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.
