Carnival As Organizing

One of the problems for the not-so-wild-about-marriage crowd was that organizing around the issue was often blatantly conservative. Not only was it legalistic— “we don’t want to change that law, we just want to be included”—but the organizing tactics were basically appeals to the judiciary and legislatures. There were no alternative visions offered. 

That was until San Francisco got into the picture and Mayor Gavin Newsom decided to engage in civically-endorsed civil disobedience and began, on February 13, to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Leave it to San Francisco to shed new light on how to organize. 

By all reports, the same-sex marriage frenzy in San Francisco turned into a let’s-get-married Mardi Gras. The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus serenaded long lines of same-sex couples outside City Hall. Hotels offered special honeymoon rates for wedding parties. Local flower shops covered the steps of City Hall with rose petals. Students from the University of California at San Francisco baked a giant wedding cake for the couples. Professional musicians volunteered their services to couples who wanted music. Isn’t this unleashed joy of communal celebration what marriage is supposed to be about? 

According to the San Francisco Chronicle , the city has already issued more than 3,200 marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples. Most are from the Bay Area, but others have traveled from more than 20 other states. Some have come from as far away as Venezuela, Switzerland, and Thailand. But then, San Francisco has long been known for its “party” politics. 

Since the mid-19th century, San Francisco was called, in the parlance of the day, a “wide-open town”—the kind of place where practically anything goes. The city was rife with gambling palaces, opium dens, all-male dance halls (not so much homosexual as homo- social because of the predominantly male population), and male and female brothels. Dubbed the “Barbary Coast,” it was also a haven for all kinds of immigrants, from gold-seeking Latin American miners to fugitive southern slaves. 

By the 1930s, San Francisco had a thriving bohemian arts community. After World War II, thousands of lesbian and gay veterans, many of whom had come out during the war, moved to San Francisco and founded one of the largest, most open queer communities in the U.S. 

In the 1950s, the city gave rise to the newly emerging Beat culture and, in the 1960s, hippies and flower children made it the nation’s countercultural capital. By the late 1960s, San Francisco had become a last stop for queers around the world. 

This history had a profound effect, not just on gay culture, but on gay political organizing. From the 1960s onward, San Francisco’s queer communities were far more flamboyant—and daring—in their quest for basic civil rights than their East Coast counterparts. The Mattachine Society’s eastern leaders, for instance, required members to dress up (suits and ties for men; dresses and heels for women) for a 1965 protest in front of the White House. Compare that with José Sarria’s 1961 election bid for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. A performer at the notorious Black Cat Bar who often campaigned in drag, Sarria’s slogan was “Gay Is Good.” He won only 5,613 votes (at-large seats required from 70,000 to 100,000 votes), but Sarria helped create the idea of a publicly gay political presence. In 1962, a loose association of San Francisco’s gay bar and club owners formed the Tavern Guild of San Francisco (TGSF) to fight off police raids, in part by providing economic help for smaller gay-owned businesses. (On the East Coast, meanwhile, gay club owners spent the 1950s and 1960s paying protection money to corrupt vice squads.) The TGSF raised money by organizing risqué events like the Halloween Drag Ball and the Beaux Arts Ball. The group made progress by keeping one eye on the basic civil rights struggle and the other on throwing a fabulous party. 

Perhaps the contrast between East and West Coast gay activism played out most clearly in the politics of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). In San Francisco, the movement was sparked with the 1970 publication of Carl Wittman’s Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto . While Wittman had a long history as a leftist political activist, his work in San Francisco was rooted in the counterculture and it was from this he drew most strongly. Much of Wittman’s manifesto concerned sexual liberation and personal freedom, which in turn served to reinforce those aspects of the West Coast’s gay movement.  

In New York, the GLF was formed after the Stonewall Riots in June 1969 and drew its inspiration from organized progressive institutions such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the War Resisters League. East Coast gay activists tried to change the world by quoting Marx and Mao, San Francisco activists did it by transforming the everyday culture of the city. 

By the 1970s, San Francisco, more than any other U.S. city, offered an ongoing spectacle of queerness. Although concentrated in the Castro and Tenderloin districts, lesbians, gay men, and transgender people were visible everywhere. As a result, Gay Pride marches were larger and more extravagant than elsewhere, as were serious political gatherings. 

N ot everyone was happy with Newsom’s decision. California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer both voiced disapproval of what they saw as an illegitimate method of testing the validity of state law. Massachusetts Congressperson Barney Frank told the Associated Press he feared “San Francisco being in sort of a free-for-all will be used against us politically.” Arline Isaacson, who has lobbied tirelessly on Beacon Hill for gay rights, expressed fear of a backlash when she told the Boston Globe : “What happened in San Francisco has not helped us at all. And it arguably made things worse here.”  

This is what you would expect to hear from senators, representatives, and lobbyists. This is what they have to say (and may even believe). But such fears don’t invalidate what’s happening in San Francisco. Within days of Newsom’s mayoral order, Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley said he agreed with Newsom’s decision and would, if he had the authority, issue marriage licenses to lesbian and gay couples as well. On February 20, Victoria Dunlap, the clerk of Sandoval County, New Mexico, began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the county attorney said state law defines marriage as an agreement between contracting parties, but does not mention sex. Licenses were granted to 26 couples before New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid issued an opinion saying the licenses were “invalid under state law.” The Netherlands and Belgium both allow same-sex marriage and, on February 19, Cambodia’s 81-year- old King Norodom Sihanouk announced—after seeing news of gay marriages in San Francisco—that he would support same-sex marriage in his country because he had “respect” for homosexuals and “God loves a wide variety of tastes.” 

Progress has been made in the legal fight for same-sex marriage—in Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court declared it to be a constitutional right, as did the Supreme Courts of Hawaii and Vermont (although the implementation of those decisions was circumvented by a constitutional amendment forbidding it in the former case and a civil-union bill that replaced it in the latter).  

The city of San Francisco has sued the state of California, arguing that the law prohibiting gay and lesbian couples from marrying violates the state constitution. If the Golden State’s highest court finds that these weddings have violated the state constitution, it will have to order 3,000-plus couples to divorce. (Massachusetts will face the same prospect if the legislature and public eventually pass a constitutional amendment banning same- sex marriages—which cannot happen until November 2006 at the earliest, long after the first of these weddings takes place this May.) Newsom’s challenge of the implicit discrimination in California’s state laws has created a cultural context in which the world can see the alternative to what exists now. The gambit not only generated great press, it also showed that the world doesn’t fall apart because there is same-sex marriage, that it actually looks like a better, more fun place in which to live. (Most of the reporting about the anti same-sex marriage protesters has cast them as disgruntled, wet-blanket party poopers. ) 

Politics is often described as “the art of the possible” and San Francisco has shown the world that gay marriage is possible.