Then Comes Marriage by Roberta Kaplan Read Free Book Online

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?