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

August 31, 2015 Matthew Baume

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

August 24, 2015 Matthew Baume

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

August 17, 2015 Matthew Baume

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

August 10, 2015 Matthew Baume

“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

August 3, 2015 Matthew Baume

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/

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