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Joan C. Williams

Yes, we won that right by not contradicting, not ignoring, but rather relying on core middle-status values. My colleague Matt Coles, who led the American Civil Liberties Union’s gay marriage initiative, held focus groups and listened to how people talked about marriage. They spoke in terms of commitment. What does commitment mean? Stability.

What people don’t really understand is that the gay liberation movement wasn’t initially interested in marriage. They saw it as a lame, patriarchal institution. They focused on legal rights, equality, and celebrating diverse intimacies. The idea of prioritizing marriage was anathema to many leaders. The gay activists trying to legitimize diverse sexual expressions initially thought, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

But the movement as a whole, including many people who originally thought that marriage was a boring goal, made a decision to pivot, and it worked.

Matt Coles tells an amazing story of looking at people lining up to get married at San Francisco City Hall and realizing, “These weren’t doctors and lawyers. These were ordinary people. For them, this was the prom, the wedding, the ability to say, ‘Mom, I got married.’” A lot of gay and lesbian people were middle-class people with corresponding values, and this was the key.

So the movement knowingly pivoted. One of the major goals was always to communicate that gay intimacy is dignified. Instead of fighting it head-on, they achieved far more by connecting with middle-status people’s respect for family, stability, and propriety.

Gay marriage is the only social justice battle we’ve definitively won in forty years. There’s a key message for the Left in here. Your values are your own — don’t compromise them — but politics is about building coalitions that win. The gay marriage movement built a winning coalition and changed what it meant to be gay in this country. We think of it as inevitable, but it wasn’t.