After Prop 8 was passed, protesters took to the streets across California in their thousands. Steve joined a march two nights after the election in LA, which was made up of straight and gay people. He said he’d never experienced a crowd so angry. ‘It wasn’t like a violent sort of atmosphere but there was a lot of screaming and yelling, people leading chants, trying to draw as much attention, just needing to be heard, needing the media, fellow citizens in Los Angeles, or people who were just trying to drive home, to stop and take notice of this hurt and the enormity of what we were all collectively feeling.’
At another march, Steve met someone with a clipboard who invited him to a meeting about how to try to fight Prop 8. It felt like a way to take back agency and power. First it was rewarding, he said, but pretty quickly it wasn’t: ‘It was a lot of people who were feeling upset in a room venting to each other without really doing anything.’ Steve felt that most of the blame seemed to fall on communities of people of colour. ‘They’d say it was black or Latino people who voted against us. They’d say, “They’re so conservative, if their communities weren’t so backwards we could have won.” Then people of colour were turning around and rightly saying, “Well, excuse us, the campaign put no resources in our neighbourhoods,” or, “You’re painting us with an incredibly broad brush and saying we’re backwards, it’s disgusting.’ They were just at each other’s throats, and it was not a very satisfying environment to be in.’
‘So what happened next?’
Steve heard about a new project that involved knocking on doors, talking to voters who voted against same-sex marriage in Prop 8. He thought it sounded like something he definitely didn’t want to do, but people kept asking him, so in January 2009 he signed up. Until then, canvassing had traditionally focused on getting your supporters out to vote. This, by contrast, was about targeting neighbourhoods where the majority were against you. I asked him to show me what he did.
‘Whaddayawant?’ I asked Steve, putting on a man’s voice.
‘Hey, are you Amelia?’ He had missed that I was in character.
‘I am, that’s right.’
‘Hey Amelia, my name’s Steve, I’m a volunteer with Vote to Equality. We’re talking to people in your neighbourhood about that gay marriage ballot we had a few months ago, the probate, do you remember that vote?’
‘Kind of.’
‘OK, yeah, do you remember how you voted?’
‘I didn’t vote.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Should I pretend I voted? Sorry. OK, I voted against same-sex marriage.’
‘What you just did is . . . a lot of people say they didn’t vote but we know from ballot drop boxing that very few people didn’t vote.’
‘So that was actually quite accurate acting?’
‘OK, so you voted so that gay couples would not be able to get married. Why was that the right decision for you?’
‘I just think it’s perverse.’
‘OK, yeah. So on a zero to ten scale, if you were gonna vote on this tomorrow, would you vote the same again? Zero meaning that you totally think gay couples should not get married – and ten means that you think gay couples should be able to get married.’
‘One.’
‘One, got it. And why is that the right number for you?’
‘I feel like I think it’s wrong but maybe if it wasn’t in a church then it would be OK.’ I was losing my footing. (Usually, for reasons half to do with self-preservation and half to do with privilege, I try not to think about what goes on in a homophobic person’s mind.)
‘Are you religious yourself?’
‘I’m a Christian.’
‘I’m curious, what’s on the other side of it? Because you’re a one, you’re not a zero. So what’s that little bit that keeps you from being a zero?’ Then he whispered: ‘It’s because you know someone who’s gay.’
‘Oh right, because my neighbour’s gay.’
‘OK, got it. So you probably remember during the campaign, people on both sides ran a lot of TV ads – do you remember seeing some of those?’
I nodded and Steve got out his phone to show me a YouTube video of a TV advert that was shown to Californians before the Prop 8 ballot. It featured a little girl saying to her mom, ‘Today I learned how a prince married a prince and I can marry a princess.’ Then a deep voiceover said: ‘Think it can’t happen? It’s already happened. When Massachusetts legalized gay marriage, schools began teaching second-graders that boys can marry boys. The courts ruled parents have no right to object.’ Then a second voice: ‘Under California law, public schools instruct about marriage. Teaching children about gay marriage will happen here unless we pass Proposition 8. Yes on 8.’
I wasn’t surprised by the advert. A similar, if not more extreme, campaign popped up in Australia in the lead-up to the 2017 vote on same-sex marriage (which was passed). Photos of homophobic posters in Melbourne went viral. They read: ‘92 per cent of children raised by gay parents are abused, 51 per cent have depression, 72 per cent are obese.’ These stats were based on a bogus study. A review of seventy-nine studies published by the Public Policy Research Portal at Columbia Law School, and referenced in a Medical Journal of Australia article, found ‘an overwhelming scholarly consensus . . . that having a gay or lesbian parent does not harm children’. If anything, they found, discrimination does.
Data showed that the average Californian saw the Prop 8 ad twenty to forty times before they passed their vote, and following the polling data from before it aired to after, you can see support for gay marriage drop off a cliff. ‘Our side completely failed to come up with a successful counteractive message,’ Steve said. ‘The reason for showing the video is to learn who was impacted by this and how, but also to unveil people’s true feelings when they were in the ballot box, so to recreate the environment when they have seen that ad and it’s on their minds. When we’re facing future votes, that’s the environment we’re going to be in.’
Steve said that the most interesting thing they found from canvassing people was that their reasons for voting against same-sex marriage generally fell into three categories: religion – they would say, ‘My church believes . . .’ or tradition – ‘This is what the word marriage has always meant, can’t you just find a different word?’ and then kids – ‘What’s gonna happen to my kids?’
The conversations Steve was having with people weren’t just about these factors, though; they were about homophobia more broadly. Is it OK to be gay? How do people come to be gay: is it a choice, is it not a choice? Is it healthy, is it not healthy? Steve and his team recorded the conversations by filming them – more than three thousand – and then analysing them. They found the most effective way to change people’s minds was talking to them about their own lives and feelings. It was about sharing their own experiences and being personable, partly because they hoped it would affect voters, but also because it created a two-way street of vulnerability and honesty. A lot of people had never had the opportunity to talk about the issue; they couldn’t tell their Republican friends they were unsure about gay marriage, just as they couldn’t tell their lesbian cousin. But they had questions. Some people asked Steve if he’d been abused as a child, how many people he’d slept with, whether he was in a relationship. One door he knocked on even led him to meet an older guy who was a zero on the scale, but after inviting Steve in, he broke down in tears and started talking about his son who’d committed suicide and whom people suspected had been gay. ‘They were almost giving themselves therapy, like they’re talking through their own experiences and re-evaluating the conclusions they’ve drawn, and kind of changing their own minds,’ said Steve.
In late 2012, Steve’s team of eleven people relocated to Minnesota for three months in the lead-up to a vote on gay marriage there. They taught their findings to local campaigners, as well as deploying them in neighbourhoods themselves. They took the idea of visibility – allowing people to see or meet a gay person – and applied it to their media
-messaging too. They put gay people on TV, talking about being gay, and refuting the message about schools (until this point, pro-gay marriage organizers had pretty much kept gay people off-screen and avoided the word ‘gay’ altogether). The campaign in Minnesota was successful – the gay marriage bill was passed in May 2013, making it the twelfth state to legalize same-sex marriage in America.
Steve told me that, through his work, one of the biggest things he learned is just how important the right to marriage is for LGBTQ+ people’s mental health. According to social scientists, banning gay marriage or losing a vote on passing it has a catastrophic psychological impact on members of the LGBTQ+ community. In an analysis published in 2010 by the American Journal of Public Health, researchers studied data on mental health recorded before and after state bans on same-sex marriage in 2004–5. For people who identified themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual living in states that had experienced the bans, there was a 37 per cent increase in mood disorders, a 42 per cent increase in alcohol-use disorders and a 248 per cent increase in generalized anxiety disorders.
California never went back to the ballot (or hasn’t yet) on same-sex marriage – but when it was reinstated through a judicial hearing in 2013, experts were brought in to testify on the psychological damage that legal discrimination inflicts on LGBTQ+ people, and the chief economist for San Francisco even testified that the state of California would save money by allowing same-sex couples to marry because it would reduce costs to mental-health services.
As for Steve, he was just pleased that neither he, nor the LGBTQ+ community, had to go through the trauma of people voting on their rights again and that the issue was resolved in court, even if it did mean the door-knocking technique wouldn’t be put to the test in his home state. In February 2014, Steve’s boyfriend proposed to him by a campfire during a holiday in Hawaii. Steve said yes and they were married in a botanical garden in LA that summer. Like Sean and Sinclair, Steve said it wasn’t a political statement but that it just ‘felt right’ – a personal choice, but one he conceded probably isn’t for everybody. Steve had never slept with or even kissed anyone else, so monogamy didn’t feel like a big change. ‘Plus we didn’t have to hash through it a lot because it exists out there in the world and we could just take it off the shelf and apply it to our lives.’
‘So you kind of just did it because it was an easy option?’
‘Yeah. It didn’t feel radical, or like I was making a big statement to society. Going door to door on the campaign asking people if they had a problem with gay people, that felt radical or transgressive. But getting married itself – with all the people there that wanted to see me get married? That just felt normal.’
The day after I met Steve, and not long before I was set to return to the UK, Patty emailed me back. She was in Palm Springs with her wife and daughter, she said, but I could come over for dinner the next day. I didn’t know any lesbians with kids in London, and as I replied to her it dawned on me that this would be the first time I could see the template of what my life might look like in the future – a crazy thought. But when I got to Patty’s house – a big, Gothic, gated property in the neighbourhood of Silver Lake – she told me she used to be in the same position.
I knew Patty very tenuously; like Sean and Sinclair, we had met once. She had been in a successful grunge band called Hole, with the notorious Courtney Love. She joined in 1992, when the band had enjoyed some underground or industry acclaim, but had yet to break into the mainstream. Two years later, their 1994 album Live Through This went platinum, and they enjoyed much of the same global success as other grunge bands like Nirvana or Sonic Youth. But being in the band contributed to severe addiction problems for Patty, and when heroin got her too addled to do her job, she was kicked out. She later made a brilliant film about the experience, which pieced together all her archive Super 8 tour footage to tell the story of the band’s rise to fame and of her recovery.
I interviewed her when I was twenty-one, after her film came out, and we’d been social media friends since. I felt like we had something in common after that first conversation; not only the feeling of growing up with a lack of lesbian role models, but also a desire to talk about it. The difference was, Patty was actually in a position to do so. She came out publicly in Rolling Stone magazine in 1995. ‘It’s important,’ she told them at the time. ‘I’m not out there with that fucking pink flag or anything, but it’s good for other people who live somewhere else in some small town who feel freaky about being gay to know that there’s other people who are and that it’s OK.’
We went through to Patty’s garden, and sat in the exact spot where she and her wife Christina got married nine years before. I recognized Christina and their daughter Bea from Patty’s Instagram photos. Christina had a young, round face, and tattoos; Bea was brilliantly blonde and tanned, the picture of a Californian child. They were making dinner together, and Bea kept glancing shyly at me the way all six-year-olds do when there’s a stranger on their turf. On the other side of the yard, I asked Patty about her marriage.
Patty told me that, growing up in Marysville in the State of Washington, she didn’t know anyone gay. When she started to realize she was, in the 1980s, as a teenager, she says she looked around and ‘felt ripped off’ that she didn’t get to have the same experiences as everyone else. ‘When I was attracted to a girl I couldn’t do what the other kids would do and ask her to the dance. And I knew then, I’m not gonna have that marriage like I see all these straight people have. Part of me could, maybe, but it would have to be a secret. I would stare out the window in class and have fantasy thoughts of a pretend world where I would be married with a girl.’
When Patty came out to her friends and family and herself, she was nineteen. She moved to Seattle, where there were ‘maybe three places for women to go’.
‘I guess they didn’t have Tinder back then,’ I said.
‘Right,’ she said, smiling, as if to say, that didn’t stop me.
As a young lesbian, Patty said she was a ‘serial monogamist’, making up for lost time. She used to partake in activism – going to gay rights marches, attending meetings with the AIDS activism group ACT UP – and threw herself into queer culture in San Francisco for a while. That was where she first met Christina, but they didn’t hook up until later. In the meantime, Patty bought the property in Silver Lake and turned it into a party house that I very much wish I had been around to visit. Christina later told me that every lesbian over forty in LA had been to a party there in the nineties, which I solemnly believed.
In 2005, Patty and Christina met again in a gay bar called Shotgun, and started dating. Then they moved in together, and then they got married in 2008, during the short period when gay marriage was legalized. ‘We were planning to get married anyway and just have a commitment ceremony,’ said Patty. ‘And then I got a text from my mom that said, “Congratulations, they legalized gay marriage”.’
‘Why did you decide to do it?’ I asked.
Patty paused. ‘Well, we fell in love. It felt like the right thing to do.’ That phrase I kept hearing. ‘I felt like I wanted to have that life with a partner.’
‘What about you, Christina?’ I called over to where Christina was standing by the barbecue. ‘Why did you want to get married?’
‘What, versus a commitment ceremony? I got married because I fell in love with Patty and we were committed to each other. But in terms of . . .’ Christina had sounded slightly defensive; now she fell silent for a minute to think. ‘I don’t know, it just seemed to legitimize it.’
‘How?’
I expected her to say something about how marriage legitimized them socially, but Christina surprised me: the decision was as much legal and financial as anything else, she explained. She told me that she had read an article in the New York Times comparing a straight married couple and a gay unmarried couple over the course of their lives. Although there were a lot of variables on income, location and the like, they found that in th
e end the gay couple lost out on things like partner health insurance (not available to same-sex couples before marriage), social security benefits and being able to transfer pension payments to a non-working spouse. And this was all before estate tax. ‘In our worst case, the couple’s lifetime cost of being gay was $467,562,’ wrote the Times in 2009, although ‘the number fell to $41,196 in the best case for a couple with significantly better health insurance, plus lower taxes and other costs.’
Either way, it was a lot of money, said Christina, at which point she told me they still hadn’t paid the $3,000 for Patty’s second parent adoption, which they still had to pay even though they were married and Patty was named on Bea’s birth certificate.
‘That’s the kind of stuff where I was like, “We should get married to have all those benefits,”’ Christina continued. ‘They needed like ten documents for me to add Patty to the insurance before we were married, showing that we were on the lease together, that we had a joint bank account. Part of it was just the bureaucracy.’
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard these arguments for same-sex marriage, just the first time I’d seen for myself how they might work practically. During the 1980s and 1990s, if AIDS-related illness claimed the life of one half of a long-term same-sex couple, the other half would be left with no inheritance or property rights. Christina’s argument also recalled that famous case of United States v. Windsor. A lady named Edith Windsor had lost her spouse, Thea Spyer (whom she’d married in Canada in 2007) in 2009. Spyer left her entire estate to Windsor, but Windsor was not given spousal tax exemption since the US Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) stated that marriage must be between a man and a woman to qualify. Windsor took the case to court and won, setting in motion the Supreme Court’s challenge to DOMA, which would eventually lead to the legalization of same-sex marriage across all fifty states of America in 2015.
Queer Intentions Page 4
