"The Day Of Truth Is Coming..."

Gay Marriage’s Moment

The New York TimesFrank Bruni
June 20, 2015


REMEMBER the AIDS crisis? If you lived in a big American city during its spread, you were witness to constant sorrow and countless examples of gay people treated as second-class citizens.

One was almost certainly this: the steadfast, heartbroken man being shut out of his beloved’s final weeks — not allowed in the hospital room, not welcomed at the grave — because some family members disapproved and no law trumped their bigotry.

This was a recurring story, an infuriating leitmotif, and many gays and our allies remarked and railed that it wouldn’t be happening if committed same-sex relationships got the legal recognition that heterosexual ones did.

Sometimes we even used the word “marriage.”

That was 30 years ago.

Now we stand nervously and hopefully on the brink of a milestone. Before the end of June, a month associated with wedding bells and wedding cake, the Supreme Court will issue a major decision about the right of two men or two women to exchange vows in a manner honored by the government. It may well extend same-sex marriage to all 50 states, making it the law of the land.

Many Americans still oppose that. And some will argue, as they routinely do, that it has been forced on them much too quickly and that history can’t be rewritten in an instant.

Too quickly? An instant?

Nothing about this juncture feels quick if you soldiered through AIDS and the country’s awakening then to just how many gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans there are, just how profound our bonds can be, just how fiercely we’re willing to fight for them, just how ardently we ache to be included.

Nothing about it feels quick if you consider that Evan Wolfson, a chief architect of the political quest for same-sex marriage, wrote a thesis on the topic at Harvard Law School in 1983, or if you remember how passionately the issue of same-sex marriage was debated in the 1990s, when the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, was passed.

Nothing about it feels quick if you’re among or you know gay and lesbian Americans who, in a swelling tide, summoned the grit and honed the words to tell family members, friends and co-workers the truth of our lives. Our candor came from more than personal need. It reflected our yearning for a world beyond silence and fear, and we knew that the only way to get there was through these small, aggregate acts of courage.

Same-sex marriage isn’t some overnight cause, some progressive novelty, especially not when it’s put in its proper context, as part of a struggle for gay rights that has been plenty long, patient and painful.

Yes, the dominoes of marriage equality in individual states have tumbled with a surprising velocity. My first Op-Ed column, in June 2011, noted that New York had just become the sixth state in the country to legalize same-sex marriage. The count today is 37 states and Washington, D.C. I’m amazed at this still.

And I marvel that just over two years ago, Hillary Clinton hadn’t yet spoken up for marriage equality, which is now such a given among Democrats that they characterize Republicans’ resistance to it as damnably backward and baldly uncivilized. That’s an enormous change.

But it’s not so dizzying or difficult to comprehend when you think about the simple logic behind same-sex marriage: You can’t relegate the commitments and loves of an entire group of Americans to a different category, marked by a little pink asterisk, without saying that we ourselves don’t measure up. You can’t tell us that you consider us equal and then put perhaps the central, most important relationship in our lives in an unequal box. It’s a non sequitur and a nonstarter.

A Supreme Court judgment for marriage equality wouldn’t be a rash swerve into uncharted terrain. It would merely be a continuation of the journey of gay Americans — of all Americans — across familiar land, in the direction of justice. It would be a stride toward the top of the hill.

And the first steps go back much further than 2011, than DOMA, than AIDS, even than the Stonewall riots of 1969.

Next month, in fact, is the 50th anniversary of the first “annual reminder,” a picket in Philadelphia for gay civil rights. It commenced on July 4, 1965, with just a few dozen gays and lesbians, and occurred yearly through July 4, 1969, as “Gay Pioneers,” a short 2004 documentary, eloquently chronicles.Continue reading the main story

Three newer documentaries also underscore the sweat and tears that preceded the present moment. PBS just posted on its website “Limited Partnership,” the story of a committed gay couple’s efforts, starting in the 1970s, to prevent United States immigration officials from deporting one of them. On Monday, Yahoo Screen will introduce “Uniquely Nasty: The U.S. Government’s War on Gays,” which rewinds to the 1950s.

And a week later, HBO will begin showing “Larry Kramer: In Love & Anger,” about the irrepressible AIDS activist who wrote — and lived — “The Normal Heart.” Watch it. I can’t predict your response to Kramer’sdudgeon and decibel level, but I can guarantee that you won’t ever again regard the forward march of L.G.B.T. Americans as easy or trendy or fleet.

Alfred Kinsey told Americans in the late 1940s just how common same-sex activity was. The Mattachine Society, one of the earliest gay rights groups, appeared in 1950, in Los Angeles. The Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian political organization, appeared in 1955, in San Francisco.

From those seeds, the legalization of same-sex marriage flowered, and no shortage of harsh winters intervened.

There have been ruined careers, scuttled adoptions, sanitized obituaries. There have been millions of same-sex couples who were married in the eyes of each other, of everyone around them and of any truly righteous god, and they waited and waited for the government to catch up.

Ask Jim Obergefell. His is one of the cases that the Supreme Court is about to decide. He sued Ohio to have his name added as a surviving spouse on the death certificate of his husband, who died in 2013. It wasn’t just a few years before then that they began making their life together. It was two decades earlier.

Ask Edie Windsor. Her protest of the estate taxes that she was ordered to pay — but that a widow with a dead husband instead of a dead wife would have been spared — prompted the Supreme Court to gut DOMA two years ago.

She was married in Canada in 2007. When her wife first proposed to her, she gave Windsor a brooch instead of a ring, so that the diamond didn’t prompt questions from co-workers.

That was in 1967: nearly half a century ago. So don’t tell her that the idea of same-sex marriage needs more time to ripen.

********

"Fear Eats the Soul"