First night thoughts from after the Prop 8 decision last month. How did you react to the pictures of smiling couples celebrating on the day of the victory in Perry v. Schwarzenegger by seeking marriage licenses at San Francisco's City Hall? The federal court decision in August held that denial of marriage to same-gender couples was both irrational and unconstitutional. The only apparent sadness for those couples was that the decision was stayed – first briefly and now longer while the case is being appealed.
Well, I recognized a disconnect between how my brain rationally comprehends this enormous victory and my more complicated feelings. For while I had invited friends to join me at the celebration that first night, I was in fact home alone watching it on multiple TV newscasts.
Rationally I understand the decision's deep implications for LGBT rights even beyond the right to marry. I recognize the separate importance of being able to choose to marry or not on an equal basis. And the pictures I saw were of two young women of color from the Central Valley, our movement demonstrating amazingly good PR acumen, just as with the choice of octogenarian lesbians Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin (now deceased) as the first married in San Francisco couple in 2008. But that is brain talk.
Yet my heart didn't connect with the victory that my brain recognized, and as I watched at home, I identified not feeling any emotion, or perhaps not knowing what or how I wanted to feel. I began to understand my reaction as related to being a single gay, or S'Gay – a term I invented so I could quickly ask friends about a man with them being both single and gay as in "Is he S'Gay?"
I think I invented this shorthand term because for me, single is a state of being to process through, as quickly as possible. While a number of my single gay friends feel happy and uncomplicated about not wanting to couple quickly (staying "unhitched"), others of us are deeply influenced by how we became single. Not only we garden variety single gays; how about my recently widowed gay male friend, or a friend with raw feelings about his last breakup? Remind you of anyone you may know?
And this complexity of emotions is not limited to single gays. Every time the right to marry is won, gay couples reflect on whether to marry or not. Partly this is a choice of how they desire to conduct their relationship, but for some it is a reflection of where they feel their relationship is – or isn't. These multiple legal victories provide a repeated Rorschach test for some couples of "are we marriage material?" We LGBT family law lawyers know that some of those couples in fact do break up after reflecting on where they are and aren't.
Complex feelings even exist for those seemingly happy marrying gay couples. During the period of legal marriages after the California Supreme Court's equally sweeping decision recognizing our right to marry, I was asked to witness friends' small City Hall ceremony. When I expressed my happiness to the groom-dads for their wonderful moment, one surprised me be saying he actually felt angry at the number of times he had had to marry to "make it legal."
I think it is important for our movement to figure out ways to emotionally connect these victories to people who feel at least complicated that they aren't going to end up immediately as part of a smiling couple at a City Hall asking for a marriage license. In the days following this great win, I began the process of connecting my own heart.
Feeling connections. The first connection I could actually feel was as a donor of money and time to the organizations who actually assisted in the state case and directed related litigation – for me Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. And that feeling was accompanied by a tremendous sense of thanks from me to these same organizations for giving me a way to participate. If you ever gave to one of these organizations, or the ACLU LGBT Rights Project, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, or others, your heart should feel engaged. (And if you haven't, do now.)
But more broadly, each of us who has ever come out, been out, had uncomfortable conversations with friends, families and coworkers, marched in a Pride parade, donated to or fundraised for another LGBT or HIV-identified cause, or taken any of a myriad other actions, created today's more accepting environment for LGBT people, which not only allowed Judge Vaughn Walker to rule the way he did, but in some way compelled him to do so. "Personal Pride" is what I'd call what we each did to make real this vastly new world.
I also began to smile very broadly in that first week after the decision, that all media had gone all gay all the time: every time I turned on a radio, a TV, a newspaper, etc., it was about "gay." It made me feel for just that one week what I think straight people take for granted – that all the media all the time reflects your life and your family. That was quite a powerful feeling to see my life and the lives of my friends writ large.
A friend who did attend the City Hall celebration says Chief Deputy S.F. City Attorney Terry Stewart, one of the prime architects of this legal strategy, summed up the decision in just two words. Acknowledging that most in the crowd had not actually read Walker's 100-page decision, Stewart condensed its meaning for the crowd as: "We matter."
The simple and powerful idea that connects those two words also connect my brain and my heart, with echoes of an earlier decade's "We shall overcome."
In all of these ways, I am able to feel emotions of pride, ownership, history, and most importantly connection to this victory as not only for smiling couples seeking marriage licenses, but for me right at this phase of life. I imagine you have your own ways to connect, but if not feel free to borrow any as my suggestions.
By the way, are you a single gay?
Charlie Spiegel is an attorney in San Francisco.