Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality

by Becker, Jo

  “Virgin has tons of gay employees,” he said to Black, “so if they try to make me check it, we will look for a gay guy to save us!”

  Arriving at the airport, they ran through the terminal. At the gate, there was bad news: The flight was delayed by forty-five minutes. The trip itself took just over an hour. It was going to be very, very tight if weddings started precisely at 3 P.M. By the time the flight was called, Chad was going out of his mind. “It’s the perfect continuation of the four-year drama,” he said to Black, laughing. “If you tried to write this into a script, people would be like, ‘Come on.’”

  The handsome young attendant taking Chad’s ticket glanced down at his name, looked back up at him, and did a double take. “Thank you,” the attendant said, smiling warmly. Then, remembering his job, he added, “Oh, and thank you for flying Virgin America.”

  The plane landed at San Francisco airport at 2:53 P.M. Adam, who had flown in from Burbank, was ahead of them. “Get off fast,” Chad texted Black, who was seated a dozen rows back. “I think it’s happening.”

  Another mad dash through another airport terminal ensued. Gasping for air, dragging his bursting bag, Chad climbed into a waiting black SUV that had been sent to meet them, while frenetically checking his e-mail and texts.

  “And we’re off,” he said as the driver pulled away from the curb. “Phew. Fuck!”

  Seconds later, Chad’s phone rang. It was Bruce Cohen, down at City Hall. Cohen was in San Francisco producing a musical called I Am Harvey Milk, featuring the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. Kris and Sandy had seen it the night before, and had asked whether it would be possible for the chorus to sing at their wedding. Little did anyone know that it might take place less than twenty-four hours later.

  Cohen had called Adam to say that since the chorus was in rehearsal that afternoon, he could still make that happen. Okay, Adam had said, but for God’s sake don’t say a word about what is going on: “You can’t tell three hundred gay men that this is going to happen and expect it to stay a secret!” So Cohen had kept them at the ready, in the theater where the musical was showing down the street from City Hall, with no explanation.

  A leak could give the proponents of Prop 8 a chance to file for an emergency injunction so they could litigate just how broadly Judge Walker’s ruling should apply. But once the marriages began, as Judge Walker himself later put it, it would be “very hard to stuff that genie back in the bottle.”

  So Kris and Sandy were on ice, in a car parked outside City Hall, so as not to attract any media attention. Someone had even thought to call a makeup artist, who was applying foundation and blush in the backseat. A photographer, hired at the last minute to shoot the wedding, had almost blown everything by tweeting about the job with a #Prop8 hashtag. The team caught the tweet within minutes and it was quickly deleted.

  “Do we know anything more?” Chad asked Cohen, who was standing by with Terry Stewart.

  Negative, Cohen replied, promising to call back the moment that he did.

  Willing the driver to go faster, Chad spoke with an assistant about the press release that would be issued the moment they knew for sure what the Ninth Circuit was going to do.

  “I just want it to be”—he paused—“super powerful. What’s the headline today?”

  “To be in a state that has twice had marriage taken away?” Black mulled it over, before suggesting, “This is permanent. I think that’s meaningful, because marriage is supposed to be permanent.”

  They settled on, “In California, a time of struggle and indignity are over, and love, justice, and freedom begin anew. And now, no election, no judge—no one—can take this basic right away.”

  “Going to the chapel,” Black began to sing. “Gonna get married!” Chad chimed in.

  Chad’s phone rang again. It was Cohen. Chad put him on speakerphone.

  “The order has been issued, but we don’t yet know what it says,” Cohen said. “It’s just upstairs.”

  Seconds ticked by. Everyone was silent.

  “Okay, we have it!”

  Another pause, then: “We’re a go!”

  Hanging up, Chad looked at Black. The day before, Chad had gotten up at 4:30 A.M. to fly to Salt Lake City, Utah, in many ways the Montgomery, Alabama, of the gay rights movement, to give a speech at the Utah Pride Center. It was an important symbolic stop, his first since the decisions. At the press conference that took place just after the rulings on the U.S. Supreme Court steps, Chad had made a promise. “It took less than five years to strike down Proposition 8,” he’d said. “Within five years, we will bring marriage equality to all fifty states in this vast country.”

  Utah was still ground zero in that battle. Though the Mormon Church was no longer in the business of funding initiatives like Prop 8, public school teachers in Utah could still be fired just for speaking about homosexuality in a positive manner. This was not a place where marriage equality could be won anytime soon at the ballot box, or through legislative action. It would likely take another case, and a Supreme Court willing to go the distance.

  Tomorrow, there would be time to contemplate next steps. Tomorrow, Chad would have to figure out where and when to bring the next case.

  But right now, sitting in the SUV as it careened toward City Hall, jerking from one lane to the next in an effort to steer around traffic, to Chad the victory he had already achieved finally felt as momentous as it was. For the first time in American history, a federal district and appellate court had found a constitutional right for gays and lesbians to marry. And if Justice Scalia was right, it would not be long before the Supreme Court did too. He had bucked the oddsmakers in the gay rights establishment, and he had won. Even Judge Smith, who had ruled against them on the merits in the Ninth Circuit, had signed on to the order lifting the stay, allowing same-sex couples in California to resume marrying “effective immediately.”

  “It’s happening now,” Chad told Black. “Weddings can start now!

  Then he typed a text to his mom: “Hurry, turn on your tv.”

  “Holy crap!” Black exclaimed. “We did it. Like, it’s gonna happen!”

  As the SUV pulled up to City Hall, Chad’s eyes welled. “Uh-oh,” he said, waving his right hand in front of his face. Then he and Black jumped out and ran up the stairs.

  Stepping inside the doors, they spotted Adam, Kris and Sandy, Elliott, and Kris’s mom. Then the entire entourage began moving as one through the spectacular Beaux-Arts rotunda toward the county clerk’s office, where the plaintiffs would be issued their license. City employees came out of their offices, lining the balconies that ringed the rotunda, and cheered. Camera crews, now alerted, began pressing in on all sides.

  “Wait for me!” yelled Cleve Jones.

  He had been scheduled to give a speech when Cohen reached him with the news. “Pretend to be me,” he’d ordered a friend, then ducked out and dashed to City Hall. Running to join the group, he wheezed, “I ain’t never run so fast!”

  “I can’t believe we pulled this shit off, and everyone is here,” Adam said, shaking his head.

  Jones’s hand shook as he took a photo inside the county clerk’s office of Black, Adam, and Chad. “Try not to look so smug.” He laughed, tears running down his face.

  Just then, California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris, rushed in. She had agreed to marry Kris and Sandy in lieu of Olson, who had flown back east the day before and was stuck in West Virginia attending a judicial conference with Boies.

  Her presence was fortunate. The clerk in Los Angeles, confused about what the Ninth Circuit had done, was hesitant about giving Jeff and Paul a license. Someone from the AFER team in San Francisco was on an open line with the couple, and now handed Harris the phone.

  “This is Kamala Harris,” she said sternly. “You, you must start marriages immediately.”

  She loudly repeated her directive, ensuring
the camera crews filmed her every word, then listened to the response.

  “Okay. That’s wonderful. Have a good day,” she said. “And enjoy it—it’s gonna be fun.”

  At 3:58 P.M. the San Francisco county clerk, with dramatic flair, called out. “Can we help the next customer, please?”

  As Kris and Sandy stepped to the desk, Jones looked over at Chad. “Oh, Chad, the places you take us.”

  “It’s real,” Chad replied, his voice quavering. “Do you see that?”

  Jones nodded. “It’s real.”

  Across the country, Cooper watched it all unfold in shock. It was inconceivable to him that the Ninth Circuit had given him no notice of what it was about to do, “one of the most questionable events in a case that was rife with questionable events,” he would later say. His view of the law had not changed. Still, seeing the plaintiffs’ faces, he couldn’t help but wish them the best.

  “At a personal, human level, I rejoiced in their happiness.”

  Over the years, Cooper had often thought about what would happen if his argument prevailed at the Supreme Court, playing it out like a movie in his mind. He had followed the polls in California carefully, and it seemed likely to him that Proposition 8 would go back on the ballot, and be repealed. “At that time, Kris and Sandy and Jeff and Paul would have gotten married,” he said, of his imaginary scenario. “And I often thought, that would be a ceremony I would like to attend.”

  And he now understood, in a way that he could not possibly have when the two couples testified at trial, what this moment meant to them, because he now understood what it meant to his own daughter.

  They had been sipping iced teas and eating sandwiches outside, during a family vacation at their home on the beach in Bonita Springs, Florida, when Cooper finally broached the subject with Ashley, a vibrant young woman in her twenties with long brown hair, a freckled nose, and an impish grin.

  “So,” he said, “when am I going to meet Casey?”

  “I hope soon,” Ashley replied. “Because she’s really special to me.”

  It had been midway through the case, during the interminable Ninth Circuit phase, when his wife confirmed what he had suspected for months. Debbie Cooper had known, even before her husband agreed to take the Proposition 8 case, that her daughter was a lesbian.

  Listening to the trial testimony by day and talking to Ashley on the phone at night had been like living in two parallel universes. Debbie Cooper had been deeply moved by Jerry Sanders, the mayor of San Diego with the lesbian daughter who had testified about his own unthinking prejudice. She worried for her daughter, because “it’s a hard life, and you can’t help but realize that there are places in this country where she could be harmed.” But listening to the testimony of Kris and Sandy had given her comfort.

  “Here were two women who were much older than Ash, and they were so okay, in every emotional way, in their lives, in their heads, and in their family. And I remember Chuck coming back from court that day and talking about their strength of character, their integrity.”

  Still, she had held off sharing Ashley’s secret with him, out of respect for her daughter’s wishes that she be allowed to come out to him in her own way. But if he asks, Ashley told her, you can tell him. And he had, which is what led to the conversation in June of 2012 in Florida. Chuck had married her mother when Ashley was just seven, and he was as much her dad as her biological father. She was nervous about telling him, but he had made it so much easier by bringing it up himself.

  “I said, ‘You know, it’s not easy to talk about,’” Ashley recalled.

  “It’s not easy for anyone,” he replied, “but I love you, and you love me, and that’s all that matters.”

  Her mother initially asked her if she was sure she was a lesbian, but Cooper accepted it without question.

  “I sometimes wonder if what made him so amazing to come out to was the experience of being part of that trial,” she said.

  Cooper would like to think he would have reacted the same way regardless. But he said the trial, and especially the wrenching testimony of Ryan Kendall—the Denver Police Department employee who testified about how his parents forced him to attend sexual orientation “conversion therapy”—did teach him one thing: “It certainly acquainted me with ways that are not the right way for a parent to react,” he said.

  He spent hours talking to her about the case, to make sure it did not come between them. She disagreed with him about the constitutionality of bans like Proposition 8, and it was hard not to be hurt by some of his arguments. “I think the most upset I got was being called an ‘experiment’ that people deserved to see the outcome of before accepting. It just made me feel—alien, I guess.”

  But she could tell how important it was to him that she understood that he was not trying to take anything away from her personally. Some of her friends found Ashley’s family situation hard to fathom, but they didn’t know Chuck the way she did, couldn’t see him for the father he was, the man who danced and sang along to the Rolling Stones at family get-togethers, and who cared more for her than to use her for his own benefit.

  Shortly after the Supreme Court granted cert in the Proposition 8 case, in December of 2012, Ashley had proposed to Casey, with the blessing of both her parents. She and Casey lived in Massachusetts, where Ashley worked on Cape Cod as a chef—and where it was legal to marry. Cooper told Ashley that if she wanted to tell the world, she could. If she wanted to tell no one until after the Supreme Court had decided the case, that was fine with him too. In the end, she decided that she did not want to subject herself, her fiancée, or her family to a media frenzy, a decision that relieved Cooper, despite the fact that the publicity might have helped his case.

  “I didn’t want, and I didn’t think she wanted, for her and Casey to suddenly become the most famous lesbians in America,” he said. “But can you imagine how riveting it would have been if at the oral argument I disclosed this? I kind of personified what I was arguing.”

  Now, with the case behind him, he and Debbie had their own wedding to throw.

  “I consider my life to be a storybook life—I had this Prince Charming come and scoop up me and my children, and you can’t help but want that for your children,” Debbie Cooper said. “And the thing is, except for one thing, my storybook life for Ashley looked a lot like hers does now—happy, healthy, and in love with someone that I do think is a wonderful person.”

  “We love all our children and we respect them, and we know our script isn’t necessarily their lives,” her husband added. Cooper still did not feel it was appropriate to say how he might vote on same-sex marriage. But “what I will say only is that my views evolve on issues of this kind the same way as other people’s do, and how I view this down the road may not be the way I view it now, or how I viewed it ten years ago.”

  Back in San Francisco, with the paperwork done, Kris and Sandy and the rest of the group headed back to the rotunda.

  In a small holding room just off the mayor’s suite, with a connecting door to the office where Harvey Milk had been shot, someone handed Kris and Sandy matching bouquets of white flowers. Picking one of them up, Sandy held it strategically in front of her, suddenly every bit a blushing bride who had only been given twenty minutes to deliberate over her outfit. “See, then all the attention is drawn to the flowers, away from the hip.”

  Kris, doing the same, laughed. “Slenderizing!”

  Chad reached Jeff and Paul, using an app on his iPhone called FaceTime, which allowed for videoconferencing. He put the state’s attorney general on the line first.

  “Thanks for making the call,” Paul said to Harris, marriage license now firmly in hand. “You should have seen the registrar’s hand shaking. It was awesome!”

  Chad panned his phone toward Kris and Sandy, who could see that Paul and Jeff were in a car, on their way from Norwalk to Los Angeles City Hall, where th
e mayor of Los Angeles had been enlisted to perform their wedding ceremony. The team had arranged for Rachel Maddow to broadcast it live on MSNBC.

  Kris laughed. “Are you in L.A. traffic on your wedding day?”

  “For about an hour or so,” Paul replied.

  Boutrous, who had been arguing a case on behalf of Walmart in the federal district courthouse where the Prop 8 trial had taken place, burst into the room, just in time. Cohen just kept shifting his weight from one foot to another, repeating, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

  “Don’t leave without the license,” Harris called as the group moved out the door, camera crews in tow, toward the balcony off the mayor’s office where the actual ceremony would take place.

  As Kris and Sandy walked through the halls, the crowd following them grew larger. Everyone began clapping, a rhythmic ovation that grew louder and louder. Chad was banging his hands together so hard that his watch fell off.

  “This is fun,” Boutrous whispered, as Harris, Kris, and Sandy took their positions. “Don’t cry,” Terry Stewart admonished herself. After all these years of tamping down expectations, if she started now she might never stop.

  Harris, introducing the couple, said, “They have waited and hoped and fought for this moment. Their wait is finally over.”

  Elliott held up his iPhone so that his brother, Spencer, who was in North Carolina at a leadership camp, could see the proceedings via FaceTime. Sandy’s boys, one in New York and the other in San Diego, had sent their love via text. Directly across the way, the bust of Harvey Milk watched over the nuptials.

  “Do you Kris, take Sandy to be your lawfully wedded wife, to love and cherish, from this day forward?”

  “I do.”

  “And do you Sandy, take Kris to be your lawfully wedded wife, to love and cherish, from this day forward?”

  “I do.”

  Kris slipped a ring onto Sandy’s finger, the fourth of a set. She had given her the first when they got engaged, the second when they were married in the ceremony that was later invalidated, the third on the day that Judge Walker had issued his decision, and now this one, first presented on the Supreme Court steps.