Defining Marriage - Gay/LGBT News & Chat

“Marriage felt impossible for so long. This impossible thing you’re never going to get, so don’t bother asking for it,” said Dan Savage. But: “it doesn’t get better for us in a vacuum. It gets better FOR us because straight people get better ABOUT us.” I chatted with Dan and with Fred Karger about what life was like for gays in the 1970s, and their two very different ways of dealing with it: for Fred, a gay Republican, there was safety in hiding. But Dan, despite being raised in a Roman Catholic household, came emphatically out of the closet at an early age and let the straight world know that any discomfort they felt was their own doing. From within the belly of the beast, Fred was able to rally opposition to homophobic legislator John Briggs long before it was safe for him to do so publicly. But ultimately, hiding proved far more destructive than coming out. After all, if queers were ever going to demand full equality, first they’d have to reveal themselves. They’d have to exist. Then they could get down to the work of making things better.

It was the mid-1970s in Seattle when a twenty-something radical named Faygele Ben Miriam dragged his boyfriend Paul to a King County office to demand a marriage license. They never managed to get one, but if they'd walked into the office of Boulder county clerk Clela Rorex, she'd have defiantly handed one to them on the spot. These pioneers were the first vanguard of a new post-Stonewall marriage equality movement, and the overwhelming consensus was that they were nuts. Marriage for homosexuals was too ludicrous an idea to take seriously, and those few activists who spoke out for the cause were shunned and ridiculed. Decades later, the auditor who rejected Faygele Ben Miriam’s license later became one of the state’s leading voices for marriage equality (on behalf of his lesbian daughter). Clela Rorex’s successor, forty years later, led the charge for equality across all of Colorado. Everyone thought that early vanguard was crazy. It turns out they were visionaries.

It’s March of 2013, and there’s a battle playing out at the Supreme Court, both inside and out. On the steps of the courthouse, protestors wave competing signs; inside, the justices grill attorneys on who gets to decide the meaning of marriage. It’s a gulf that for years has divided the whole country: marriage for same sex-couples versus preserving of the status quo. Some protestors say that God defines marriage. Others say that it’s defined by the state. Most couples just want to say “we’re married” and be done with it. So who gets to choose?

Hello friends, and thanks for subscribing to the Defining Marriage podcast. You'll get one complete and unabridged chapter every week of my book, Defining Marriage: Voices from a Forty-Year Labor of Love. This show, like the book, traces the decades-long evolution of marriage through the personal stories of those who lived through it. We'll take an intimate glimpse into the private lives of those who dreamed of marriage in the 1970s, the survivors of the 1980s, the audacious pioneers of the 1990s, the tireless soldiers of the 2000s, and the champions who won marriage today. Defining Marriage is the story of how people from all walks of life fought to change marriage -- and how fighting for marriage, in turn, changed them.