The Gay Metropolis (62 page)

John Boswell, a gay historian at Yale, had recently completed his book about gay marriages in ancient times, and he suggested to Stoddard and
Rieman that they could be the first couple in America to use one of the ancient ceremonies he had unearthed. Boswell said he had found eighty different ceremonies, “some written originally in Greek, some written in old Slavonic, and some written in Latin.” But the ceremonies made the prospective couple uncomfortable “because all of them made considerable reference to Jesus Christ and to religious beliefs to which we do not subscribe.” So they decided not to use any of the ceremonies and not to have anyone officiate “because part of the purpose was to create our own ceremony.

“We're not looking for approbation from the larger world. We're making our
declaration
to the larger world. So we composed a sentence that each of us would declare to the other and would precede the exchange of rings, and that's what we said to one another.

“The rings came from Tiffany's,” said Stoddard. “I decided to go and buy a gift certificate for Walter, amounting to the total price of two rings, for our anniversary, which was in August. That was the very day I moved back from Washington, from the campaign [to permit gays in the military]. I was feeling sad, and sort of confused about things, but because we were having dinner in celebration of our anniversary, I wanted to present this gift certificate from Tiffany's to Walter that evening. I had only a few minutes to get to the store, and I was laden down with baggage, so I showed up at Tiffany's at quarter to six.

“I had trouble getting through the door because I had all this luggage. The salespeople thought I was just totally bizarre, and I made them very nervous. But eventually they escorted me over to the wedding ring counter, and I talked to the person behind the counter who sold me the certificate for $600. As she went away to process the transaction, another salesclerk, who was leaving, passed by. She said,

“‘Talk about last minute!' She must have thought we were eloping. It was really funny.”

When Stoddard returned with Rieman to get the rings fitted, he was delighted by the demeanor of their salesman. “I thought to myself, Gee, this is going to be real trouble, and he's going to be real uncomfortable in all this. And he
couldn't have
been better. He was courteous without being officious, he was not in the least uncomfortable. He just went through the transaction as if such things happened every day. I was pleased because I thought this was a sign of how much the world had changed, and disappointed at the same time because part of this thing was to make a fuss, to cause trouble on behalf of other people.

“When I went back to pick up the rings I saw the same clerk, and I said,
‘I know this was an untraditional transaction. I really appreciated your businesslike attitude. It was a pleasure to deal with you.' And he had a big smile on his mouth, and he extended his hand. And I liked that. I thought that was very significant.

“We wanted to incorporate appropriate traditional elements in this ceremony while maintaining our individuality and our distinctness from a traditional ceremony. We filed for domestic partnership the week afterward. We did not have a cake with two male images; we thought that was absolutely ridiculous. But we did keep some traditional elements. The rings were presented to each of us by our oldest siblings. We had some form of ceremony and we dressed up. But we only wore suits.”

Stoddard had tried for a formal wedding announcement in the
Times,
but the paper's editor said that would be impossible, at least until the state had formally legalized gay marriage. But when another
Times
reporter learned he was getting married that weekend, he ended up with an announcement in the paper anyway—in the “Chronicle” section. “So I got, in some strange way, the wedding announcement that I wanted.”
The New Yorker
also made the marriage the lead item in “The Talk of the Town.” Both items also mentioned that Stoddard's partner had just been elected to a partnership at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. That made Rieman nervous about how his fellow partners would behave at his installation, but Ted Sorensen, who was the master of ceremonies for the event, handled the recent publicity deftly.

“Now I'd like to bring to the dais Walter Rieman, whose wedding received more attention than anyone else's, except Donald Trump's,” said Sorensen.

“That's all he said,” Stoddard recalled. “It was just perfect. And then Walter came up, and among other things thanked me for supporting him as he became a partner. And then Sorensen got up after Walter spoke—and this still really affects me—and said, ‘Congratulations, Walter, and welcome, Tom.' So he was welcoming me to the firm as a spouse—and that was very moving to me. Walter was euphoric.”

Stoddard and Rieman had decided to conduct their ceremony at Chanterelle, which was their favorite restaurant in Manhattan. Rieman's brother and two sisters and Tom's gay brother were among the seventy guests. The ceremony took place in December 1993, which also happened to be the twentieth anniversary of Stoddard's coming out. “The comment which affected me the most was from Hendrik Uyttendaele.”
^*
said Stoddard.
“Hendrik seemed very moved by it and said that he thought that it was one of the most honest events that he'd seen in his life.”

Each man declared, “I commit to you my life and my love for the rest of our days,” put on their rings, and kissed. Then Stoddard's brother performed the traditional role of the best man by offering this toast:

“Tom and Walter have done something that gay people have dreamed of for thousands of years. Let's raise our glasses to Tom and Walter. May you continue your life together in a more perfect union, in good health, and always with adventure and purpose and love.”

JANUARY
1996
BROUGHT
inklings of the greatest hope the gay community had felt since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic fifteen years earlier. A new three-drug combination seemed to offer what Lawrence K. Altman described in the
Times
as “the most powerful AIDS therapy ever tested on infected patients.” He quoted Dr. William Paul, the head of the federal office of AIDS research: “Patients need to know this is promising, all signs are optimistic.”

For Charles Gibson, for Xax, and for thousands of others, it seemed it might possibly be that “miraculous thing” that would finally allow them to recover.

Xax, who had resisted all drug therapy for several years after he first learned he was infected, was one of the first patients to start receiving the new treatment: protease inhibitors, in combination with AZT and 3TC.

“I started in the spring,” said Xax. “Now I do know a lot of people on it. Then I didn't. Seeing these trials come along—one after another—and everybody's viral loads are dropping to undetectable levels. It took me about a month to go through the psychological change. And then taking them at the beginning was very hard too, because it has a very strong effect. You would feel it, like, coursing through your body. I would feel it washing through my brain. I would start to go unconscious and all of a sudden I'd snap to, like, where was I? And then in a few seconds I'd be back again, like, whoa, now where was I. And then all of a sudden I'd be knocked out and I'd be asleep. But then over like a few months, that stuff stopped. And I'd just have energy.

“And I'd just feel good. And that's a completely new phenomenon in my whole life.

“Now I feel great. For the first time people see the glimmer of a real cure. And so there's
life
ahead of them all of a sudden, instead of death. And like all the people who have unraveled their lives and prepared themselves
to die, are suddenly like, ‘Oh, I guess I'm going back to work. I guess I have a life again.'”

Other treatments had seemed to offer similar hope at earlier stages of the epidemic. But none had had such dramatic effects on so many people so quickly. In the first nine months of 1996, the number of deaths from AIDS in the United States dropped 19 percent.

“AIDS has been the best thing and the worst thing for the planet,” said Xax. “Because I really think that AIDS is the crux of the change of the turn of the century: to force everyone on the planet to accept people who are different from themselves—of every kind. … It is our role as a sacred people to do this. Our culture has become so huge that it encompasses the whole world now—the huge media culture. We are all so connected now. So it's taken a very huge event to affect things on that scale.

“And I think that's why AIDS is here. I think that's why the cure is in sight now, because enough people have bonded together with a common goal. I have a friend who was doing medical research who stopped because there was no communication within the research world, everyone was so out to find their own discovery, everyone was so selfish, that nothing ever happened. AIDS, it forced people to finally come together to find something.

“And I think that's what the whole thing is about: it's about unity, it's about inclusion—and it's forcing everyone to wake up.”

The Reverend Peter Gomes of Harvard saw America as it approached the millennium this way: “The place for creative hope that arises out of suffering most likely now is to be found among blacks, women and homosexuals. These outcasts may well be the custodians of those thin places; they may in fact be the watchers at the frontier between what is and what is to be.”

MORE QUICKLY
—and more permanently—than any other federal institution, the Supreme Court has the capacity to set the tone for the treatment of any minority group—sometimes for decades at a time. Two and a half years after Stoddard's marriage, the country's highest Court rendered the kind of decision that Stoddard had been hoping for since he first came out in 1970. In
Romer
v.
Evans,
on May 20,1996, the Court voted six to three to throw out the Colorado state constitutional initiative that had forbidden protection for gay people from discrimination.

Very significantly, the decision was written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, an appointee of Ronald Reagan. Kennedy began by quoting Justice John Marshall Harlan's famous dissent in
Plessy
v.
Ferguson,
the 1896
case that subjected blacks to legally sanctioned discrimination for another fifty-eight years—until the precedent reversing
Brown
v.
Board of Education.

“One century ago, the first Justice Harlan admonished this Court that the Constitution ‘neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.' Unheeded then, those words are now understood to state a commitment to the law's neutrality where the rights of persons are at stake. The Equal Protection Clause enforces this principle and today requires us to hold invalid a provision of Colorado's Constitution.

“A state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws,” Kennedy continued. The Colorado provision had singled out the state's homosexuals as “a solitary class,” creating a legal disability so sweeping, it could only be explained by “animus.”

“It is not within our constitutional tradition to enact laws of this sort.” Justice Kennedy said the Colorado amendment did not meet even the lowest level of scrutiny accorded an official action that is challenged as a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. Under that test, as Kennedy described it, “a law must bear a rational relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose, and Amendment 2 does not.”

Justice Antonin Scalia filed a furious dissent for the three-member minority which included a concise description of the decision's huge significance: it placed “the prestige of this institution behind the proposition that opposition to homosexuality is as reprehensible as racial or religious bias.”

Suzanne B. Goldberg, a lawyer with the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, who was part of the winning legal team in the case, summarized the decision even more simply:

“This is the most important victory ever for lesbian and gay rights,” she said.

THE DECISION FIT
beautifully into Tom Stoddard's vision for the gay movement:

“It's about the tenor of a society which is intolerant of those people and those things that are different,” he said. “There's no point in having a movement if you're just going to turn everyone into a suburban homemaker. The whole point is to celebrate difference. And there is something deeply offensive about a movement that only argues for its own people. The underlying idea behind the movement, to anyone's mind, it seems to me, is equality. If the idea is equality, it can't possibly be said that it should be equality for only one group of people. The idea of equality has to apply
across the board, and therefore, it's not just that there ought to be interconnectedness between the African American community and the Latino community and the gay community. It's that what motivates those movements is exactly the same thing. And it is a terrible thing to just promote one's own equality. It's what lawyers call special pleading. It's unprincipled and it's selfish—and it will never sell.

“We are engaged in the remaking of the culture in a way that benefits everybody. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood that: the significance of the black civil rights movement for white Americans. And he said it again and again. It wasn't just a device; he knew exactly what he was doing. It uplifted people. It not only touched them—because it made people listen to him who otherwise wouldn't—it made people feel better about themselves and their culture. It moved them forward.

“We want a richer, more diverse, more compassionate culture, in which everyone feels the possibility of self-expression and self-actualization. And that is what it's about. I say that as a true believer because it was true for me. As I mentioned before, I would have a miserable, unhappy, meaningless life if not for being gay and I would like for other people to experience that as well.”