Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality (56 page)

At 3:58
P.M
. the San Francisco county clerk, with dramatic flair, called out. “Can we help the next customer, please?”

As Kris and Sandy stepped to the desk, Jones looked over at Chad. “Oh, Chad, the places you take us.”

“It’s real,” Chad replied, his voice quavering. “Do you see that?”

Jones nodded. “It’s real.”

Across the country, Cooper watched it all unfold in shock. It was inconceivable to him that the Ninth Circuit had given him no notice of what it was about to do, “one of the most questionable events in a case that was rife with questionable events,” he would later say. His view of the law had not changed. Still, seeing the plaintiffs’ faces, he couldn’t help but wish them the best.

“
At a personal, human level, I rejoiced in their happiness.”

Over the years, Cooper had often thought about what would happen if his argument prevailed at the Supreme Court, playing it out like a movie in his mind. He had followed the polls in California carefully, and it seemed likely to him that Proposition 8 would go back on the ballot, and be repealed. “At that time, Kris and Sandy and Jeff and Paul would have gotten married,” he said, of his imaginary scenario. “And I often thought, that would be a ceremony I would like to attend.”

And he now understood, in a way that he could not possibly have when the two couples testified at trial, what this moment meant to them, because he now understood what it meant to his own daughter.

They had been sipping iced teas and eating sandwiches outside, during a family vacation at their home on the beach in Bonita Springs, Florida, when Cooper finally broached the subject with Ashley, a vibrant young woman in her twenties with long brown hair, a freckled nose, and an impish grin.

“So,” he said, “when am I going to meet Casey?”

“I hope soon,” Ashley replied. “Because she’s really special to me.”

It had been midway through the case, during the interminable Ninth Circuit phase, when his wife confirmed what he had suspected for months. Debbie Cooper had known, even before her husband agreed to take the Proposition 8 case, that her daughter was a lesbian.

Listening to the trial testimony by day and talking to Ashley on the phone at night had been like living in two parallel universes. Debbie Cooper had been deeply moved by Jerry Sanders, the mayor of San Diego with the lesbian daughter who had testified about his own unthinking prejudice. She worried for her daughter, because “it’s a hard life, and you can’t help but realize that there are places in this country where she could be harmed.” But listening to the testimony of Kris and Sandy had given her comfort.

“Here were two women who were much older than Ash, and they were so okay, in every emotional way, in their lives, in their heads, and in their family. And I remember Chuck coming back from court that day and talking about their strength of character, their integrity.”

Still, she had held off sharing Ashley’s secret with him, out of respect for her daughter’s wishes that she be allowed to come out to him in her own way. But if he asks, Ashley told her, you can tell him. And he had, which is what led to the conversation in June of 2012 in Florida. Chuck had married her mother when Ashley was just seven, and he was as much her dad as her biological father. She was nervous about telling him, but he had made it so much easier by bringing it up himself.

“I said, ‘You know, it’s not easy to talk about,’” Ashley recalled.

“It’s not easy for anyone,” he replied, “but I love you, and you love me, and that’s all that matters.”

Her mother initially asked her if she was sure she was a lesbian, but Cooper accepted it without question.

“I sometimes wonder if what made him so amazing to come out to was the experience of being part of that trial,” she said.

Cooper would like to think he would have reacted the same way regardless. But he said the trial, and especially the wrenching testimony of Ryan Kendall—the Denver Police Department employee who testified about how his parents forced him to attend sexual orientation “conversion therapy”—did teach him one thing: “It certainly acquainted me with ways that are not the right way for a parent to react,” he said.

He spent hours talking to her about the case, to make sure it did not come between them. She disagreed with him about the constitutionality of bans like Proposition 8, and it was hard not to be hurt by some of his arguments. “I think the most upset I got was being called an ‘experiment’ that people deserved to see the outcome of before accepting. It just made me feel—alien, I guess.”

But she could tell how important it was to him that she understood that he was not trying to take anything away from her personally. Some of her friends found Ashley’s family situation hard to fathom, but they didn’t know Chuck the way she did, couldn’t see him for the father he was, the man who danced and sang along to the Rolling Stones at family get-togethers, and who cared more for her than to use her for his own benefit.

Shortly after the Supreme Court granted cert in the Proposition 8 case, in December of 2012, Ashley had proposed to Casey, with the blessing of both her parents. She and Casey lived in Massachusetts, where Ashley worked on Cape Cod as a chef—and where it was legal to marry. Cooper told Ashley that if she wanted to tell the world, she could. If she wanted to tell no one until after the Supreme Court had decided the case, that was fine with him too. In the end, she decided that she did not want to subject herself, her fiancée, or her family to a media frenzy, a decision that relieved Cooper, despite the fact that the publicity might have helped his case.

“I didn’t want, and I didn’t think she wanted, for her and Casey to suddenly become the most famous lesbians in America,” he said. “But can you imagine how riveting it would have been if at the oral argument I disclosed this? I kind of personified what I was arguing.”

Now, with the case behind him, he and Debbie had their own wedding to throw.

“I consider my life to be a storybook life—I had this Prince Charming come
and scoop up me and my children, and you can’t help but want that for your children,” Debbie Cooper said. “And the thing is, except for one thing, my storybook life for Ashley looked a lot like hers does now—happy, healthy, and in love with someone that I do think is a wonderful person.”

“We love all our children and we respect them, and we know our script isn’t necessarily their lives,” her husband added. Cooper still did not feel it was appropriate to say how he might vote on same-sex marriage. But “what I will say only is that my views evolve on issues of this kind the same way as other people’s do, and how I view this down the road may not be the way I view it now, or how I viewed it ten years ago.”

Back in San Francisco, with the paperwork done, Kris and Sandy and the rest of the group headed back to the rotunda.

In a small holding room just off the mayor’s suite, with a connecting door to the office where Harvey Milk had been shot, someone handed Kris and Sandy matching bouquets of white flowers. Picking one of them up, Sandy held it strategically in front of her, suddenly every bit a blushing bride who had only been given twenty minutes to deliberate over her outfit. “See, then all the attention is drawn to the flowers, away from the hip.”

Kris, doing the same, laughed. “Slenderizing!”

Chad reached Jeff and Paul, using an app on his iPhone called FaceTime, which allowed for videoconferencing. He put the state’s attorney general on the line first.

“Thanks for making the call,” Paul said to Harris, marriage license now firmly in hand. “You should have seen the registrar’s hand shaking. It was awesome!”

Chad panned his phone toward Kris and Sandy, who could see that Paul and Jeff were in a car, on their way from Norwalk to Los Angeles City Hall, where the mayor of Los Angeles had been enlisted to perform their wedding ceremony. The team had arranged for Rachel Maddow to broadcast it live on MSNBC.

Kris laughed. “Are you in L.A. traffic on your wedding day?”

“For about an hour or so,” Paul replied.

Boutrous, who had been arguing a case on behalf of Walmart in the federal district courthouse where the Prop 8 trial had taken place, burst into the room, just in time. Cohen just kept shifting his weight from one foot to another, repeating, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

“Don’t leave without the license,” Harris called as the group moved out the door, camera crews in tow, toward the balcony off the mayor’s office where the actual ceremony would take place.

As Kris and Sandy walked through the halls, the crowd following them grew larger. Everyone began clapping, a rhythmic ovation that grew louder and louder. Chad was banging his hands together so hard that his watch fell off.

“This is fun,” Boutrous whispered, as Harris, Kris, and Sandy took their positions. “Don’t cry,” Terry Stewart admonished herself. After all these years of tamping down expectations, if she started now she might never stop.

Harris, introducing the couple, said, “They have waited and hoped and fought for this moment. Their wait is finally over.”

Elliott held up his iPhone so that his brother, Spencer, who was in North Carolina at a leadership camp, could see the proceedings via FaceTime. Sandy’s boys, one in New York and the other in San Diego, had sent their love via text. Directly across the way, the bust of Harvey Milk watched over the nuptials.

“Do you Kris, take Sandy to be your lawfully wedded wife, to love and cherish, from this day forward?”

“I do.”

“And do you Sandy, take Kris to be your lawfully wedded wife, to love and cherish, from this day forward?”

“I do.”

Kris slipped a ring onto Sandy’s finger, the fourth of a set. She had given her the first when they got engaged, the second when they were married in the ceremony that was later invalidated, the third on the day that Judge Walker had issued his decision, and now this one, first presented on the Supreme Court steps.

“May your love never falter,” Harris said. “By the power vested in me by the state of California, I now pronounce you spouses for life.”

On the grand staircase leading up to the balcony, the San Francisco Gay
Men’s Chorus waited for the newlyweds to make their way downstairs. Already, other couples had begun to gather, some pushing wheelchairs, others strollers. One woman, sobbing with happiness and dressed in white, thrust her flowers into Sandy’s hand. They had come to join the ranks of the married, a status Justice Kennedy had said would confer upon them “a dignity and status of immense import.”

Then the chorus began belting out a song based on Milk’s most famous speech.

“The young gay people in the Altoona, Pennsylvanias, and the Richmond, Minnesotas, who are coming out,” Milk had said in 1978. “The only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right.”

Forty-four years after Stonewall, and thirty-five years after Milk’s speech, that dream, at long last, seemed within reach. “Equal feels different,” Jeff said, directly after he and Paul were married. Kris, contemplating the last four-plus years, put it this way: “It’s like, you’re good, you’re not good, you’re trying to get it all regulated.” She’d looked skyward, and then over at Sandy. “It’s all good now. From here on out, it’s all good.”

As for Chad, he just stood on the steps of City Hall, chin lifted, grinning like an idiot, listening to that chorus sing:

“You gotta give ’em hope, you gotta give ’em hope,” the words rang out, a clarion call. “Oh, you gotta give ’em hope.”

Ted Olson, on the left, and David Boies share a laugh as the team readies for trial. The odd-couple pairing—Olson represented George W. Bush and Boies served as Al Gore’s lawyer in the disputed 2000 presidential election—generated headlines and helped change the nature of the debate over same-sex marriage.