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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
I was elated over Obama's historic win. Then I got the news that Proposition 8 was passing -- banning my right to marry a woman.
By Meredith Maran
Read more: California, Racial Issues, Homosexuality, African-Americans, Gay Rights, Gay Marriage, Same-Sex Marriage, Barack Obama, 2008 election, Life
Courtesy Meredith Maran
Proposition 8 advertisements.
Nov. 10, 2008 | The news flashed on the grainy Jumbotron screen in the Oakland Convention Center ballroom: Barack Obama elected president of the United States. A howl erupted, and then we were in each other's arms, hundreds of Obama volunteers, young and middle-aged and old, black and white and Latino and Asian.
"I can't believe it," I choked out, weeping into the neck of the man I was hugging, the man I'd been standing shoulder-to-shoulder with on the ballroom floor, watching and cheering as the electoral votes mounted on the screen.
The man put his hands on my shoulders, his tear-filled eyes gazing into mine. I felt him sizing me up, and then I felt him decide to trust me, black man deciding to trust white woman, and that's what it was all about, wasn't it? This triumph? All of us deciding to trust each other, starting now, on this new American day.
"You know what black folks are saying?" he confided, shouting to be heard as the crowd around us roared, "Yes! We! Can! Yes! We! Can!"
I leaned in close, keeping my eyes locked on his, not wanting to miss a word.
"Rosa sat, so Martin could walk," the man said. "Martin walked, so Barack could run. Barack ran, so our children could fly."
I dissolved again, and he hugged me again, and I reached out and pulled my wife, Katrine, into our embrace. "This is the best thing that's ever happened to this country," I sobbed.
"That's right!" the man cried.
"This country really is changing." Beaming at Katrine, then back at the man, I added proudly, "Just yesterday, we got married."
I felt it in his arms. And then I saw it on his face. The snap of our bond breaking. The no.
"Uh-huh," he mumbled. And then he slipped out of our three-way hug and disappeared into the crowd.
Around us, the ecstatic volunteers updated the chant. "Yes! We! Did! Yes! We! Did!"
When we got home from the celebration, we got the news about Proposition 8.
There was dancing in the streets -- Castro Street, at least -- six months ago, when the California Supreme Court overturned the ban on gay marriage. Citing a 60-year-old precedent that reversed a ban on interracial marriage, on May 15, 2008, the court ruled, "An individual's sexual orientation -- like a person's race or gender -- does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights."
For those of us who had been waiting a lifetime to see those dots connected (discrimination is discrimination -- duh!) we barely took notice when, approximately 10 seconds after the Supreme Court's ruling, the state's Catholic bishops and other usual suspects started organizing a ballot measure to overturn it.
"They won't stop us this time," we gloated, dusting off the wedding gowns and tuxes we'd hung up when our 2004 San Francisco marriages were halted or annulled. After all, it was 2008, and the world was changing fast. A woman and a black man -- with the middle name of Hussein, no less -- were competing for the Democratic presidential nomination. Homophobia was going the way of the disco ball: The Supreme Court ruling had proved it. The California Supreme Court had made gay marriage constitutional.
Katrine and I revived our "discussion" of the pros and cons of taking advantage of our new legal right. As I did in 2004, the first time I wrote about gay marriage for Salon, I felt like a commitment-phobic Bad Boyfriend.
"I don't believe in legal marriage," I told the woman I'd loved, lived with and extralegally married three times in our 12 blissful years together. "If we were straight," I added, "we wouldn't even be having this conversation. We'd just live together happily ever after like the, um, rogue mavericks we are."
"But we're not straight," Katrine said. "And they're finally letting us get married, and I want to marry you." Caving, I did a quick calculation in my head. "Let's get married on our anniversary," I suggested.
"Which one?" Katrine asked. Every month we celebrate the 18th (the day we met); and the 21st (the day we fell in love). On Feb. 2 each year, we also celebrate the anniversary of the public "wedding" our loved ones threw for us in 2003.
"Our February anniversary," I said. "That'll give us nine months to break it to everyone that they have to buy us wedding presents again."
As the election neared, Katrine and I, like many of our once-cynical friends and family members, threw everything we had into electing Obama: phone banking in Ohio, Colorado, Nevada, Oakland; gathering food and wine and campaign speakers and wealthy friends for high-priced fundraisers, easing our political expectations out of reverse and into hope's high gear.
On Oct. 2, we sat on our couch watching the vice-presidential debate with our friend Steve and a bottle of wine apiece. Biden was mercifully tethered to planet Earth; Palin was being Palin. What more could any Obama Mama hope for? Until ... until.
GWEN IFILL [to Joe Biden]: Do you support gay marriage?
JOE BIDEN: No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that.
GWEN IFILL [to Sarah Palin]: Is that what you said?
SARAH PALIN: My answer is the same as his, and it is that I do not.
GWEN IFILL: Wonderful. You agree. On that note, let's move to foreign policy.
The next morning, in response to my daily dose of Obama fundraising appeals, I didn't send money. I sent a letter instead. "Hearing Joe Biden say with such certainty that he and Barack don't support gay marriage was a knife in my heart," it began. "Would Joe Biden have looked into the camera and said that he and Barack don't support interracial marriage?"
It would be two weeks before I received a response from the campaign. ("Senator Obama supports full civil unions, expanding hate crimes statutes, fighting discrimination at work and in housing and other places of public accommodation, and wants to increase adoption rights. He opposes any Constitutional ban on gay marriage. Thank you again for writing.")
In the interim, at a fundraiser, I met a staffer for the Obama campaign. A small crowd of donors, most of them heterosexual couples, gathered around as I told him about the letter I'd written, the sense of betrayal I felt.
"Barack opposes Prop. 8," he told me.
"I didn't know that," I said. "And if I didn't, who did?"
"Biden said they oppose gay marriage," the host of the fundraiser interjected.
"Barack supports civil unions," the staffer replied.
"Not good enough, " I said. "I really want to believe this guy is different, but this sounds like typical politician doublespeak."
"I give you my word," he looked into my eyes and said. "President Barack Obama will be a friend to gay people."
I remembered hearing those same words from David Mixner, Bill Clinton's gay campaign advisor, at a D.C. gay rights demonstration in 1991. Don't drink the Kool-Aid again, a voice in my head warned me. And then the staffer talked some more and the lust in my heart for hope took over, and I fell in love with Obama again.
A few weeks later, the campaign opened its Northern California headquarters -- two blocks from our house. At the jubilant opening ceremony I was surprised to see a few of my old lesbian activist friends signing up for shifts on the phones. "There was a time you wouldn't be in a room with a man, let alone campaign for one," I teased one of them.
"This is different," she said.
"I hope so," I said.
Suddenly Proposition 8 supporters were everywhere. I swear it happened overnight. One day it was all about Obama, and the next day, it was all about the November ballot initiative that would overturn the Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage.
They appeared at freeway offramps, on street corners, on overpasses, most of them teenagers, most of them kids of color, many of them wearing oversize crosses on thick chains, all of them pumping their yellow and blue signs gaily, as if they were drumming up business for a high school car wash.
I had my first personal encounter with them as I was pulling up to a stop sign at a busy Oakland intersection. My jaw fell open at the sight: Five or six boys and girls on each of the four corners were holding posters featuring stick figures of one man, one woman, two children, and they were shouting, "Vote yes on eight!" I leaned my head out the window, made eye contact with a young Filipino girl and beckoned her over.
She danced up to my car. "Would you like some information?" she asked, waving a flier.
"I'm happily married," I said. Her eyes darted across the street to her friends. Whoever planted these kids on this corner, I thought, forgot to give them a script for actual conversation. "To a woman," I added.
Next page: "May God forgive you"
We're here, we're queer, we're married. Yawn.
Gays in the age of Obama
Proposition 8 vs. black homophobia 
