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Shortly after Prop. 8 passed, an anonymous gay blogger started Gays Against Gay Marriage, arguing that same-sex couples who marry are seeking mainstream approval by mimicking straight people. Against Equality, another gay-backed group that travels and speaks out against same-sex marriage, also launched in the wake of the proposition. (It even sells "Just say no to marriage" tote bags.) Last year, Salon.com and Daily Beast articles examined anti-marriage perspectives in the gay community. Gay fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld told Vice magazine in 2010 that he opposed marriage: "In the '60s they all said we had the right to the difference. And now, suddenly, they want a bourgeois life."
At home, San Francisco's long-running radical collective Gay Shame argues that same-sex marriage shouldn't be the ideal — or at least shouldn't take priority.
"Everyone should have access to the things that marriage brings to some (like healthcare)," group spokesperson Mary P. (all members go by "Mary") says in an e-mail. "We believe that extending these practices to a few more does nothing to undermine the racist, sexist, classist, trans/homophobic violence that is U.S. law. The LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] mainstream needs to stop celebrating the state and begin the work of overthrowing it."
While dissent may have hampered the momentum of the marriage-equality movement, complacency and apathy might be a bigger problem.
"I don't think a lot of the community really cares that much," says Julia Adams, wife of Rebecca Prozan, who organized the first public civil-union ceremonies in 1996. "Maybe that isn't exactly right — especially for older LGBT folks, they didn't expect it to happen in their lifetime, and so they think, 'Why be overly concerned? It will happen or it won't.'"
But Stuart Gaffney, who with his husband, John Lewis, was part of the lawsuit that legalized same-sex marriage in California in 2008, doesn't see these detractors as standing in the way of gay marriage, but as part of the conversation he and others like him helped shape.
Marriage wasn't always on the radar for Gaffney and Lewis, now among the most-recognized faces in San Francisco's marriage-equality faction. The couple resolved on Jan. 1, 2004, to get involved in the marriage fight. Their first work of activism: Lewis would attend the Freedom to Marry rally on the steps of City Hall on Feb. 12, 2004, when Mayor Gavin Newsom, who'd held the office all of six weeks, began issuing marriage licenses.
Lewis arrived at the rally and asked Molly McKay, then Equality California's field director, what the plan was.
"She said, 'You can walk right into City Hall right now and get married. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon just did," Lewis says, referring to one of San Francisco's pioneering gay-activist couples. Eagerly, he borrowed a cell phone and called Gaffney.
"It was the most urgent wedding proposal you've ever heard: 'Get to City Hall right now,'" Gaffney says. "It felt very fragile. It could be a once-in-a-lifetime chance, and what if we missed it?"
Despite being in a committed relationship for 17 years, the transformation that they felt upon being pronounced "spouses for life" was profound. "It was the first time in my life that I felt like my government was treating me as an equal human being, respecting my relationship, my love, my family, as fully worthy as any other," Gaffney says.
Those 2004 weddings — themselves a form of protest — put a public face on same-sex relationships. Television viewers nationwide saw couples dressed in tuxedos and white dresses, kissing and tossing flowers, just like in the weddings they'd seen at their local churches. Similar marriage protests followed in other parts of the country. Afterward, couples went back to their daily lives, bringing visibility and openness with them. That visibility hastened acceptance of same-sex marriage, says Verta Taylor, chair of the sociology department at UCSB and co-author of a forthcoming book, The Marrying Kind?: Debating Same-Sex Marriage within the Gay and Lesbian Movement.
This was when the marriage-equality movement was born — out of Newsom's action and the 4,037 marriage licenses that followed. When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger shut down the weddings and revoked marriage licenses a month later, gay newlyweds were angry — and began fighting back.
Taylor, who co-authored an award-winning research paper on the influence of San Francisco's 2004 weddings on gay activism, polled gays and found that 75 percent subsequently gave money to a marriage-equality organization; 46 percent became more "out" about their marriages; and others demonstrated, gave money to pro-gay legislators, wrote letters, or took some other action.
(She also discovered plenty of opposition among gays. Some felt that marriage would change gays by shoehorning them into traditional heterosexual roles, or that too many married couples would spoil the special community gays had cultivated for decades.)
From 2001 to 2004, public opinion on same-sex marriage barely budged. But it shifted sharply after the 2004 weddings, according to polls conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Nationwide, marriage advocacy surged from 31 percent in 2004 to 39 percent in 2008, while opposition fell from 60 percent to 51 percent. Despite the swift changes, those numbers were still a far cry from the support needed to defeat Prop. 8.
When the California Supreme Court found the state's 2000 anti-gay marriage ballot initiative, Proposition 22, unconstitutional in May 2008, it opened the floodgates for legal weddings — and for new enthusiasm within the movement. Some 18,000 same-sex couples were married in California before the November election, including many who'd hastily married in San Francisco in 2004.
After so much progress, voters' approval of Prop. 8 came like a bucket of ice water in the face. Even with growing support, it was suddenly clear that California didn't have gay couples' backs. But the state was also on the verge of a tipping point with respect to marriage equality. That's one reason the grassroots effort, with as many tools as a Swiss army knife, became so effective: Where one didn't work, another unlocked people's minds. But none proved better than good old-fashioned face time.
