An Outsider Steps In and Changes the Script
BOSTON — In the weeks before Valentine's Day, San Francisco lesbian and gay activists didn't expect that the city's wedding bells would be ringing for them any time soon. In fact, like other freedom-to-marry groups around the country, Marriage Equality California was planning its fifth annual "Standing Up By Getting Turned Down" rally, in which, on Feb. 12, same-sex couples would apply for marriage licenses and then stage a protest when they were turned down.
Instead, Feb. 5, Mayor Gavin Newsom's political aides started placing calls to the city's lesbian and gay rights leaders. Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, returned a phone call from her car and was told by a Newsom aide that this year the new mayor was going to issue the requested licenses. "My first reaction was stunned disbelief," she recalls.
Kendell asked for some time to confer with same-sex marriage movement leaders around the state and country about whether the timing was right for such a move. But the aide made it clear that the mayor was not asking for permission, that this was a courtesy call. Kendell and others quickly grasped that, to stop those licenses, they would have to proffer "some huge, very compelling, precisely articulated objection. We really didn't have that kind of objection. And I, for one, didn't have the stomach to talk him out of it."
It sometimes happens this way. A social movement makes its plans, hold its rallies, introduces legislative proposals, brings its meticulously planned court cases, issues press releases and argues its position in endless briefs and talk shows, books and articles. Then an outsider steps in and -- for his own reasons -- changes the script, and by doing so turns up the debate's volume dramatically. For lesbians and gay men, this scenario is reminiscent of the breathtaking year that ran between June 1992 and June 1993, when Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton started openly courting our votes and donations, declaring ours a just cause -- and in doing so pushed us into the mainstream media spotlight.
Clinton, of course, made some missteps: Any experienced gay activist could have told him that military service was too volatile an issue to start with. But even though the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy ultimately implemented wasn't an improvement -- it resulted in more discharges (especially of lesbians) than the policy of uneasy coexistence that preceded it -- Clinton's push dramatically improved the political climate for lesbians and gay men.
