San Francisco became the city of love again yesterday when the 9th Circuit lifted its stay on same-sex marriage. Weddings began almost immediately at SF City Hall and continued into the evening.
These adorable boys were handing flowers to every newlywed couple they saw.
Because love is love. So simple even adults know it when they see it.
When I tell you I live in San Francisco, you may think being gay here is just a done deal. And most of the time, you might be right: I don’t worry about who I am or whether I am or seem “out” to anyone else. My wonderful wife and child and I can simply exist.
Then I remember the irony of the train ride on the evening of Tuesday, November 4, 2008. A group of us took the F-Market train from the No On Prop 8 headquarters down to the democratic campaign headquarters at the St. Francis hotel, all decked out in our No On Prop 8 shirts, carrying No On Prop 8 signs and generally excited though uncertain about what was to be a long roller-coaster night of heartbreak ahead.
We were taunted on the train. A group of kids were seething slurs at us, and the slurs were not at all pretty. We were, basically, publicly humiliated.
It’s true so much has changed even just since then. Five years later we’ve not yet seen the repeal of Prop 8, but other states have managed to overcome the barrier to popular vote for the rights of gays and lesbians to marry. We feel the tide turning. But we still have a long ride ahead.
The beautiful newlyweds Loret (@lwaldal ‘s sister) and Aimee ♥ #washington #marriage #equality #love twitter.com/moyalynne/stat…
— Moya Watson (@moyalynne) April 6, 2013
Last week we took the Amtrak Coast Starlight up to Seattle and back for Loret and Aimee’s beautiful wedding on Saturday, April 6. The thing about these long rides on Amtrak trains is that you’re not just traveling – you’re dining, watching movies, squeezing through tight corridors, and generally hanging out with a bunch of people you don’t know. For an entire day.
When you go into the dining car for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, unless you’re a party of four already, you’re placed together with others who fill the table. Each time, you try to have conversations.
Conversations with strangers are wonderful – even when one is badly slept and unshowered on a rocking train. Conversations about our gay families though – even in 2013 – are still risky. Here’s what it’s like:
All in a split second, you consider the 2012 election result that approved same-sex marriage in the state to which the train is heading, stick the fact in your back pocket that 53.7% approved the marriage you’re going to witness, and by proxy your own marriage, and come up with the figure that roughly 1 in every two you meet, were they Washington voters and did they vote in this particular election, are going to be thusly supportive of the conversation you’re about to consider having.
And you try to evaluate: which one is this?
Caboose @amtrak #11 Coast Starlight #I‘mOnATrain twitter.com/moyalynne/stat…
— Moya Watson (@moyalynne) April 8, 2013
Not everybody gets this opportunity to have their relationship status a subject of national debate. Usually this is considered a good thing – a matter of privacy – but we’re global citizens, sharing the same world, the same country, the same dining car table – and marriage is nothing if not about a societal conversation and recognition.
I don’t always succeed in taking the opportunity to represent who I am, even in the face of a 53.7% chance of being met with frank approval.
On the train, I failed at the first meal, with the couple from Imperial County in California. Somewhere my mind made a judgment from within the context of the 2008 Prop 8 verdict of their home county, and I answered the dining questions vaguely, for which I felt like a deceptive and bad global traveler.
The rest of the conversations would go differently. With the mom and her kid, who seemed almost mirror images of my daughter and me and were returning to their home city near Seattle — with them we talked freely, and I thanked them for approving R74 – even though I had no idea how they actually voted. They reacted supportively – almost like this wedding thing is just a given.
Then there’s an entire other end of the spectrum. My wife Leanne was practically jumped upon by a self-professed conservative Republican who wanted to apologize for his party and wish us well whatever the hell we wanted to do. Eventually for Leanne it became a matter of choice NOT to keep talking to this fine fellow — she had other things to do on the train, after all.
What a difference indeed the five years – the ten years – the knowing of one out of every two – makes. I should represent like every other person who is alive today can, but I get this extra chance – to represent in the face of a flying social issue. I do try, and not always very well.
The flip-side of the 53.7% factor is the 46.3% factor. For this good reason and many better ones, conversations on our journey, still risky, are more and more important, rewarding, and hopeful — every day.
Charles Cooper and Judge Vaughn Walker: view from the overflow2 room
My wife and I arrived at the Federal Building an hour before the closing arguments began at 10am, but by then we were already number 30 in a line waiting to get into the overflow room. We were told the overflow room was full and only press could reserve passes. By 10am, the line to get in looked to be 150 people at least – and luckily they had opened an additional two overflow rooms.
So we had plenty of time while standing in line to talk to people around us. Though we were mostly too full of nerves to talk, we did meet one really nice guy behind us in line and talked about the trial, and about how my wife and I wish we could just invite the people who don’t want us to marry over for cocktails so we could really talk to each other and see how we are alike and how we are different. He told us he’d also be honored to have us over to visit him and his wife.
We finally all got in to overflow room nr. 2 and Leanne and I tweeted the entire way till the trial concluded at 4pm. (There were brief breaks — we rode the elevator UP with David Boies; we rode the elevator UP with Cleve Jones and Dustin Lance Black; we got to talk to the many great NCLR folks there… we felt starstruck).
Charles Cooper - speaking at press conference after intro from Andy Pugno (to his right) and before Ron Prentice (to his left)
There’s obviously much of record there and much to say about what Olson and Cooper and Walker said during the trial — and there’ll be much written elsewhere, now and for a long while to come — but to me the most amazing thing happened after the trial so I want to write this now.
Thanks to Marriage Equality USA’s Molly Mckay, we got into the press conference right after the trial. We immediately met the smiling man we had shared the “nr. 30” spot in line with before the trial, and he gave us a big hug. I then asked him what his interest was in being there — “I work at the California Family Council and with Ron Prentice at Protect Marriage,” he said. To my other side was Kate Kendell, tireless and amazing director of NCLR, and to this side was “the enemy.” And we were already friends. It was an amazing and bizarre moment.
Olson: "Our clients - they're not plaintiffs, they're human beings who stand for everyone"
As I listened to “his side” talk at the press conference about the wrongs people like us were doing to people like my daughter, I kept receiving pictures on my cell phone of my daughter, who was at that moment twirling with a friend in the playground in the brilliant light. And he and my wife and I kept talking about our families, and re-extended the invitations to visit. We shared pictures of beautiful family. I thought about the truly thin line that separates “our side” from “their side” and what in the end we are really fighting for. I felt like the future is a bright light toward which we run, and one day none of this will matter anymore. We’ll be beyond.
When shall we learn what should be clear as day
We cannot choose what we are free to love
W.H. Auden
Moya Watson 