How Getting Married Made Me An Activist

Proposition 8 has changed my life. Just one month ago, when it looked like the gay marriage ban was winning support here in my home state, I turned to my partner of seven years and told him we'd better say "I do" before California voters told us "you can't." Immediately, Jeff Bechtloff and I jumped into full "Bridezilla" mode. We ordered a three-tiered mocha-chip wedding cake from the best bakery in Los Angeles (which now carries same-sex cake toppers). We pulled together a soundtrack of Frank Sinatra songs to play in lieu of "Here Comes the Bride." We asked NEWSWEEK's film critic David Ansen and his friend Mary Corey to do a reading from our favorite romantic film, "Breakfast at Tiffany's." We went flower shopping with my high-school girlfriend, who made the table arrangements and corsages for us.

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Finally, on Oct. 25, Jeff's mother walked him down the aisle, followed by my 86-year-old father and 93-year-old mother, who accompanied me as I bit my lip and fought back unexpected tears. Standing before the judge, I looked out at the audience of 100 familiar faces and saw my tears of joy returned in kind. With such an outpouring of support—and Barack Obama's promises of hope and inclusion gaining traction—I couldn't imagine that voters here on the liberal Left Coast would deem our wedding a threat to "traditional" marriage. But we were living in a bubble. We'd wrongly assumed that because most Americans no longer feel entitled to call us "faggot" to our faces, we had won acceptance.

Today, Jeff and I and 18,000 couples like us wait anxiously to see whether our marriages will remain valid. California Attorney General Jerry Brown says yes, but there's a good chance that will be challenged in court by proponents of Proposition 8, which changes the state constitution to read "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." The judge who married us is of the opinion that our wedding will stand, since ex post facto, or retroactive, laws are illegal under Article I of the United States Constitution. I can only say that I am grateful the Founding Fathers had the foresight not to make the U.S. Constitution as easily fungible as the state of California's.

Like all Americans, I was taught to believe in the promises those Founding Fathers made: you know, "All men are created equal," and that sort of thing. I always felt especially proud when my teachers would invoke the Declaration of Independence, because it was written by a long-lost cousin of mine (look again at my byline). I would only hope that the man who promised me "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" would agree that affairs of the heart should not be determined by popular vote.

As luck would have it, the organization that helped my father and me trace that bit of family genealogy is the same one that played a central role in revoking my right to marry this month: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose members donated an estimated $15 million or more—nearly half the Prop 8 war chest—in a state where only 2 percent of the population is Mormon. That's made the Mormon church a prime target as the gay community does its Prop 8 postmortem. Some activists are calling for the IRS to revoke the church's tax-exempt status; others have suggested boycotting companies with Mormon executives who supported the ban and getting Hollywood types to pull out of the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

But it's becoming clear to me that the main failing may have been our own. Most gay people I know seem to have forgotten—or in many cases never learned—the lessons of our collective history. For what transpired in California is only the latest skirmish in a three-decade battle between the religious right and the gay community in what has come to be known, euphemistically, as the culture wars. Had Prop 8 opponents taken their playbook from the gay-rights battles of the 1970s, I might not be in my current predicament. But most gay people my age and younger have little memory of those battles, in large part because many of the pioneers who fought them succumbed to a virus called HIV before they could teach us. And because gay rights have advanced so far since then—we are protected by nondiscrimination laws, our employers give us domestic-partner benefits, and several states recognize our unions—we probably took for granted that gay marriage was an inevitability.

How are we to learn our history? I decided to go back to my high-school government teacher for a civics lesson. Robert Garland, now 76, never spoke publicly about his sexual orientation when he was my instructor at Ulysses S. Grant High School in Van Nuys, Calif., even to the co-workers whom he and his longtime companion Tom Ethington socialized with: it was just understood that they were a couple. This past Aug. 20, on the 50th anniversary of their meeting, Garland finally could call Ethington what he had been all along: his spouse.