Nathaniel Frank in Slate (Photo by Kimberly White/Reuters):
“This is how a revolution begins,” commences Jo Becker, a Pulitzer Prize-winningNew York Times reporter, in her new book, explaining that the gay marriage movement had “languished in obscurity” until 2008, when a young political consultant named Chad Griffin grew impatient and deployed his “unique ability” to leverage his Hollywood connections to “rebrand a cause.” It was a cause, argues Becker, that had to be rescued from established gay advocates who had spent 40 years doing virtually nothing worth mentioning in a major history of the marriage-equality battle. The book, excerpted in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, focuses on Ted Olson and, to a lesser extent, David Boies, two straight lawyers recruited by Griffin and funded, initially, by Hollywood stars to challenge California’s Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot initiative that revoked gay marriage in that state. Olson and Boies were on opposite sides of the 2000 Supreme Court battle that landed George W. Bush in the White House, and their teaming up to fight for gay marriage was a brilliant coup by Griffin. Olson’s conservative bona fides and eloquence in embracing the cause of gay marriage was enormously valuable in growing support for the cause just as it was reaching a tipping point.
Yet that’s a far cry from suggesting that this small, well-heeled group was responsible for bringing the nation gay marriage, or for a major leap in public approval, something that was in the works long before these players arrived on the scene, and which was jolted forward by widespread national anger against Prop 8, not just the anger of Chad Griffin and Ted Olson.
The actual revolution that led to gay marriage began, of course, not in a spacious San Francisco hotel suite in 2008 but on the streets of New York in 1969, when LGBTQ activists got tired of perpetual abuse and chose to fight a police raid at the Stonewall Inn. This remarkable uprising, which built on earlier efforts that can be traced back to the first gay rights organization in Chicago in 1924, led to gay marriage lawsuits in the early 1970s that were laughed out of court but were followed by the victorious 1993 Hawaii ruling that launched the gay marriage revolution.
And let’s be clear how we’re using revolution. This revolution began within the LGBTQ movement, which had been split over thoughtful, principled differences about the value and role of marriage in the social structure and, specifically, for the LGBTQ population.
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