Chapter 8: You’d Think They Had Won

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.

Music:
Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) 
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Chapter 7: There’s No Marriage Without Engagement

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.

Music:
Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) 
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Chapter 6: I Was Just Tired of Running Away From Myself

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?

Music:
In Your Arms Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) 
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Chapter 5: I Just Wanted to Love Somebody as Much as I Could

Genora Dancel, Evan Wolfson, and Ninia Baehr

They said it was unwinnable. 

The lawsuit that Genora Dancel 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.

Maybe it was time to rethink the conventional wisdom about what was “winnable."

Music:
In Your Arms Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) 
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Chapter 4: Not the Marrying Kind

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.”

Music:
In Your Arms Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) 
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Chapter 3: Know Who Your Enemies Are

“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.

Music:
In Your Arms Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) 
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Chapter 2: To be Let in, not Just Left Alone

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.

Here are some of the clips discussed on the podcast of the 1971 New York marriage counter zap:

Music:
In Your Arms Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) 
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Chapter 1: Imperfect Man

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?

To answer that question, I’ve journeyed to Washington to witness the protests and to watch the Justices deliberate. I explore the personal stake of the activists and attorneys before the court, and delve into artifacts from long-gone same-sex couples who, in decades past, somehow found a way to define their relationships on their own terms. 

I come away with more questions than answers. It’s just the beginning of a saga that will take me back in time and around the country, and force me to confront own conflicted relationship with marriage and with my own partner.

As mentioned in this week's chat at the end of the chapter, here's my video about the Equality Act, as well as Stuart and John talking about why marriage matters.

Music:
In Your Arms Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) 
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Defining Marriage Introduction

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.

If you're the impatient type and you'd like to read the whole thing all at once, you can download a digital version over on Amazon. It's available for free during its first week in the store, July 13th to 17th, and just $9.99 after that.

This podcast audiobook version will always be free, and if you find it worthwhile, all I ask is that you give it a rating and review on the iTunes store -- that feedback makes a huge difference, and I read it all. 

Since this is the first episode, I'm going to start things off at the beginning, with the book's introduction. It's a little shorter than the rest of the chapters, but stick around afterwards for a little post-chapter discussion with me and a special guest.

Music:
In Your Arms Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) 
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/