Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America

By Nathaniel Frank

The right of same-sex couples to marry provoked decades of intense conflict before it was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015. Yet some of the most divisive contests shaping the quest for marriage equality occurred not on the culture-war front lines but within the ranks of LGBTQ advocates. Nathaniel Frank tells the dramatic story of how an idea that once seemed unfathomable—and for many gays and lesbians undesirable—became a legal and moral right in just half a century.

Awakening begins in the 1950s, when millions of gays and lesbians were afraid to come out, let alone fight for equality. Across the social upheavals of the next two decades, a gay rights movement emerged with the rising awareness of the equal dignity of same-sex love. A cadre of LGBTQ lawyers soon began to focus on legal recognition for same-sex couples, if not yet on marriage itself. It was only after being pushed by a small set of committed lawyers and grassroots activists that established movement groups created a successful strategy to win marriage in the courts.

Marriage equality proponents then had to win over members of their own LGBTQ community who declined to make marriage a priority, while seeking to rein in others who charged ahead heedless of their carefully laid plans. All the while, they had to fight against virulent antigay opponents and capture the American center by spreading the simple message that love is love, ultimately propelling the LGBTQ community—and America—immeasurably closer to justice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Release date: Apr 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9780674977594

Book preview

NATHANIEL FRANK

AWAKENING

HOW GAYS AND LESBIANS BROUGHT MARRIAGE EQUALITY TO AMERICA

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts • London, England

2017

Copyright © 2017 by Nathaniel Frank

All rights reserved

Jacket photos: Michael Rowley and Adam Korzekwa/Getty Images

Jacket design: Jill Breitbarth

978-0-674-73722-8 (alk. paper)

978-0-674-97759-4 (EPUB)

978-0-674-97760-0 (MOBI)

978-0-674-97756-3 (PDF)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Frank, Nathaniel, author.

Title: Awakening : how gays and lesbians brought marriage equality to America / Nathaniel Frank.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016041974

Subjects: LCSH: Same-sex marriage—United States—History. | Gay culture—United States—History. | Gays—Legal status, laws, etc.—United States—History. | Gay liberation movement—United States—History. | Gay rights—United States—History.

Classification: LCC HQ1034.U5 F73 2017 | DDC 306.76/6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041974

In memory of Frank Kameny, 1925–2011

For Dominick, my husband

It’s just possible that a small and despised sexual minority will change America forever.

—Andrew Kopkind, The Nation, 1993

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

Prologue

1

Homosexual Marriage?

THE STIRRINGS OF A NEW IDEA

2

What Was Important Was That We Were a Household

GAY MARRIAGES AND THE DOMESTIC PARTNERSHIP ALTERNATIVE

3

We Are Criminals in the Eyes of the Law

SODOMY, AIDS, AND NEW ALLIANCES

4

A Tectonic Shift

EARTHQUAKE IN HAWAII

5

The Very Foundations of Our Society Are in Danger

THE DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE

6

Here Come the Brides

LAYING THE CORNERSTONE IN MASSACHUSETTS

7

Power to the People

ROGUE WEDDINGS AND BALLOT INITIATIVES

8

A Political Awakening

CALIFORNIA’S PROPOSITION 8 CHANGES THE GAME

9

Brick by Brick

PROGRESS IN THE STATES

10

Make More Snowflakes and There Will Be an Avalanche

BATTLES OVER STRATEGY COME TO A HEAD

11

Without Any Rational Justification

PROPOSITION 8 ON TRIAL

12

A Risk Well Worth Taking

EDIE WINDSOR AND WINNING MARRIAGE IN NEW YORK

13

The Nation Is Ready for It

A PRESIDENT AND A COUNTRY EVOLVE

14

Love Survives Death

THE WINDSOR RULING AND ITS AFTERMATH

15

The Responsibility to Right Fundamental Wrongs

A CIRCUIT SPLIT SETS UP A SHOWDOWN

16

It Is So Ordered

MARRIAGE EQUALITY COMES TO ALL FIFTY STATES

Epilogue

Notes

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

Index

ABBREVIATIONS

ACLU American Civil Liberties Union ACT UP AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power AFER American Foundation for Equal Rights AFM Alliance for Marriage APA American Psychiatric Association BAGL Bay Area Gay Liberation BLAG Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group CLIP Colorado Legal Initiatives Project CMC Civil Marriage Collaborative DOB Daughters of Bilitis DOMA Defense of Marriage Act FMA Federal Marriage Amendment FREE Fight Repression of Erotic Expression FTM Freedom to Marry (the national organization) FTMCM Freedom to Marry Coalition of Massachusetts GAA Gay Activists Alliance GLAD Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders GLF Gay Liberation Front GMHC Gay Men’s Health Crisis HRC Human Rights Campaign (formerly Human Rights Campaign Fund) IAV Institute for American Values LCR Let California Ring (and elsewhere, Log Cabin Republicans) LGBTQ lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer MCA Massachusetts Citizens Alliance MFI Massachusetts Family Institute NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NACHO North American Conference of Homophile Organizations NCLR National Center for Lesbian Rights (formerly Lesbian Rights Project) NOW National Organization for Women Task Force National Gay Task Force (later the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and then the National LGBTQ Task Force) VA U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs VFTMTF Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force

PROLOGUE

Marriage is one of our most private bonds and most public institutions. It is defined both by individual commitment and by social recognition. Getting married is a profoundly intimate act, a couple’s pledge of their love to each other, but it also calls on a community to bear witness to that promise, giving the couple and their union a visibility and a sense of belonging that’s difficult to achieve through other means. It is no surprise, then, that many Americans view marriage as a unique rite of passage, a key element of personal identity and community belonging, and an essential aspect of adult citizenship.

Yet if marriage can help bring lovers, families, and the community together, if it can thrust people into the center of mainstream society, it also helps define who lies outside that core, who appears as less than a full adult citizen. And as loath as we often are to admit it, we easily internalize the designations that marriage creates, allowing its marks of inclusion and exclusion to shape our very identities. The exclusionary dimensions of marriage have been especially resonant for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) Americans, who across the second half of the twentieth century watched as personal freedoms, including the freedom to marry, expanded for many groups while seeming to stall or even contract for them. Indeed, many LGBTQ people observed—and helped precipitate—the emergence of a dramatically new social landscape during this period, one in which their freedom to marry soon shimmered as a modern birthright.¹

The most essential story about marriage equality—how it was won by a divided LGBTQ community, what the achievement meant to that community, and how this triumph changed America—remains untold. This book seeks to tell it. The question at the heart of the story appears simple: how did an idea that once seemed so unfathomable become, in just half a century, not only a legal right nationwide but a moral good in the eyes of a substantial majority of Americans? From a distance, the answer seems straightforward, too: gays and lesbians—and eventually their straight supporters—pushed for the freedom to marry, and won, while social and religious conservatives fought against it, and lost. Yet the real story is far more complex. In fact, battles within the gay and lesbian community were just as fierce as the fight against gay rights opponents. Perhaps surprisingly, the divisions within what we now call the LGBTQ movement shaped the quest for same-sex marriage as much as, if not more than, clashes with social conservatives. There was no monolithic movement working together to push toward a single, shared goal; rather, marriage equality resulted from a complex and contentious set of interactions among professional movement activists, gays and lesbians from outside the movement, politicians, cultural and intellectual leaders, straight allies, and the courts. Creating an effective strategy to win national marriage equality ultimately required forging a base level of unity out of a boisterous, unwieldy, multifaceted social change movement that resisted leadership by a single voice or organization.

The tensions over how to secure marriage equality mirrored an even deeper disagreement: whether marriage was worth fighting for at all. Many gays and lesbians—and most of those in the organized LGBTQ movement—were indifferent or actively opposed to fighting for marriage equality right up until the early twenty-first century. Similar clashes of thought arose from the very start of the organized gay rights movement in the 1950s, which staged often fractious debates about whether gays and lesbians should seek to join mainstream America or fight to fundamentally change it, about whether equality meant accepting the world as it was or transforming that world in ways that would liberate a wide range of people from oppressive laws, beliefs, and expectations. Inspired by the feminist, counterculture, antiwar, and black power movements in which many had cut their teeth, gay activists found their imaginations captured by the prospect of freeing themselves and their peers from outdated constraints, roles, and practices. Few sought assimilation into a broken world.

Indeed, across the first several decades of the gay rights movement, most of its members were working toward goals other than marriage: protecting gays and lesbians from violence, eliminating laws that made sodomy a crime and thus turned gay people into presumed criminals, fighting for child custody rights, and ensuring access to jobs, health care, and military service. To those working in the trenches of these harrowing social and political battles to protect the rights and very lives of gay people—most traumatically in the 1980s during the catastrophic AIDS crisis—marriage could seem like an impossibility or, at best, a distant luxury. In any event, as heirs to 1960s radicalism, many gay activists viewed marriage as bourgeois, constrictive, exclusionary, and—particularly among feminists—patriarchal. Outsiders to the mainstream, they hoped instead to advance an alternative vision of family and community. Some proposed entirely new legal arrangements that would recognize and protect relationships without replicating the privileged hierarchies of traditional marriage.

Yet dividing the LGBTQ movement into sides pitting liberationists against assimilationists would be reductive. Liberationist goals could coexist with conventional means of achieving them, while disruptive tactics could be deployed to win mainstream assimilation. Throughout its history, the gay rights movement has contained all these ingredients. Confrontational politics often helped awaken gays and lesbians to the full extent of their shame and exclusion, spurring a simple desire to be able to live like anybody else, while also forcing mainstream society to take seriously their claims to full citizenship, including—eventually—the right to marry. Conversely, the quest to eradicate stigma and discrimination by claiming equal dignity could unleash a powerful awareness of the broader suffering caused by ancient taboos, cementing a more radical commitment to achieving liberation for all Americans, not just gay ones.

The divisions among LGBTQ activists never disappeared. But over time, gay and lesbian leaders overcame them enough to build the unity necessary for their movement to win the right to marry. Achieving this end required something essential: an awakening by gays and lesbians to the full measure of their worth and to the new opportunities for belonging that a changing world held out to them. Starting fitfully after World War II, and then with increasing fervor across the social tumult of the next two decades, millions of gays and lesbians—both activists and those who never took a leaflet, carried a placard, or attended a meeting—began to identify as gay or lesbian, to come out of the shadows, and to insist on their equal worth and their right to be treated as full citizens. Throughout the last third of the twentieth century, many underwent a profound awakening that transformed their own view of the dignity and worth of their love and desires. As a handful of activists and a couple of states flirted with gay marriage, making the idea suddenly seem possible, more and more gay people began to wonder why marriage should exclude them. Throwing off the yoke of shame and stigma, they converted self-hatred into self-love and began to wrestle with what it could mean for their love to gain full recognition in both the court of public opinion and in courts of law. Having long viewed the right to marry as something impossible, unimportant, or undesirable, more and more came to see it as possible, even essential. It became both a logical and righteous end in itself and also the perfect tool to help the nation debate, ponder, and finally grasp the equal worth of same-sex love. Pushed, prodded, and exposed to a deeper understanding of what it meant to be gay or lesbian, the nation, too, experienced an awakening, with more and more of its people coming to see same-sex love as equal to any other love.

Winning marriage equality required two other essential ingredients: unflagging persistence and a coherent strategy. While the achievement may seem to have come out of nowhere, the process of awakening to, and persuading a nation of, the equal worth of same-sex relationships was actually the result of countless incremental changes that unfolded across more than a century, along with other transformations in the American understanding of family, identity, morality, and law. Just as gay people spent decades in the late twentieth century building toward a moment when access to marriage became possible, the enormous changes of those decades were themselves created by much larger historical forces, as well as the efforts of earlier social movements. Indeed, the dramatic shifts in attitudes about same-sex love by the dawn of the twenty-first century were spurred by sweeping social and economic developments that began in the nineteenth century, specifically the emergence of industrial capitalism and subsequent changes in social and family relations.

Until the nineteenth century, marriage had functioned as a system designed to control production of all kinds, including reproduction, a necessary tool for staffing the farmstead. Under these conditions, survival itself could depend on the enforcement of strict obligations to the heterosexual family unit. The migration of Americans from farms and towns to cities, along with the growth of wage labor, offered a critical mass of people, particularly women, a new measure of independence from those webs of obligation, creating the opportunity to build a life centered more around individual happiness than on traditional duties. The early women’s movement took on the task of translating those changes into tangible advances for women and sustained critiques of male power over women’s bodies—including repudiation of the idea that marriage meant subsuming women’s identities under those of their husbands. Consequently marriage had already been transformed by these social, economic, and legal changes long before same-sex couples began pressing for inclusion. By the early twentieth century, fewer and fewer Americans sought to marry and start families with an eye toward securing a supply of farmhands and a subsistence living, or consolidating the property holdings of wealthy families. Most married for love, companionship, and support—both financial and emotional. If they married to survive, they also married to thrive, and their choices were shaped by the pursuit of happiness.

These shifts in the meaning and structure of family, and in the social and legal views surrounding it, did not make same-sex marriage inevitable. But by the second half of the twentieth century, the tectonic forces of modernity had created a new world of social and economic relations, one in which the rationale for gay marriage increasingly appeared no different from the rationale for straight marriage. Once this happened, only invented rationalizations could set them apart: that marriage is about procreation, and thus same-sex couples don’t fit; that gay marriage would harm the institution because gay people would fail to take it seriously; that same-sex marriage is somehow bad for children and could even destroy civilization.

It fell to gay people to combat these myths by recognizing, and insisting, that their place in this changing world was one of belonging. These efforts often occurred organically, as ordinary gay people made themselves more visible and came to expect equal treatment in more areas of their lives. Some—perhaps thousands across the 1960s and 1970s—sought marital recognition in religious or social ceremonies, and a handful pressed their cases in court. Many others lived their lives as though they were married, referring to their same-sex partner as husband or wife, sharing homes and chores, combining finances, and adopting the varied habits and social expectations of married couples. A number of them raised children together.

Still, coming out and coupling up were not enough to make same-sex marriage a reality. As more and more gays around the country awakened to the possibilities of full equality, as they came to realize that modern life seemed—logically, at least—to make room for them, a nascent equal rights movement began to make formal demands on the legal and political system, and to combat emerging, reactionary narratives of gay people as a menace to society.

Among the earliest participants in this organized gay movement were a small group of lawyers and legal scholars who reflected all the ideological tensions and conflicts of the gay and lesbian community as a whole. Starting in the 1970s, animated by the 1969 Stonewall riots against police harassment, these attorneys joined together to reimagine what their world could look like if gays and lesbians had the full protection of the law. Hardworking, fiercely dedicated, highly educated, intellectually gifted, and strategically sophisticated, the lawyers were mostly located on coastal cities, were liberal or left-wing, and were largely white. Eventually these attorneys, many of whom worked at a handful of nonprofit legal aid organizations, joined with gay legal scholars and some private attorneys working on gay rights cases to form the Litigators’ Roundtable, a close-knit group of two to three dozen legal thinkers who gathered regularly to share ideas about constitutional law and litigation strategy for advancing gay rights.

Although the Roundtable lawyers, with their unprecedented level of focus, coordination, and strategic prowess, would ultimately play the most influential role in obtaining marriage equality, almost none began their work fighting for it. Indeed, only a very few embraced marriage early on, while most came late to the marriage battle, viewing other priorities as paramount. Yet their persistent dedication to fighting for legal protections for gay people, which increasingly came to include recognition of same-sex relationships, helped over time to make marriage itself a possibility and then a reality. And so the story of winning marriage equality is a story of the unintended consequences that so often characterize how history unfolds. In seeking to transform their world to accommodate broader understandings of what family, community, and society should mean, the lawyers of the Roundtable ultimately helped reform—and arguably strengthened—existing institutions and social patterns, making mainstream assimilation—for better or for worse—dominant.

Despite the early resistance of many gay and lesbian lawyers, and the initial apathy or hostility of much of the larger gay movement toward marriage, a tiny marriage equality movement emerged by the early 1990s. It was propelled both by the awakening of gay people to new social and legal possibilities and by several developments over the previous decade: custody struggles for lesbian mothers, the AIDS epidemic, and a surprise court victory in Hawaii in a case brought largely by movement outsiders. The new marriage movement consisted of these movement outsiders—accidental activists—who brought or backed or considered marriage equality lawsuits without the support or blessing of the gay rights movement, a handful of Roundtable lawyers who began to consider the value of such lawsuits, a couple of (mostly conservative) gay writers, and an unknown number of grassroots activists—who talked up, wrote about, marched for, and dreamed of a world where they could marry the person they loved. Such efforts put pressure on the larger gay rights movement, and eventually the nation, to take the matter seriously.²

Even this minute alliance had its divisions. Early on, the few Roundtable lawyers who supported the push for marriage sometimes had to battle colleagues within their own organizations and comrades in the larger gay movement who opposed or declined to prioritize marriage. The legal organizations, due to a mix of ideological resistance and strategic caution, frequently declined to represent same-sex couples trying to win marriage rights in court, and even the pro-marriage lawyers discouraged the filing of certain lawsuits when they thought they were poorly conceived or timed, or felt the groundwork had not been adequately laid for a victory that wouldn’t court reversal or a backlash. For their part, plaintiffs and would-be plaintiffs often viewed requests to respect a careful strategy of incremental change as needless snubs or inexplicable efforts to block progress. They and other grassroots activists who prized marriage as a movement priority were sometimes enraged when they encountered the cold shoulder of established movement groups with little interest or faith in advancing marriage, or at least in supporting their particular cases.

Over time, and in response to pressure from committed marriage proponents inside and outside the LGBTQ movement and to unexpected developments on the ground, the Roundtable lawyers took the lead in pushing same-sex marriage, having coalesced around a common belief: that fighting for legal recognition of same-sex relationships and for social recognition of their dignity through equal access to marriage was critical to advancing LGBTQ equality. Once united around the goal of marriage, the Roundtable lawyers set about creating a plan to win the freedom to marry nationwide through litigation, lobbying, and public education, a plan that ultimately would prove successful. Yet in the midst of combat, these highly cautious, strategic legal thinkers repeatedly found themselves losing control of the battles they sought to direct, as grassroots activists, couples seeking their day in court, and gays and lesbians who simply wanted equal rights charged ahead with their own plans to get married and—as one grassroots outfit christened its group—get equal. Still, the remarkable ability of the Roundtable lawyers to collaborate effectively, air differences productively, respond to a changing landscape, and ultimately create the framework for a winning strategy to secure marriage equality is a key lesson in what makes for a successful social change movement. It was an incremental strategy—evolution rather than revolution—that won marriage equality, even as the goal was achieved with unprecedented speed. An edifice can be built slowly or quickly, but it must be built from the ground up, one brick on top of the next.

Marriage became a paramount priority of the LGBTQ movement, then, largely in reaction to developments outside the movement’s control. But it was also a strategic choice, one made earlier by some activists than by others. That choice was a decision to advance LGBTQ equality by framing gay rights as a fight for equal dignity and for access to the most traditional ideas and institutions of American life: marriage, the military, family, and faith. The choice reflected a growing recognition that acceptance at the center of society was crucial to full equality, and that if the world could see gay people as fully belonging to the most mainstream of American institutions—if it could see them as assimilable—it would be impossible to view them as a subversive, destabilizing force in society.

That menacing view of gay people as a threat was pushed—increasingly in the last third of the twentieth century—by a conservative Christian movement that established a powerful new hold in American politics starting in the 1970s. The new visibility and demands of gay people created intense anxiety and backlash during this period, and the right wing saw any effort to gain equal treatment or to reimagine traditional norms with gay dignity in the mix as an attack on all they cherished about America. Erecting an empire known as the religious right, religious leaders cast gay people as an acute danger to the American way of life, and helped spread a sense of moral panic about the challenges posed by new ideas about sexual freedom and equal treatment. In the 1990s, following a court victory in Hawaii that seemed to put gay marriage on a course to legalization there, anti-gay backlash widened, and the nation saw the passage of the federal Defense of Marriage Act along with dozens of state gay marriage bans. And back and forth it went, as gay demands and visibility spurred expanded efforts by social conservatives to clamp down on pleas for tolerance and liberation, part of the larger reaction to an era of social tumult and a new assertiveness by minorities and the counterculture.

If the religious right was the most vocal and active force in seeking to block gay equality, a quieter majority of Americans nevertheless looked upon gay people as unfamiliar oddities—alternately threatening and ridiculous—and viewed marriage as so obviously heterosexual as not to need explanation. As political and court battles began to question this assumption, more and more Americans began to perceive that their most cherished assumptions were under assault. Marriage felt to many Americans like an institution so central to their way of life that the effort by gays and lesbians to join it drew more starkly than ever before the battle lines for the soul of the American mainstream.

While the gay movement had not set out to make marriage central to its conception of either liberation or equality, the sense gays and lesbians had of being under attack awakened a response. The grassroots gay marriage champions and the professional legal advocates who had joined together—often uneasily—to push gay marriage to the center of the LGBTQ movement now worked to push it to the center of American life. The question of what place gays and lesbians should occupy within the American mainstream thus animated the fight for equality throughout the decades before and after the turn of the century. A handful of gay conservatives began to champion gay marriage as a natural embodiment of the conservative principles of family, stability, and responsibility. Gays on the left decried this notion—or agreed with it and hence steered clear of marriage. For many years gay marriage was considered too conservative a goal for the left-leaning gay movement. That interpretation was, of course, anathema to the religious right. Yet while the lives that gay and lesbian marriage proponents aspired to were hardly radical, and the tactics they used to achieve their goals were often conventional, marriage equality was largely indebted to America’s liberal tradition of political protest. To reach their ambitious goal, the marriage movement drew on the rhetoric, strategies, philosophies, and legacies of egalitarianism, liberal jurisprudence, and left-wing social protest honed by the black civil rights, feminist, labor, antiwar, and student movements. It would take decades of social disruption, street rallies, political agitation, and civil rights activism to arrive at a point where same-sex marriage was even imaginable by a critical mass of movement activists, much less a legal reality embraced by a majority of the American people. It took sustained, relentless work to change millions of minds about who gay people were, what marriage meant and ought to mean, and how and whether gay people fit into it. It required battling entrenched religious hierarchies and social and cultural contingents that devoted every last ounce of their energy to defeating the inclusion of gay people and families in the fabric of American society.

As the following story shows, marriage equality ultimately emerged through a combination of ragtag lawsuits and uncoordinated actions by ordinary individuals and scrappy activists; incremental strategic work by gay and lesbian legal advocates; and the growing awareness—by not only straight people but gay people themselves—that same-sex love had a dignity no different from any other love and fit squarely into the contours of what modern marriage had, by the late twentieth century, become. Like so many chapters in America’s long reckoning with civil rights, this is a story of progress and backlash, of carefully laid plans for cultural and legal change and improvised reactions to unexpected events. It’s also the story of a contest of values among gay advocates—spurring an ongoing dialogue over the meaning and place of gay people in the American mainstream—and between those gay advocates and a variety of social conservatives who characterized demands for equality as an attack on the foundation of American society. Above all, the battle for marriage equality is a love story. Because no matter how political the battle for marriage became, no matter how pragmatic the focus on benefits and legal protections, no matter how dogmatic the arguments against including gays and lesbians in this central American institution, this was a quest by LGBTQ people to take themselves and their love seriously, and to have both recognized—unalterably, simply—as equal.

1

Homosexual Marriage?

THE STIRRINGS OF A NEW IDEA

In 1963 a scrappy little magazine called ONE ran a provocative story on its cover. In Let’s Push Homophile Marriage, a writer using the name Randy Lloyd argued that the nascent gay press was paying too much attention to the trouble-causing, time-wasting, money-scattering, frantically promiscuous, bar-cruising, tearoom peeping, street crotch-watching, bathhouse-towel-twitching, and movie house-nervous-knee single set. Instead, he sought a little respect for marrying types. The truth is, Lloyd wrote, many of us married homophiles regard our way of life as much, much superior to that of single gay men. The preferable path, he argued, invoking the term then in use for gay people, was homophile marriage.

ONE was the first enduring gay-themed magazine in the United States, publishing monthly from 1953 to 1967. It published work by both women and men, but Lloyd’s article was entering a debate focused mainly on the lives of gay men. He readily identified himself as married to another man; that his union was not legally recognized went without saying. It was a reflection of how common it was, even in the mid-twentieth century, for same-sex partners to identify themselves—and to live—as married couples, albeit without official recognition of their union. The point of Lloyd’s article was not that the gay rights movement should lobby for access to legal marriage, but simply that living in a long-term partnership should be viewed as a plausible, even preferable, option for gay people, and one that could help usher in gay equality.¹

The cover of ONE Magazine in June 1963, fifty years before the Defense of Marriage Act was struck down, pushed homophile marriage. The caricatured images of effeminate gay men reflect both the era’s gay stereotypes and a self-image appropriated by elements of gay culture.

While Lloyd acknowledged the challenges of finding love in a homophobic world, too many gay people, he complained in a derisive tone that smacked of his own hostility toward gay culture, had just plain given up the fight in a great big tizzy of petulance and despair, careening to one extreme or the other: celibacy or cynical promiscuity. He saw the pursuit of married life as a path toward both self-respect and social approval.

Lloyd predicted that as social acceptance of gay people grew, the number of homophile marriages would grow. As discrimination lessened, he argued, it is going to dawn on more and more homophiles that they can quit sneaking into bars, urinals, bathhouses, etc. and instead meet viable prospects for long-term relationships in more respectable settings. Indeed, Lloyd maintained that social acceptance and marriage would be mutually reinforcing. It seems to me, he wrote, that when society finally accepts homophiles as a valid minority with minority rights, it is going first of all to accept the married homophiles. We are, after all, the closest to their ideals.

Let’s Push Homophile Marriage ran six years before the uprising at New York’s Stonewall Inn that gave new energy to the inchoate gay rights movement, and neither the countercultural fervor nor the sexual liberationist ethos of that decade had fully taken root yet. The magazine’s cover featured caricatures of elaborately dressed, swishing, flitting, effeminate men engaged in flirtatious banter, reflecting an internalization of the era’s gay stereotypes. Indeed, as forward-thinking as it was, Lloyd’s article pushed back against the more radical aspirations of urban gay culture, and in that regard, it struck an essentially conservative tone. It touted a conventional model of domestic life for gay people that repudiated the embrace of limitless sexual freedom and challenges to respectability that pockets of gay culture had already begun to valorize. Lloyd disapproved of sexual promiscuity and was not shy about declaring the coupled life morally superior to the single life. He believed that anti-gay stigma and exclusion from the institutional sanctions of marriage were partly to blame for gay male promiscuity. He viewed certain behaviors of gay people as immature. He believed that committed gay couples would be the easiest for the non-gay world to accept as virtual equals and seemed intent on winning such mainstream approval. Homophile marriage, he concluded, is the most stable, sensible, and ethical way to live for homophiles.

Lloyd was a man of his time; he likely had no idea that marriage could ever become a legal option for same-sex couples. But in focusing on a certain set of gay social and sexual norms, he anticipated claims to legal marriage itself that gays and lesbians—both activists and ordinary people waking up to their full self-worth and the opportunities emerging around them in the second half of the twentieth century—would make in future decades in the course of pursuing equality.

That 1963 issue was not the first time that ONE had put marriage on its cover. The magazine had featured a story on the topic in 1953, a decade earlier. Homosexual Marriage? the magazine asked in white block letters on a green background. Written by E. B. Saunders—likely a pen name, like Lloyd’s, since few would dare to publicly reveal their homosexuality in print—the story raised a prospect the author considered horrifying: that social acceptance of homosexuality would lead to homosexual marriage. If the new movement for gay and lesbian rights focused on normalizing the deviate, he worried, it might also mean imposing on gay people the same constraints that bound heterosexuals—the very ones Lloyd would be happy to impose ten years later. Equal rights mean equal responsibilities, wrote Saunders. Equal freedoms mean equal limitations. And at this notion he was simply aghast. The idea seems stuffy and hide-bound, he wrote, adding that rebels such as we join movements not to place limits on their liberty but to demand freedom! Gay men—Saunders’s focus far more than lesbians—currently enjoyed unalloyed sexual abandon. Were they—should they be—ready to trade it for respectability?²

Saunders’s belief that marriage would stifle the freedoms that gay people enjoyed anticipated the sentiments of gay liberationist thought that would flower in the 1970s. But, having internalized a specific set of normative views common in mid-twentieth-century America, he also voiced what seemed then, and continued to seem to many people long afterward, like commonsense and even definitional objections to the idea of same-sex marriage. Those concerns contained nearly all the key ingredients of the battles over same-sex marriage that both gay and non-gay Americans would wage over the next half century. In deriding the prospect of homosexual marriage in favor of a vision of limitless freedom, Saunders laid out many of the thorny questions that heterosexual opponents of same-sex marriage would raise over the course of that debate. What about parenting? Would the state have to allow legally married same-sex couples to adopt children? What impact would it have on children to have two parents of the same sex? Would the existence of homosexual marriage mean that married gay couples would be expected to have children, much as heterosexual couples were? And what about gender roles? Would same-sex unions wind up blurring or eliminating gender expectations in opposite-sex marriages? In short, would marriage itself—and the larger gendered configuration of family—be irreversibly harmed by letting gay couples join the institution? Heterosexual marriage, Saunders wrote, must be protected, since no better arrangement had yet been devised for structuring the optimal family unit.

Viewing marriage as he did—as a way to structure gender roles and child-rearing—Saunders naturally considered it to be the exclusive purview of heterosexuals. And yet, almost unwittingly, he made a robust case for making marriage a top priority for the early gay rights movement. Homosexual marriage, he wrote, would need to be the keystone of any movement seeking mainstream approval: One would think that in a movement demanding acceptance, legalized marriage would be one of its primary issues. What a logical and convincing means of assuring society that they are sincere in wanting respect and dignity! Inasmuch as Saunders’s logic bolstered the case for same-sex marriage, his argument, like Lloyd’s, was a conservative one, anticipating the more extensive and sophisticated arguments that some gay writers would put forward more than a generation later. Saunders noted that marriage helped to foster stability, self-respect, and conformity to social norms. Even among the most stable and respectable of homosexuals, he wrote, few couples remained committed to each other over the long run, a phenomenon exacerbated by their systematic exclusion from the expectations of marriage. Saunders was no supporter of monogamy—or marriage—for gay people. But his article ultimately made one point abundantly clear: since the public associated gay people with promiscuity and lax social norms, the best way to make homosexuality acceptable was to bring about homosexual marriage.

The very idea that marriage could apply to same-sex couples emerged in tandem with the growth of an anti-gay ideology whose zeal and reach were also new. Indeed, secrecy, stigma, shame, and invisibility may have appeared to be permanent features of gay life when they came under fire by early gay advocates and writers starting in the 1950s. But they weren’t. The historian George Chauncey has uncovered the presence of surprisingly confident—occasionally even visible—subcultures of gay men and lesbians who, along with a wide range of gender-nonconforming social outlaws, thrived in pockets of early twentieth-century America. Certainly laws and attitudes in the first half of the twentieth century suppressed both gender outlaws and any expression of same-sex desire. Overt homosexuality brought with it considerable risk of social exclusion, job loss, intimidation, violence, and even jail. Yet punitive laws and customs were unevenly enforced, were in some cases less restrictive than they became later in the century, and reflected the sense that sexual minorities were more of an oddity or a nuisance than a genuine threat.³

In big cities especially, gay men and women had considerable opportunities to flourish. They built a culture with a coded language and a set of signs and behaviors that allowed them to identify one another and socialize in relative safety, all while remaining part of the larger mainstream society around them. In 1920s New York, bars, nightclubs, performance spots, and social networks were the locus of cross-class and often interracial same-sex liaisons, relationships, and friendships. Middle-class curiosity-seekers attended Harlem drag balls where they mingled with drag queens, nances, and other self-styled degenerates, and watched ministers from the community preside over elaborately ritualized same-sex weddings—without, of course, the force of law.⁴ Lesbian relationships were sometimes more tolerated during this period than they came to be later. The term Boston marriages referred to close companionships among unmarried women that may have had a romantic or sexual component. In several big cities, lesbians operated many of the best coffeehouses and tearooms in the most fashionable districts, spaces that were frequented by a mix of gay and non-gay patrons considering themselves sophisticated for being in the presence of the queer set.⁵

The relative openness of gay life in the first third of the twentieth century was shattered as the Jazz Age under Prohibition gave way to the Great Depression, the start of a massive, decades-long process of redefining same-sex desire and gender nonconformity as a threat to the American way of life. Much of the opposition to gay and lesbian freedom was rooted in a broader resistance to sexual freedom that was a response to both economic anxiety and the loosening gender roles of the early twentieth century. The economic turmoil of the Depression exacerbated these concerns in particular among men, whose role as provider suddenly became insecure. Many began to see gay and gender-nonconforming individuals, alongside working or ambitious women, as challenges to their survival. Economic fears were matched by social and psychic ones, as some came to view the Depression as a direct result of the hedonistic Jazz Age, with gay culture standing as a symbol of such decadence at its most unrepentant.⁶

The attempt to render all aspects of gay culture invisible was part of a larger effort by the government to make gayness disappear from the public sphere during the middle third of the twentieth century.⁷ Ironically, World War II helped both to strengthen gay identity and community and to prompt a brutal crackdown on any expression of either. The massive mobilization for military operations meant that millions of young men were suddenly thrown together in often intense, intimate, all-male settings. Their travels through both major U.S. port cities and foreign countries exposed them to new experiences of personal freedom, social innovation, and cultural experimentation—awakening many to the exciting new prospect of belonging to a community of like-minded men.⁸

The same was true for women. Not only did many young lesbians find themselves surrounded by other lesbians when they volunteered to join the newly created Women’s Army Corps, but the military mobilization of men left millions of jobs ordinarily taken by men suddenly open to women. This development accelerated a shift in gender roles that had begun in the 1920s with the flapper, and the realignment had profound implications. Women felt newly empowered as their demonstrated ability to step into traditionally male workplace roles furthered the demise of stereotypes and assumptions about women’s limited capacities. The notion that women might not need to depend on men for their economic sustenance gave limitless new potential to the lives of women, signaling to millions that women could live truly independent lives, as either single heterosexuals, working married women, or lesbians. In this sense the growth of lesbian identity and community was bound up with broader advances in women’s rights, indebted, to some extent, to the exigencies of world war.⁹

At the same time, the war also accelerated a key shift in understandings of sexuality that had begun earlier in the century. Previously seen as a fallen act to which anyone could occasionally succumb, homosexuality became an identity that defined who a person was. During the war, the military sought to screen twenty million young male draftees to determine who was suitable and who was likely to compromise the mission through immorality or disloyalty. This meant going beyond punishing isolated acts of sodomy; it required identifying the kinds of people who were too risky to induct, hence defining gay men as a class of people who must be pushed outside the bounds of American respectability. Enlisting the burgeoning psychiatric profession to help separate the good citizens from the undesirables, the military authorized the wholesale discharge of suspected perverts who were henceforth deemed unfit for service and, by extension, for full American citizenship.¹⁰

This shift in emphasis from behavior to identity made it both easier and harder for gay people to advance. The emerging minority model of gay identity helped many gay people envision power in numbers. The idea that gays and lesbians were members of a distinct group, like African Americans or ethnic or religious minorities, enabled a positive, more hopeful perspective on the prospects of eventual majority tolerance, especially as the early black civil rights movement was beginning to organize and make a similar case. And the ability of many gay people to see and meet other gay people helped confirm for them the righteousness of their cause. Ironically, by insisting that same-sex desire was an essential component of identity—and one that should be used to screen, mark, and exclude a whole swath of the population from civilized society—the government during and after World War II was instrumental in creating the momentum toward gay rights that authorities had hoped to quash.¹¹

Yet in the decades before that momentum translated into tangible gains—much less a successful marriage equality movement—the government at the federal, state, and local levels played a major hand in driving homosexuality and gender nonconformity out of the public realm, spawning some of the most hateful, repressive, and destructive attitudes and laws regulating gay and lesbian citizens that the nation had ever witnessed. In 1950 Joseph McCarthy’s name became synonymous with witch hunts designed to root out communists from positions of power. But the gravest damage from his attacks was visited upon gays and lesbians, whom he targeted as perhaps the most dangerous and threatening presence in the government. McCarthy’s assertion of a homosexual infiltration prompted a Senate committee investigation, which found that sex perverts in the government had become a corrosive influence and security risk because they were prone to blackmail and lacked the emotional stability of normal persons.¹²

In 1953, the year ONE published the Saunders article, President Dwight Eisenhower, following the Senate’s recommendation, signed an executive order banning sexual perversion anywhere in government. Thousands of government employees lost their jobs or job prospects as a result. Congress also passed legislation requiring that immigrants and even travelers seeking to enter the United States swear an oath that they were neither communist nor gay. The measures were part of what became known as the lavender scare, a deliberate effort to tie homosexuality and communism together in the public imagination as an enemy mind-set, and thus to depict gays and communists (often imagined as one and the same) as outside the bounds of American citizenship.¹³

State laws against sodomy and certain kinds of free association inherently criminalized gay life, but the impact of those laws went further, forming the basis for discrimination and even purges by private employers, which not only made every gay person vulnerable to economic ruin but also impeded the growth of a gay social or political movement because it raised the risks of being visibly gay. Making matters worse, after the war, states began passing additional laws referring sexual deviants to psychiatrists who had the authority to institutionalize them against their will. In 1952 the American Psychiatric Association (APA), whose members had assisted the military in screening out gay men from service during World War II, first classified homosexuality as a mental disorder, calling it a sociopathic personality without bothering to gather evidence of any actual symptoms.¹⁴ With little self-awareness of how bias and a deeply moral overlay had infected their judgment, psychiatrists touted their ability to cure homosexuals with procedures that included electric shock, hormone injections, lobotomy, and even castration.¹⁵

Urban police forces joined the federal and state governments in relentlessly quashing a gay presence in the public sphere. As early as 1923, New York State had banned gay men from gathering in public places.¹⁶ Over the next forty years, more than 50,000 New York men were arrested for this offense, far more than were prosecuted for the felony of sodomy. Swept up in Cold War anxiety and hatred of perceived outsiders, urban police forces not just in New York but also in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., St. Louis, and other big cities stepped up enforcement, including constant raids of the gay and lesbian bars and social spots that were proliferating at mid-century. At times vice squads hauled in more gay men than the courts could process.¹⁷

The tiny gay rights movement emerging in the 1950s—as well as the broader but still limited group of Americans who identified as gay or lesbian and attended gay bars and other social gathering places—was thus shaped by the constant interplay of concealment and the push for visibility, of repression and the nascent assertion of a rights-bearing gay identity. The ubiquitous presence of the police as the face of anti-gay repression and a constraint against these first ventures out of the closet framed the experiences of the gay rights movement in profound ways from its start. Just at the moment when an increasing number of gays and lesbians began to identify and behave as a distinct minority with a claim to all the rights of American citizenship, the Cold War pervert menace loomed everywhere.

Gays and lesbians sought safety from such persecution in two distinct but overlapping refuges: bars and political organizing. Gay bars and nightclubs in big cities had long offered opportunities to converse, dance, find partners, and hire hustlers. Many were owned and operated by organized-crime figures. Some catered exclusively to gays and lesbians (often one or the other), while others were known as sympathetic, or welcomed gay patrons on particular nights. Police raids were routine, with managers issuing warnings when they could by blinking on and off the lights, signaling that patrons should stop dancing, separate, or depart. Payoffs to the police were an integral part of the raids, as were the humiliation and arrest of patrons, something more likely to befall those who were nonwhite and / or gender-nonconforming.¹⁸

In the 1950s, gay and lesbian bars and social clubs multiplied, all the while contending with increasing crackdowns spurred by Cold War paranoia. In this climate, some activists, often conferring at bars or coffeehouses, began contemplating efforts to organize through newsletters and political societies. ONE was published by members of the Mattachine Society, a secret organization founded in Los Angeles in 1951 under the leadership of Harry Hay. Mattachine had to operate under the radar, with members taking oaths of secrecy. We had to be very, very careful, Hay recalled, because if we made a mistake and got into the papers in the wrong way, we could hurt the idea of a movement for years to come. Hay and his cofounders were highly conscious of creating a movement, as these words reveal, and took seriously the obligation to make it both safe and enduring.¹⁹

Hay was aware that several changes were needed for his movement to see effective results. First, homosexuals needed to change their self-image, instilling in themselves a new pride—in belonging, and in participating in the cultural growth and the social achievements of the homosexual minority. That language contained another radical idea for the time, one that Lloyd took up when referring to gay people as a valid minority with minority rights: that homosexuals were not simply isolated deviates but part of a naturally existing minority group deserving of the same recognition, rights, and protections as any other minority. The growing visibility of black identity and the black civil rights movement was a particular inspiration for Hay, who absorbed from his study of that struggle a third key principle of change: an understanding of the role of identity consciousness and social solidarity in the rise of social movements. And by raising consciousness among gay people as a distinct minority worthy of equal treatment, a fourth ingredient might emerge: a concrete political agenda that allowed gay people, by learning to press the right levers of power, to renegotiate the place of homosexuals in the larger society. What we had to do was to find out who we were, he once said. What we were for would follow.²⁰

The Mattachine Society eventually developed a reputation among younger gay activists for being timid, conservative, and overly focused on mainstream assimilation, in part because of reactionary leadership. Yet Hay himself and the earliest incarnation of the society were pathbreaking. Hay wanted respect for homosexuals, but not at the cost of conformity, and he sought the approval of non-gay society for our differences not for our sameness to heterosexuals.²¹ Unlike many of his peers, he did little to conceal his true identity, enduring the scorn of his fellow communists, who were appalled by his relative openness.²² His willingness to express his authentic self publicly, to synthesize the lessons of history, to organize his fellow homosexuals, and to contemplate a political role in advancing the well-being of gay people lent great staying power to his early leadership, even when his organization initially petered out.

Nineteen fifty-one also saw the publication of a book that shook the earth for gay people who read it. The Homosexual in America was written by Edward Sagarin under the pen name Donald Webster Cory. Like Hay, Sagarin, a sociology professor in New York City, had a wife and family. His book, which went through seven printings, was a blunt critique not just of the provincial homophobia and antisexual culture of straight