“The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which ‘the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one’s skin or color or race’ are minor indeed. History is a miasma of contingency, and courage, and conviction, and chance.īut some things you know deep in your heart: that all human beings are made in the image of God that their loves and lives are equally precious that the pursuit of happiness promised in the Declaration of Independence has no meaning if it does not include the right to marry the person you love and has no force if it denies that fundamental human freedom to a portion of its citizens. For many years, it felt like one step forward, two steps back. Movements do not move relentlessly forward progress comes and, just as swiftly, goes. I recall all this now simply to rebut the entire line of being “on the right side of history.” History does not have such straight lines. Bush subsequently went even further and embraced the Federal Marriage Amendment to permanently ensure second-class citizenship for gay people in America. The Clintons embraced the Defense of Marriage Act, and their Justice Department declared that DOMA was in no way unconstitutional the morning some of us were testifying against it on Capitol Hill. Much of the gay left was deeply suspicious of this conservative-sounding reform two thirds of the country were opposed the religious right saw in the issue a unique opportunity for political leverage – and over time, they put state constitutional amendments against marriage equality on the ballot in countless states, and won every time.
In fact, we lost and lost and lost again. And when we won, and got our first fact on the ground, we indeed faced exactly that backlash and all the major gay rights groups refused to spend a dime on protecting the breakthrough … and we lost.
A local straight attorney from the ACLU, Dan Foley, took it up instead, one of many straight men and women who helped make this happen. No gay group had agreed to support the case, which was regarded at best as hopeless and at worst, a recipe for a massive backlash. Then a breakthrough in Hawaii, where the state supreme court ruled for marriage equality on gender equality grounds. A young fellow named Evan Wolfson who had written a dissertation on the subject in 1983 got in touch, and the world immediately felt less lonely. “This is the loopiest idea ever to come down the pike,” he joked. It was Crossfire, as I recall, and Gary Bauer’s response to my rather earnest argument after my TNR cover-story on the matter was laughter.
I remember one of the first TV debates I had on the then-strange question of civil marriage for gay couples. Marco Berger turns his unparalleled eye for the male form to one of the world’s largest displays of masculine bodies- a traditional South American Carnival. Both come from completely different worlds, Janik’s.Ī documentary about a real-life couple, Paco and Manolo, two Catalan photographers from the outskirts of Barcelona, who have been together for thirty years. Janik and Samuel are extremely close best friends celebrating the end of their Senior year of high school. Umut is a young water polo player- a gentle & quiet high school senior, just trying to live his life in a complicated world. Despite arriving to the warm embrace of his sister, Moi struggles to c. Moi travels with his boyfriend, Biel, to his family home after the death of his mother. In a high-rise apartment in Paris, four men and a woman gather to share their experiences of a man that they have all been involved with, fell in love with, and. ‘Down In Paris’ follows Richard Barlow, a filmmaker, who, after experiencing an unexplained anxiety attack on the set of his latest film, wanders in to the. ‘The Sea’ tells the story of Lorena and Diego, a couple who, upon moving to the coast of Chile, find their relationship tested when Diego begins to develop. His weightlifting obsession is driven by his mother J. At sixteen, David is much like any teenager, but his boyish good looks rest upon a hulking, muscular body.