exact some retribution as well. Virus or vaccine, punishment or reward, marriage had become a crossroads of ideologies, a metaphorical battleground with a literal body count. "At the time, it seemed like it was the fucking end of the world," Sullivan told me, years later, while waiting for his husband to join him at a Provincetown bar. “I mean, I can’t tell you how scary it was. Everybody knew they could die, and there didn't seem to be any cure. Part of that gave me the courage to go out and make that argument. Because I thought it was going to be the last argument I would ever make.”