Then Comes Marriage (5 page)

I was drawn to Rachel's fearless, outspoken nature, but it also made me anxious—especially when it brushed up against my own lingering internalized homophobia. The first time Rachel met my parents was a classic example.

For months after the head-banging incident, my mother and I did not speak at all. Gradually, with the help of my father and Grandma Belle, we were able to bridge that gap, and eventually we resumed our old habit of talking almost daily. My parents had made a lot of progress since that time in tolerating the idea that I was a lesbian, though we still had our rough spots.

I first introduced my parents to Rachel over dinner at a steakhouse in Grand Central Station. Right from the start we had a culture clash, with Rachel's directness and strong sense of fairness bumping up against my parents' Midwestern sense of reticence and stoicism. During the course of dinner, my mother asked me about an old law school friend, a woman who had had a disconcerting response to my breakup with my girlfriend of seven years. I had been pouring my heart out about the split to this friend, and she had responded by completely ignoring what I was saying, oddly changing the subject to the topic of a lace tablecloth her mother had recently given her. And this was a close friend, a well-educated woman who had gay friends besides me and who had known my ex-girlfriend. She was either unable or unwilling to discuss the end of my relationship, much less give me any comfort, since she clearly thought the subject was either trivial or something best kept quiet about, and that had hurt me still further.

After I finished telling this story, my mother said that she did not see what my friend had done wrong and that I should not be so touchy.

“What do you mean?” Rachel responded. “Robbie and her girlfriend were together seven years. This was like a divorce. It's really homophobic that her friend did not acknowledge that.”

My parents were shocked. This was not the way they communicated with me or with anybody in their social circle, much less with someone they had just met. But that is Rachel's way. She believes in being a truth-teller. At that moment, I was simultaneously freaked out and a little bit thrilled. Rachel was sticking up for me. No one had done that for me in that way before. But Rachel was and would always be on my side, and if she saw me being the victim of any kind of unfair or unkind treatment, including homophobia, she was going to speak up even if I was afraid to. Or perhaps
especially
when I was afraid to. (I should also add that my parents eventually came not only to accept Rachel's approach but to embrace it. When the woman in question encountered my mother years later while putting together her wedding registry, she pretended that she had invited me and that the invitation had been returned with a bad address! Since the wedding had yet to occur, my mother whipped out a piece of paper and wrote down my home address—with Rachel's full name on it. “Try again,” my mom advised. Needless to say, we never received that invitation.)

It was not always easy for me to get used to Rachel's fearlessness and her willingness to challenge what she saw as wrong, no matter what. She, in turn, had a hard time with what she saw as my more diplomatic—or perhaps conciliatory—need to defer to social convention, so we had our share of heated conversations in those early years. And when we clashed, Rachel wanted to discuss it, to talk about our feelings and where they came from and why. Since feelings were messy, sometimes painful, and often not subject to rational control, I did not always want to go there. There were days when I wanted to let things go. But with every discussion and argument we had, I was learning not to repress myself so much. And over the years as I have changed, those around me have changed and grown as well, including Rachel, who is now more patient with people who may have different views.

Even so, there was no escaping the complicated feelings we both had about taking our relationship to the next level: becoming domestic partners.

Marriage still was not available to gay Americans in 2002. Rachel and I had decided to become domestic partners, in large part for health insurance reasons, so it was a practical as much as a romantic endeavor. Unexpectedly, I found myself beset by a complicated array of feelings about the whole thing as we drove down to the New York City Clerk's Office to complete the paperwork. We had to stop at a bank to get some forms notarized, and I was overcome by a mixture of anxiety and frustration.

As lesbians growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, Rachel and I had no out and open role models to follow in creating a committed relationship or to support us as a couple. Of course, we knew older lesbian and gay couples, but often those relationships were an open secret at best. And their relationships were never seen as equivalent to those of straight married couples—significant, perhaps, but not equal. One of the great benefits of marriage is that it gives couples the opportunity to experience their community rallying around them, to feel the support of loved ones who pledge to celebrate the joyous moments but also to be there for them during the dark times as well. Gay people were never allowed to have that community support, and I think it wounded many of us in many ways. Because we had always been excluded from marriage, many of us had never fully understood what is at the core of the marriage experience—that it is not simply a relationship between two people, but also a relationship between a couple and their larger community. I think I felt in my bones the limits of what domestic partnership would grant to us in those moments before we registered. It bothered me that we were denied a right that any random straight couple had. The fact that two drunk heterosexual strangers could get hitched in ten minutes in Vegas, while committed gay couples were denied that right in every state, created a lot of deep-seated resentment and sadness for many gay people, even if we did not always consciously realize it.

So when we had to make an extra stop to get the papers notarized, all my irritation came to the forefront. “What is the
point
of this?” I asked Rachel. “I mean, it's not like we're getting
married
.”

Rachel turned around to look at me, her eyes blazing. “Well, just forget about it, then!” she said. She, too, had conflicted feelings but felt hurt that I was being dismissive of what was in fact an important step for our relationship. So it was no surprise that my casually glib dismissal set her off.

“No, no,” I said. “We're already here, let's just get it done.” This was hardly a romantic or soothing gesture on my part, and Rachel, understandably, remained hurt. We both were seething by then, but we got the paperwork notarized.

We became domestic partners that day, although we were barely speaking to each other by the end of the process. As we left the City Clerk's Office, we saw that there was some sort of political protest taking place on the nearby steps of City Hall. Rachel, of course, knew the people who were protesting, and when we told them why we were there, they erupted in shouts of “Mazel tov!” and “Congratulations!” Our straight progressive friends were ecstatic for us. All I could think was, there was not much to celebrate. Who knew when there ever would be?

As it turned out, the answer would come the very next year, thanks to a tireless advocate named Mary Bonauto.

3

THE BEGINNINGS
OF A NEW PERSPECTIVE

Y
ou may not know this, but if you are a married gay person in the United States of America today, Mary Bonauto actually helped walk you down the aisle. For the last quarter of a century, this no-nonsense, publicity-shunning, get-the-job-done attorney has been fighting the fight for all of us. Former Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank once called Mary the “Thurgood Marshall of our movement,” and I agree. I would say that she's all that plus our own Wonder Woman, except that as a sensible New Englander, she would never countenance wearing bright red and blue spandex.

Mary began working with Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) in 1990, back when the notion of marriage equality was derided not only by conservatives but by those within the LGBT rights movement as well. In the mid 1980s, Evan Wolfson was one of the first to start advocating for marriage equality, but most other LGBT activists dismissed the idea. In August 1989, when Andrew Sullivan published a groundbreaking
New Republic
cover story, entitled “Here Comes the Groom,” advocating for marriage equality, the response was even harsher: many gay activists and organizations lashed out, arguing that he was pursuing a path that was not only wrong but had the potential to set the movement back.

Sullivan had anticipated the backlash to his article, writing that “Much of the gay leadership clings to notions of gay life as essentially outsider, anti-bourgeois, radical. Marriage, for them, is co-optation into straight society”—a co-opting that many felt would eviscerate, rather than empower, the gay community. As the filmmaker John Waters famously put it, “I always thought the privilege of being gay is that we don't have to get married or go into the Army.”

I remember reading Sullivan's article as a deeply closeted freshman at Harvard, where Sullivan had been a graduate student. He begins by referencing a significant gay rights case that had just been decided by the New York Court of Appeals,
Braschi v. Stahl Associates
.
Braschi
involved what was then a very pressing issue in the LGBT community—whether the lover of a man who had died of AIDS could remain in their rent-controlled New York City apartment. The court held that he could, observing that a family for these purposes could include “two adult lifetime partners whose relationship is long and is characterized by an emotional and financial commitment and interdependence.”
Braschi
was written by Judge Vito Titone, who was still on the Court of Appeals when I clerked for Chief Judge Kaye years later. One of my favorite parts of the clerkship was sitting in Judge Titone's Albany chambers late in the evening listening to him tell stories about New York politics. Sullivan predicted in his article that “legal gay marriage could also help to bridge the gulf between gays and their parents”—something that certainly proved to be true with respect to my own family. In fact, Judge Titone's own son Matthew went on to become the first openly gay elected official from Staten Island.

During Mary Bonauto's early years at GLAD, gay people faced so much legalized discrimination that it seemed entirely beside the point to pursue marriage, which clearly was not going to happen anytime soon. We could be fired from jobs, denied custody of our own children, lose our housing, and be thrown in jail for having sex,
simply because we were gay
. The list of horribles went on and on. Why chase after the pipe dream of marriage when we had so many other urgent problems to solve? For all these reasons, Mary initially declined to take on any marriage equality cases.

Mary also understood, however, that once gay people were allowed to marry, we would achieve a different stature in society's eyes—and that alone would go a long way toward solving the other problems we faced. Marriage, after all, is the mechanism by which our legal system recognizes our relationships with the people we love. As a result, marriage is not only legally and practically important but symbolically important as well. If gay people were to achieve equality in marriage, it would mean that they would be considered equal in other facets of life. So a few years into her tenure at GLAD, as American attitudes began changing in the mid 1990s, Mary decided it was finally time to take the plunge. She developed a brilliant, careful, concerted state-by-state strategy for bringing marriage cases to the courts, and then she started filing complaints. “I said no to many people over the years,” she would later tell the
New York Times
. “And then I finally said yes.”

The first case that Mary brought for marriage equality was in Vermont in 1997. That case,
Baker v. Vermont
, made it all the way to the Vermont Supreme Court, which managed to simultaneously delight and dismay gay advocates with its ruling. The good news was that the court said gay people should have the right to have their relationships recognized under the law. The bad news was that it dodged the important step of deciding how to implement its own decision, instead tossing the issue of the appropriate remedy back to the Vermont legislature. Vermont lawmakers responded by creating civil unions, essentially giving gay Vermonters separate but equal status. Since we had never been seen as equal before, this was a huge step forward.

But it definitely wasn't good enough. So in 2001, Mary filed her next suit, on behalf of seven gay couples in Massachusetts. That case,
Goodridge v. Department of Public Health
, wound its way through the court system up to the highest court in Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court. In March 2003, Mary argued the case for the plaintiff couples, insisting to the justices that “civil unions” were not sufficient:

[W]hen it comes to marriage, there really is no such thing as separating the word “marriage” from the protections it provides. The reason for that is that one of the most important protections of marriage is the word, because the word is what conveys the status that everyone understands as the ultimate expression of love and commitment.

The Supreme Judicial Court was not expected to hand down its decision until the fall of 2003, but in the interim two things happened that gave hope to marriage equality supporters. In early June, the Canadian province of Ontario legalized marriage equality. And on June 26, in its landmark
Lawrence v. Texas
decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas law criminalizing sexual relationships. As Justice Anthony Kennedy put it, “When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring. The liberty protected by the Constitution allows homosexual persons the right to make this choice.” This decision reversed one handed down just seventeen years earlier, in 1986, when the Court had upheld an analogous Georgia antisodomy law in
Bowers v. Hardwick
.