USA: San Francisco celebrates gay marriage rulings

11 years ago | Posted in: Culture/Art | 643 Views

SAN FRANCISCO — This city went into party mode Wednesday after news of the Supreme Court rulings on gay marriage came down. Celebrations had begun by mid-morning in the Castro district, the heart of the city’s gay community.

“It’s a great day,” said Solange Darwish, owner of the Cove on Castro café. As soon as she heard of the rulings, which ended the Defense of Marriage Act ban on federal benefits for legally married gays and invalidated California’s Proposition 8 law against gay marriage, she changed the menu. She now offers a “Hasta la Vista DOMA” scramble for $12.95 and a “No on H8” omelet for $11.95. “They’re selling well,” she said. “We’ve been packed.”

Several thousand people filled Castro street for a massive street party Wednesday night. The San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band played, tourists and residents high-fived and dance music throbbed from speakers on trucks in the street.

“It’s just euphoric in there,” said Venka Anderson, 48, of Concord, Calif. “People are smiling. Strangers are hugging.”

She made the 40 minute trip from Concord in tribute to her brother-in-law, who died in 1988. “His partner’s family wouldn’t let him visit in the hospital as he was dying. They weren’t married so he couldn’t do anything about it,” she said.

Susan Lubeck, 51, came with a group of worshipers from Sha’ar Zahav synagogue. “There’s so much wrong in the world that it’s important that we celebrate when we see a victory for justice.”

San Francisco is “one of the gayest cities in the country,” said Gary J. Gates, a demographer with the Williams Institute, a research center on gay and lesbian law and policy at the University of California-Los Angeles. He estimates that 18% of San Franciscans are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. “That’s between three to four times higher than the national average.”

The electricity in the air Wednesday didn’t come only from the gay community. Ted Weinstein, a literary agent, said the city is clearly the place to celebrate the rulings. “San Francisco is ground zero for a global movement,” he said. “There are basically two buildings in the United States where this started. One is the Stonewall Inn in New York and the other is San Francisco City Hall.”

Protests of police harassment at the Stonewall Inn 1969 are often cited as launching the modern gay rights movement.

It was in San Francisco City Hall on Feb. 12, 2004, that then-mayor Gavin Newsom issued a directive to the county clerk to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He immediately performed weddings in the gilded torunda. Close to 4,000 couples wed between that day and March 11, 2004, when the California Supreme Court halted the marriages. Those licenses were voided by the state Supreme Court in August of that year. It was also at San Francisco City Hall that Supervisor Harvey Milk served as one of the nation’s first openly gay elected officials and was assassinated in 1978.

A crowd filled that same rotunda before 7 a.m. Wednesday, waiting for the Supreme Court ruling. The city had set up two large screens, one showing TV coverage of the court and the other scrolling through SCOTUSblog, an online resource about the Supreme Court of the United States. There was near-total silence as the group waited for the announcement. As words scrolled down the screen saying the court had struck down a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act, the crowd burst into ecstatic cheers.

After both rulings were announced, a line of politicians and gay activists appeared at the top of the grand marble staircase and the crowd let out a roar of approval.

“Welcome to the people’s house!” San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee told the crowd. “Gosh, it feels good to have love triumph over ignorance, equality triumph over discrimination.”

The largest and most sustained cheer came when 89-year-old Phyllis Lyon walked down the stairway on the arms of Lee and Newsom. now lieutenant governor. Lyon and her partner, Del Martin, were the first same-sex couple married in San Francisco in 2004 and have been icons of the gay and lesbian movement in California for decades. They founded the nation’s first known lesbian social and political organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, in San Francisco in 1955. Marin died in 2008.

The crowd reveled in being a part of history. “It’s the moment of a lifetime,” said Mark Para, 41, of San Francisco. He nodded toward his boyfriend, Angelo Cilia, 42, and said in a stage whisper, “He doesn’t know that I might ask him to marry me!” The two stood with their arms around each other’s shoulders as they listened to speeches.

Helen Zia, 61, said the feeling of being a second-class citizen has grated on her every day. “The day my now-wife and I were to be married, in 2008, I was supposed to have jury duty. I went in to explain to the judge why I couldn’t do jury duty that week and he said, ‘Well, how long does it take to get married?’ As if our marriage wasn’t real, it didn’t count — and as if we weren’t going on our honeymoon right after!”

Michelle and Rebekah Skoor drove across the San Francisco Bay bridge in rush-hour traffic Wednesday morning from their home in Oakland so they could be at San Francisco City Hall for the historic ruling. With them came the reason for their trek: 6-month-old Avila, their daughter.

“We wanted her to be here for this,” said Michelle, 40. They have been a couple for four and a half years, too short a time to have been able to marry during the 2008 window.

“We wanted to be here today to hear this and to see if we could be first in line to get married as soon as it’s legally possible,” Rebekah said. “We were domestically partnered here in the City Hall rotunda three years ago today, but we want to get married.”

The weddings can’t begin for at least 25 days. The Ninth Circuit Court has said the sponsors of the now-invalidated law, Proposition 8, must have time to request a rehearing before the high court. That means wedding bells could begin as soon as July 21.

People began calling and e-mailing to schedule weddings at Grace Cathedral around lunchtime on Wednesday, said Jane Shaw, the dean of San Francisco’s Episcopal cathedral.

“I’ve just spoken with my scheduler, and she says the inquiries have already started,” Shaw said. The cathedral hosted a news conference of over 100 clergy and rabbis from many religious denominations Wednesday afternoon who spoke of their delight at the ruling.

Any couple can be married at the cathedral, Shaw said, as long as at least one of them is a baptized Christian and they agree to be married using the marriage ceremony in the Episcopal prayer book. “You can’t just write your own ceremony, I’m afraid,” she said.

There are 114,000 married same-sex couples in the United States, Gates said, including 18,000 who married in California in the months before voters approved the ban in November 2008.

source: USAtoday

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