The long wait for gay marriage
Although Rhode Island offers a hospitable home to gays and lesbians, equality remains elusive
By Beth SchwartzapfelFebruary 15, 2006
Justice Brown-Duso is an outspoken nine-year-old with a big smile. He knows what his name means, and he is quick to criticize injustice when he sees it. “He gets really indignant,” says his mom, Michelle Duso. “Like, ‘What do you mean a mom and dad family is better than my mom and mom family?’ ” In 1998, when Duso, the executive director of the Providence nonprofit Youth Pride, and her partner, Julie Brown, went before a judge to adopt Justice, they were essentially asking the same question.
The two women went through the entire process together, insisting, recalls Duso, that they would not start “our family based on lies and shame and loopholes.” Despite this, Brown ultimately wound up stepping aside to allow Duso to file an individual petition for adoption. Told that the adoption was unlikely to be granted if they petitioned together, the couple decided it was more important to have Justice in their home than to start a court fight. A few years later, though, in 2002, Duso and Brown were able to jointly adopt their second son, Dylan, now five, and then his brother, Corey, now four.
The friendlier stance of Rhode Island courts toward gay and lesbian parents is just one sign of how things are steadily improving, locally and nationally, for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer (LGBTQ) people. The changes can be seen in such disparate events as the mainstream success of Brokeback Mountain, a string of legislative victories in Rhode Island, and how David N. Cicilline’s status as an openly gay man proved a non-issue in the 2002 Providence mayoral election. As Rodney P. Davis, president of Rhode Island Pride, which runs the annual Pride Parade in Providence and other events, puts it, “Individuals feel comfortable to be who they are in places where 10, 15, 30 years ago that wouldn’t have been imaginable.”
Stephen Hartley, director of development at AIDS Care Ocean State, agrees. “People are finally coming around,” he says. Hartley, a Johnston native who is well known in the LGBTQ community through his alter ego, drag queen Miss Kitty Litter, says the scene is far less furtive than when he came out in the 1970s. “I have been dressed in drag in every bar, every restaurant in downtown Providence,” he says. “It astounds me how many people in Rhode Island know me. The governor of Rhode Island knows Kitty Litter.”
But despite considerable progress, Rhode Island still lacks a formal community infrastructure, beyond nightspots, for gays and lesbians. There are only two organizations — RI Pride, and Youth Pride, which provides support, advocacy, and education for youth — with their own offices and paid staff. More fundamentally, the ongoing legal inability of gays and lesbians to marry here shows how a central social convention — and all that it conveys — remains out of reach.
While six states have marriage or some form of domestic partnership on the books, gay marriage legislation has been introduced at the General Assembly and then killed in committee for seven of the last eight years. The state’s top three elected officials, Republican Governor Donald L. Carcieri, and Senate President Joseph Montalbano and Speaker William J. Murphy, both Democrats, are united in their opposition to the bill. As evidenced by a well-attended Valentine’s Day rally at the State House on Tuesday, gay and lesbian activists are continuing to press their fight. But despite the enactment of steadily more legal protection for Rhode Island’s LGBTQ community, this year’s gay marriage legislation is expected, once again, to have little chance of becoming law.
Toward a more tolerant state
Gwendolyn Howard, a clinical social worker, sees her clients in a tidy and comfortable office on Wickenden Street in Providence. In her words, Howard is “a woman who has experienced gender reassignment surgery.” (Others might call her transgendered, but Howard says, “Labels can get really charged and confusing.”) During her transition, Howard moved from upstate New York to Providence in 1996, and the process was at times frightening.
Howard and her partner (a woman whom Howard married while she was still a man, and to whom she remains legally married — they just celebrated their 25th anniversary) rented their apartment as two women. Since Howard was hired at a temp agency as a man, however, she would wear men’s clothes to work, and then change in the car on the way home, hoping she wouldn’t run into her landlord, or someone from the job. Had such a chance encounter occurred, and not gone well, she would have had no legal recourse, since Rhode Island lacked civil rights protection for transgendered people at the time. “That awareness that you can lose your job, you can lose everything, just if someone found out,” Howard says, “that can be kind of a crippling fear.”
Five years ago, state Representative Edith Ajello (D-Providence) introduced a bill to bar discrimination against transgendered individuals in a variety of areas. The Rhode Island Alliance for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights, a nonprofit advocacy organization, intended 2001 to be merely a test year for a bill. But when community activist Lauren Nocera was able to arrange a meeting with then-Senate Majority Leader William V. Irons of East Providence, everything changed. Nocera happened to have grown up in the same Rumford neighborhood where Irons had raised his family (Irons’s daughter, in fact, had babysat Nocera when she was a girl). So when Nocera asked the legislative leader to meet with Gwen Howard, she was speaking not just as a constituent, but a family friend.
“You’re a parent,” Nocera recalls telling Irons. “You know my parents. And these are issues that affect families.” In the subsequent meeting, “Gwen was brilliant,” recalls Nocera. “That meeting wholly illustrates the power of personal connection.”
Irons (who left the Senate at the end of 2003) proceeded to take a strong interest in the legislation, even speaking in favor of it during a committee meeting. The bill ultimately became law, making Rhode Island at the time one of only two states offering such protection to transgendered people. These types of stories abound in the history of the LGBTQ community’s struggle for legislative recognition. As longtime community activist Tina Wood, who operates Rhode Island’s LGBTQ news list (listserv.brown.edu/rilgbt-news.html), puts it, “Other states are huge. Here, people are more likely to say, ‘Hey, you’re talking about my cousin.’ ”
The enactment of protection for transgendered people capped a string of legislative victories, including three in 1998 alone. First, the legislature repealed the state’s sodomy statute, which categorized oral and anal sex acts between consenting adults — dubbed “abominable and detestable crimes against nature”— as felonies. Second, Rhode Island became only the second state to allow individuals to choose their “immediate family,” including same-sex partners, for the purposes of hospital visitation. Third, the General Assembly passed a hate-crimes law, implementing harsher penalties for a crime committed specifically because of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (the law already contained such provisions for race and gender, among other things, but still does not include transgendered people). In 1999, Rhode Island became the first state to allow individuals to designate someone who is not an immediate family member to be responsible for their funeral arrangements. And finally, in 2001, same-sex partners of state employees became eligible for spousal benefits.
If activists were surprised by how quickly the transgender civil rights bill, and the array of subsequent legislation, passed, it was partially because of how long and how hard they had fought for their first victory.
In 1995, Rhode Island became the eighth state to pass legislation prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation in housing, employment, credit, and public accommodations. In retrospect, it seems so simple — why would anyone oppose protecting people against discrimination? But a bill guaranteeing that gays and lesbians could not lose their jobs or be kicked out of their homes because of their sexual orientation was introduced almost every year for 11 years, starting in 1984. And every time, it was either voted down, killed in committee, or passed in one branch of the legislature, but not the other.
In 1993, after nine years of fighting, supporters erupted in a minor riot at the State House, hollering and shouting in the rotunda, bringing the legislature to a standstill after the House Judiciary Committee killed the bill. “The frustration was palpable,” recalls longtime community activist Marti Rosenberg, the executive director of Ocean State Action. “We were just there, and angry, and loud.” The LGBTQ community felt alone, and it had very little support from other groups. “At the time,” remembers Rodney Davis, “we were singular activists, out in the cold, fighting.”
Rosenberg recalls sitting in the wings of the Senate in 1995, listening to the legislators’ debate in the hours before the anti-discrimination bill finally passed. “When the vote finally happened, people were crying,” she says. “I had chills. Just to see that justice was being done was an amazing thing. It was electric.” Two weeks later, Rosenberg’s then-partner gave birth to their daughter, Abby. Abby was six weeks old when the family marched in that year’s Pride parade; taped to her stroller was a triumphant sign: “Born in a Free State.”
The splintering of a movement
The mounting victories for the LGBTQ community, coupled with the more tolerant general atmosphere toward gays and lesbians, can lend a sense of inevitability to the community’s progress, leading young people to conclude that these changes were only a matter of time. Stephen Hartley, the drag queen known as Miss Kitty Litter, spends a lot of time in gay bars and clubs, mentoring and keeping an eye on the rising generation. “Sometimes I see them being disrespectful to the older people. I need to remind them that if it weren’t for the older people, there wouldn’t be 14 gay bars in downtown Providence,” Hartley says with a measure of hyperbole. “You have American history, and if you’re gay, you have gay history. These changes don’t just happen. People fought for them.”
Following the passage of the civil rights bill in 1995, the “us-against-them” cohesiveness that unified the extended gay and lesbian community for 11 years began to wear thin as different priorities came to the fore. The anti-discrimination bill “was the holy grail for so many years,” says Tina Wood. “There was no clear sense of what was next.” Although the issue of gays in the military, for instance, was a hot topic during Bill Clinton’s first term, “there’s no way I’d ever spend my time working on that,” says Peter Hocking, a former director of Brown University’s Swearer Center for Public Service, reflecting the views of the large number of LGBTQ Rhode Islanders who believe in equality, but are uncomfortable with militarism.
Ultimately, depending on who’s speaking, the Rhode Island Alliance for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights either disbanded or was put on hold. The group’s nonprofit status was revoked in 2001 and its Web site (members.aol.com/rialliance/) was last updated in 2003.
The previous focus on the civil rights bill has shifted to same-sex marriage. There is not the same unqualified support for marriage, however, from all corners of the community, particularly from its more politically radical members. Hocking, for example, respects those who have taken up this cause, but adds, “Marriage is a fundamentally flawed institution in this country. It’s an issue of patriarchy and it’s an issue of ownership of women and transmittal of property.”
Jenn Steinfeld, co-chair of Marriage Equality RI (www.marriageequalityri.org/), the group that is spearheading the fight, acknowledges, “Marriage is still a really controversial issue within the LGBT community.” Further, civil rights affect everyone, while marriage affects only some. “Maybe if I had a partner, I would be more involved,” Hartley says, “but I don’t have a partner, so marriage is not my fight.”
In some ways, the splintering of goals and priorities is a sign of the LGBTQ’s community’s ongoing successes. The community, after all, is a diverse one, and diversity of interests and demographics is no longer strictly set aside in favor of commonality. The community’s diversity, however, in combination with Rhode Island’s small size, leads to some of the community’s most glaring shortcomings.
In 2004, creating a community/resource center, for example, was one of the top priorities identified by LGBTQ community members in a Rhode Island Foundation study. Consistent concern was expressed that the only opportunity for social interaction for LGBTQ people is in bars and clubs, which are not welcoming for families, non-drinkers, and some older people. However, despite the intense interest, no such center has lasted for more than a few years. Two of the more notable examples were the Triangle Center, which opened in 1994 and closed a few years later, and the India Point Project, which hastily closed in 2004, amid questions involving financial impropriety. Other problems aside, Peter Hocking says these centers didn’t last because they were “trying to do too many things.”
Rather than trying to be “monolithic,” Hocking suggests that the only way community centers will work is if there are lots of them, each of which starts small and grows organically from a specific mission. Money to establish such a center has also been scarce, in part since less than 0.3% of all national charitable dollars go to gay and lesbian issues, according to the Rhode Island Foundation.
Hocking is the chair of Equity Action, the Foundation’s new fund for sexual orientation and gender identity initiatives. Since going public in 2004, Equity Action has distributed more than $100,000, including recently announced grants to expand the GLBT Helpline of Rhode Island and to provide a safe and supportive space for LGBTQ Southeast Asian-American youth. Hocking says Equity Action is particularly invested in projects and programs that build community infrastructure, especially those which are “interesting and inventive, which enliven the cultural life and allow people to know each other.”
The 2004 WhamBamTrans art festival, which received Equity Action funding, is a good example of the latter. Similarly, Options, the longstanding newsmagazine of Rhode Island’s gay and lesbian community, was volunteer-run until an Equity Action grant enabled it to hire a managing director. “We want to see that grow and flourish,” says Hocking, “to make the transition to a more serious professional organization.”
Advocates push for a stand
Michelle Duso and Julie Brown have been together for more than 17 years, though Duso can’t say when in their relationship they might have gotten married had that been legal. “There were conversations early in the relationship, like, ‘What if?’ — but the future looked very different because that wasn’t an option,” she says.
When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2003 that same-sex couples there should be allowed to marry, marriage was suddenly an option, albeit not a palatable one to Brown and Duso. “We’ve talked about why we wouldn’t go to Massachusetts,” Duso says. “This is where we live. Not to have your marriage recognized in your home state? It made more sense to work towards inclusion here than seeking inclusion elsewhere.”
Despite disagreement within the LGBTQ community about priorities, marriage is widely acknowledged to be the current focus. And though there are five states in which same-sex couples can either be joined in civil unions or be registered as domestic partners, there is only one — Massachusetts — where they can get married. Despite the obstacles, Rhode Island aims to be the second.
The state’s first gay marriage legislation was introduced in 1997, largely as a countermeasure to a “Defense of Marriage” (DOMA) bill that defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Gay marriage bills and DOMAs have been introduced almost every year since then, although none have come to a vote, in part due to strategic reasons. (That Rhode Island is one of only 12 states without a DOMA is itself a victory.) Marriage Equality RI’s Jenn Steinfeld says the overall expectation was always one of incremental movement, raising awareness among legislators without forcing a vote. “They don’t want to vote against it,” she says, “but they don’t feel like they can stick their neck out” and vote for it.
Although some gays and lesbians see civil marriage as a step that would build wider social acceptance, Marriage Equality has decided that civil unions are not worth fighting for. Steinfeld says, “There’s a real sense of inequality, having to stand on a separate line and get a piece of paper that says something different.”
Marriage Equality introduced this year’s gay marriage bill amid fanfare in late January, with more sponsors than ever before. Despite the opposition to gay marriage of the state’s top three elected officials, Steinfeld hopes to see this year’s bill finally go to a vote. “In the House, I think we have a good shot,” she says. “In the Senate, not so much.” Referring to gay marriages in Massachusetts, Steinfeld says, “The Rhode Island community, we’ve seen it be a reality. It’s time for people to take a stand.”
