How Getting Married Made Me An Activist

So what can the life and times of Harvey Milk teach us now? Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter of "Milk," put it this way when the screening audience asked him why he'd made the film: "I felt like we were making the same mistakes again," said Black, who is gay and was raised a devout Mormon. (Black got his break in Hollywood writing for "Big Love," the HBO series about a polygamist family in Utah.) Before Milk, most gay leaders were content to let their straight allies fight their political battles for them—rather than take to the streets and demand their rights—because they feared a backlash if gays appeared too "uppity." Milk argued that the only way to win civil rights is to demand and take them—as Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King Jr., Gloria Steinem and all the others did—rather than wait for them to be granted.

History has repeatedly favored Milk in this debate. Thousands of gay men died waiting for the government to respond to AIDS in the early 1980s, but no one paid much attention until Larry Kramer and his ACT UP activists took to the streets and demanded more funding for HIV therapies; by 1996, those drugs had hit the market and the course of the epidemic changed. In contrast, when gays and lesbians counted on Bill Clinton to let them serve openly in the military and to promote the burgeoning gay-marriage movement, they wound up with "don't ask, don't tell" and the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, which outlaws the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage.

Fast-forward to this year's battle. Gay leaders cried foul when the Prop 8 campaign targeted African-Americans with ads quoting Obama as saying he opposes gay marriage, since Obama had, in fact, come out in opposition to Prop 8. What the gay leadership failed to do was to press Obama on the obvious question: how can you say that you oppose gay marriage but also oppose banning it? (With mixed messages like that from Obama, gays shouldn't blame African-Americans—many of whom don't approve of same-sex marriage for religious reasons—for voting 70 percent in favor of banning it.) In the interest of getting a Democrat into the White House, gays gave Obama a free pass.

Likewise, gay leaders decided that the best way to fight Prop 8 was to downplay the "gay angle" so as not to offend the undecideds. That's right: no gay people allowed in the commercials defending gay marriage. Instead, we got Sen. Dianne Feinstein and other well-meaning straight folk talking about the danger of eliminating "fundamental rights" and stretching credulity by comparing the ballot initiative to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. If I was offended by the disingenuousness of these ads, I can only imagine what Milk would have thought.

At least he would have been encouraged by what he's seeing now. Just as the victory of Christian conservatives with Anita Bryant's initiative got gays to fight for their rights, so too has the passage of Prop 8 mobilized a new generation of activists. "The community's defeat on marriage equality has energized a whole group of young people who took for granted the civil rights of gay people," says the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center's Jim Key. The center brought together a group of young leaders who formed FAIR (Freedom.Action. Inclusion. Rights.) to channel all this new energy. Its motto is "From street to strategy."

Watching this revitalization of the gay-rights movement, I've come to realize that what Jeff and I did may not have been in vain after all. Even as same-sex couples in California stopped marrying, Connecticut gays and lesbians began walking down the aisle last week. By standing at the altar, Jeff and I made a commitment—to pledge our devotion to one another; to show our family and friends (and even those who oppose us) that we're all more alike than we are different; and to refuse to stand silently by while others try to take away our rights. This past week, Jeff and I decided to get our wedding rings engraved as a declaration of our newfound independence. They now say MAKING HISTORY. OCT. 25, 2008. For that, I think Thomas Jefferson and Harvey Milk would be proud.

© 2008