Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality

by Becker, Jo

  “Not as of page 41,” Olson said, and everyone dissolved in laughter.

  “All right, we’ll be upstairs,” Chad said, taking the Reiners with him to find the plaintiffs. “Everyone is so excited.”

  “It’s really strong,” Boutrous told Olson, now that they were alone.

  “Yeah, but I don’t like the ‘we don’t decide whether they have a fundamental right to marry,’” Olson said. “I wish they did.”

  That evening, the decision led the news on all three national networks. At the press conference in San Francisco, Spencer said that the ruling meant that “in the eyes of the government, my family is finally normal.”

  Listening, Enrique Monagas became emotional, thinking about his own family. Jason had been watching some of the news reports about the case with their daughter, Elisa, now four. When Enrique had explained that he’d been working so hard to make sure that everyone could get married, just like he and Jason, her reply had stunned him. “But you can’t be married,” she had said. “Men can’t be married to men.”

  “So she’d been listening to news reports but not the ones I wanted her to hear. We had to explain. She grew up in a family where we are telling her the other story, but it’s amazing how she’d been indoctrinated.”

  Judge Reinhardt, he would later say, obviously wanted to try to stop the case from going to the Supreme Court. He understood the judge’s logic, just as he understood that it was odd to urge the Supreme Court, as Olson had done during a call with national reporters immediately following the Ninth Circuit’s ruling, to review a decision they had just won. (Terry Stewart, listening, said that “the idea that the Supreme Court would now rule more broadly in our favor is crazy. Ted’s been smoking something—they are not going to shove marriage equality down the throats of 44 states.”)

  But for Monagas, that one moment with his little girl had reminded him why it was so important that the justices put their stamp of approval on families like his.

  “I want an opinion now,” he said. “Are we equal, or not?”

  At the White House, spokesman Jay Carney refused to comment. Out on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney, the front-runner in a four-way Republican presidential primary, declared that “unelected judges cast aside the will of the people of California.” On CNN, Jeff issued an invitation to Romney and the rest of the Republican candidates running for president: “Come to my house. Sit down with me. Sit down and have dinner with me. Let’s have a conversation. Look at my loving home.”

  And when Chad arrived home to his, he found Jerome had decorated the outside with red, white, and blue balloons and AFER’s never-ending supply of American flags. Inside, he was waiting with cupcakes and champagne.

  TWENTY-NINE

  8

  Rob Reiner stood before a bank of camera monitors as his all-star cast filed into the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles. It was Saturday morning, March 3, and later that night, 8, the play about the trial, would have its West Coast premiere.

  Brad Pitt, who was playing Judge Walker, chatted with pal George Clooney, cast as David Boies. The actor Martin Sheen, who Rob joked had been “arrested more times than a crack dealer” for his environmental activism, quizzed the movie director about where the case stood as he prepared for his role as Olson.

  The excitement that their case finally seemed to be headed for the Supreme Court had been short-lived. Rather than filing a certiorari, or “cert,” petition asking the justices to review the decision, Cooper instead had asked that the case first be reheard by a different, and larger, panel of Ninth Circuit judges, in what is known as an en banc—French for a “full bench”—review. The court was under no obligation to grant his request that it sit en banc to decide whether the three-judge panel led by Reinhardt had erred. And given the ideological makeup of the court, success was unlikely; it would take thirteen of the Ninth Circuit’s twenty-five active judges to grant his request.

  But Cooper had once again succeeded in stopping the case in its tracks. The Ninth Circuit judges could take as long as they liked in responding to his request for an en banc review, meaning that it was now all but certain that there was no way Proposition 8 could reach the Supreme Court before the November presidential election.

  Kevin Bacon, playing Chuck Cooper, and Jamie Lee Curtis, cast as Sandy, studied the binder on their laps as Jesse Tyler Ferguson, of ABC’s Emmy Award–winning sitcom Modern Family, and three members of the cast of Fox’s hit musical comedy Glee took their seats onstage.

  Most big-budget thrillers could not boast this kind of star power, and all the actors were volunteering their time. Rob thanked them profusely. It took a long time for the Brown v. Board of Education case to fully integrate the schools, he said, and it would take some time before gays and lesbians throughout the country would be free to marry. “But we are fortunate enough to be in the world of what George Bush called the ‘Internets,’” he said. “We are hitting critical mass. . . . You all are part of doing something that will move the ball down the field and win this game.”

  The performance was a staged reading, meaning that the actors did not have to memorize their lines, but Rob wanted to make sure it came off without a hitch. The play had debuted on Broadway to a sold-out audience that included media elites like The View’s Barbara Walters and NBC anchor Brian Williams, and even the National Organization for Marriage’s Maggie Gallagher had bought a ticket; her character makes a cameo appearance. But tonight’s performance would be live-streamed by YouTube, which had been slotted to broadcast the actual trial before the Supreme Court killed that plan. With the potential to reach a worldwide audience, Rob had ceded his Broadway role as Cooper’s star witness to direct.

  “When Brad comes in,” he instructed, “everyone stand, everyone stand.”

  Pitt looked down from his stage bench with mock judicial imperiousness, leading Clooney to wisecrack, “Man, oh man.” Everyone laughed, before settling in to go over their lines.

  Pitt could not manage to keep Walker’s straight face as Clooney cross-examined a bumbling Blankenhorn, now played by John C. Reilly, who had starred in Academy Award–winning films like Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and Stephen Daldry’s The Hours. Glee’s Jane Lynch played Maggie Gallagher as a gay-marriage-hating Sue Sylvester, the fictional high school cheerleading coach and comic villainess she portrays on the show who terrorizes the misfits of the William McKinley High glee club.

  Chad quietly slipped in to watch the rehearsal, after an overwhelming forty-eight hours that had resulted in huge news: He had just been named the next president of the Human Rights Campaign, the gay civil rights equivalent of the NAACP.

  Chad’s unique ability to leverage the legal proceedings into front-page attention and rebrand a cause that for years had largely languished in obscurity, coupled with the twin victories in Judge Walker’s courtroom and the Ninth Circuit, had gone a long way toward bringing the establishment gay rights community around. A number of groups were starting to borrow from Chad’s bipartisan playbook. Evan Wolfson’s group, Freedom to Marry, had recently hired a Republican lobbyist, and Wolfson had been magnanimous in congratulating Chad on a call of gay rights leaders after the Ninth Circuit win. Lambda Legal was about to file its own federal lawsuit, challenging Nevada’s ban on same-sex marriage and citing the Ninth Circuit’s decision in the Proposition 8 case. “Prop 8” was the most searched term on Google the day following the appeals court ruling.

  “They turned that trial into a truth commission,” said Mary Bonauto, who filed the pioneering lawsuit against the state of Massachusetts that had made that state the first in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage and was now challenging DOMA in two states.

  Still, the out-of-the-box offer had come as a shock. Its genesis had been a Washington cocktail party conversation between Kristina and Hilary Rosen, who had served on the board of the Human Rights Campaign and remained a large donor. Rosen felt that tha
t the organization needed a media-savvy tactician to lead it, someone with a bold vision who could take advantage of the moment. The current president was about to step down. Would Chad be interested? Kristina called him that night.

  “No way,” he’d exclaimed, giving her a litany of reasons why. But the more he thought about it, the more excited he became. No longer would he have to juggle paying clients with his work on behalf of the gay community. He could devote himself to it full-time. After talking it over with Rosen—“Mark my words: this is your path,” she recalled telling him—he had thrown his hat in the ring.

  The final interview with the board had taken place the previous day. He was asked to step outside the room, and when he returned, everyone had started applauding.

  It represented a full-circle moment, a validation by the very community that had once rejected what it considered his rash call to action. He was not due to start until June, and once he did, he would stay on the board of AFER and continue to be involved in strategic decisions. But now he would be able to guide the movement from the inside, with an annual budget of more than $40 million and a full-time staff of more than 150 people.

  “He just got the most important job,” Rob gushed to the cast. “He’s got huge balls, huge balls! He’s going to light a fire under those old people there.”

  Next to Reiner, Lance Black was furiously doing one last read-through of the script, looking for cuts in the hope of getting the run time down to ninety minutes.

  The gay rights movement had long suffered because of its invisibility; people did not know that their homophobia was hurting people they actually knew. The movement had come as far as it had in large part because people were willing to come out and make their stories known. So when their opponents had gone all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the plaintiffs’ tale from the public, Black had taken it personally. He had written the play to make the invisible visible, and he wanted to be sure that people stuck with it to the end.

  “Kevin,” Rob said, interrupting Black’s reverie. Bacon had just delivered Cooper’s infamous “I don’t know” line a little too matter-of-factly. “That was, like, the most incredible moment in the whole story, in the whole thing of the trial.”

  What was happening on that stage was not just art imitating life. It was a refraction of the history of a once cloaked movement now blossoming out in the open, and the catalyzing role that Hollywood and social media had played in that metamorphosis. Studios still did not green-light many films about strong gay characters; Brokeback Mountain and Milk were the exceptions, not the rule, and both took years to get made. But television, with its eye on the younger demographic demanded by advertisers, had long led the way.

  In the early 1990s, MTV’s The Real World became the first reality show with gay story lines. A few years later, NBC’s Will & Grace brought adorable, funny gay characters into people’s homes, albeit in somewhat stereotypical and sexless fashion. These days, television catered to the millennials, a hyperconnected generation who had grown up with openly gay friends, anthems like Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” and a deeper embrace of diversity and difference than any that came before it.

  Modern Family, featuring a divorced patriarch who marries a bombshell Colombian, a realtor and his stay-at-home-wife, and two gay dads all hilariously struggling to raise their kids, became the most watched comedy on television not in spite of those story lines, but in large part because of them. Enough Americans had taken on board and metabolized the idea that today’s families come in many different forms to make the show not just a critical but a commercial success.

  Glee’s multicultural, well-off and poor, gay, bisexual, and straight cast of show-tune-singing misfits averaged close to nine million viewers per episode. The show, with its nuanced story lines about everything from first love, teen pregnancy, and a father coming to terms with his gay son, was influential with teens because it offered an authentically hip window into their lives; songs performed on the show often instantaneously became among the most downloaded on iTunes.

  Onstage, actor Chris Colfer was playing Ryan Kendall, the young trial witness from Colorado whose mother forced him to attend “conversion therapy” after she found out he was gay. If he had not stopped attending, “I probably would have killed myself,” Colfer, reading from the testimony, said. On Glee, Colfer played Kurt Hummel, whose gay fictional character is temporarily forced to leave school because of a bullying episode that creator Ryan Murphy deliberately wrote into the show after the rash of gay teen suicides. And in real life, Colfer kept a book on his coffee table of all the letters he had received from teens telling him he had helped them come out.

  “The one I remember the most was wrinkled, because you could tell that it had been held so tightly,” Colfer, himself gay, said during a break. “Up on that stage, I feel like we are living a chapter in a history book.”

  Adam Umhoefer, who would take over the leadership of AFER once Chad left, sat alone in one of the theater seats, watching the tableau. Growing up in Wisconsin, and later attending the Jesuit Boston College, being gay was not something that was discussed. How, he had often wondered, would his life have been different, easier, if a show like Glee had been around?

  His older brother had a hard time accepting Adam after he came out. A former military intelligence officer who now worked as a civilian for the Defense Department, he had once told Adam that military unit cohesion would suffer if gays were allowed to serve openly. Military guys aren’t going to accept someone like that living and working among them, he’d said.

  “Like what, someone like me?” Adam had asked.

  But even his brother watched Glee on occasion with his wife, and Adam credited the show with helping to bring him around. On a recent visit to see his new nephew, Adam had been struck by just how far his brother had moved, and how much he wanted Adam to be part of his son’s life. It was nice to feel close again, to see how the work he had been doing to move the country was playing out in his own life.

  Not so long ago, Adam had been that high school theater kid. Now he was one of the coproducers of a show starring some of the biggest names in the business. It had been his idea to live-stream the sold-out production. The play was the hottest ticket in town, with seats snapped up by the likes of Barbra Streisand; director Steven Spielberg and his wife; media executive Barry Diller; film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg; A-list actresses like Olivia Wilde; and the town’s top talent agents and casting directors. Camera crews and paparazzi from mass market gossip outlets like Access Hollywood, Us magazine, and Extra would be lined up to shoot the plaintiffs and the stars as they walked the red carpet.

  When the curtain rose, with Brad Pitt playing a bemused Judge Walker, a gospel choir would not be playing “God Bless America.” But otherwise, it would be pretty close to Adam’s dream, the one that had prefaced their huge trial win.

  THIRTY

  OBAMA “COMES OUT”

  Chad almost didn’t ask the question. A little over a month had passed since the West Coast premier of 8, and he was cohosting a small gathering for Vice President Joe Biden at the Los Angeles home of HBO executive Michael Lombardo and his husband, actor Sonny Ward. Chad was working hard to reelect President Obama—he was one of his top fund-raisers—but he had given up hope that the president would embrace marriage equality before the November election.

  The previous year, Chad had attended a high-dollar fund-raiser for the president at the St. Regis Hotel. “How can we help you evolve more quickly?” he had asked the president. Obama’s answer—that Chad ought to be able to tell from the actions he had taken on DOMA and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell the direction he was headed—was heartening in substance but noncommittal in terms of timing.

  “The sense I got from him was, ‘Give me credit—look what I already have done,’” Chad said afterward.

  Three events had cemented that impression. The first was a private conversation Chad had w
ith First Lady Michelle Obama during a Los Angeles fund-raiser he cohosted for the campaign in June 2011. Reporting back to the AFER team afterward, he said the first lady’s message was clear: “Hang in there with us, and we’ll be with you after the election.” Days later, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, Chad’s close friend, was asked about the president’s stated support for same-sex marriage on that old 1996 questionnaire from back in the days when Obama was just an unknown state senate candidate. Pfeiffer first claimed it had been filled out by someone else, then, after it was pointed out that Obama had signed it, claimed Obama was “really referring to civil unions.” And then there was the president’s tepid states’ rights response to the passage of same-sex marriage in New York that same month.

  More recently, as incoming president of the largest gay rights organization in the country, Chad had been invited to a White House State Dinner. He and Jerome had been seated at the president’s table, along with the guest of honor, British prime minister David Cameron, a conservative leading the push to legalize same-sex marriage in Britain. There were still places in the world where being gay was a crime, punishable by up to life in prison or even death by public stoning. Still, nine countries, including deeply Catholic nations like Argentina and Portugal, now recognized same-sex marriages, as did parts of Brazil and Mexico City, and Chad had talked to both leaders about the growing trend. But there was little to indicate that Obama was ready to take such a bold step here at home.

  Why ask the vice president about the administration’s position on marriage equality, Chad thought as he sat waiting for Biden to address the group he had gathered together at Lombardo and Ward’s home in Los Angeles, when he already knew the answer? Instead, he planned to press Biden on why the administration was refusing to take a far less controversial step: Just days before the event, the White House had infuriated gay rights activists with an announcement that while the president continued to support stalled legislation that would prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, he would not be signing an executive order banning federal contractors from engaging in it.