Excerpts from ‘How We Won the War for LGBTQ Equality’

On the fight for marriage equality:

 Independence Day 2003 — as I commemorated the historic Supreme Court ruling striking down sodomy laws in 13 states. It was one of my first opinion pieces weighing in on the marriage issue. I had no idea when I wrote it that the issue would dominate the next 12 years of Blade coverage as states, and finally the federal government, grappled with the then-controversial question of same-sex nuptials. But before marriage, there was the rather inconvenient issue of sodomy laws to address. 

Let’s be clear about the origins of this case: Two gay men, John Geddes Lawrence, Jr. and Tyron Garner, were having sex at Lawrence’s apartment in Harris County, Texas. Garner’s ex-boyfriend called the police, falsely alleging that someone had entered the apartment with a gun. The police showed up and found Lawrence and Garner engaged in sex and arrested them under the Texas anti-sodomy law. That’s right: Two gay men were arrested for having consensual sex in a private home in 1998. Think about that for a moment — and the mind-numbing hypocrisy of Republicans who are supposedly anti-government intrusion into our private lives, until gay lives are involved. It took a Supreme Court ruling to validate the right of two consenting gay adults to have sex in a private home. 

Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in the landmark case Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned the previous ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), where the high court failed to find a constitutional right to privacy in sex. 

The court in Lawrence v. Texas explicitly held that intimate consensual sexual conduct was part of the liberty protected by the substantive due process under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The decision in this case was a breakthrough for the gay rights movement and helped to set the stage for Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized same-sex marriage as a fundamental right under the United States Constitution.

Indeed, anti-gay Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a stinging yet prescient dissent in the Lawrence case that predicted the outcome of Obergefell many years later.

On politics and the DNC:

When DNC Chair Howard Dean fired the DNC’s head of gay outreach after his partner criticized the party in a public statement (obvious retaliation), the terminated staffer, Donald Hitchcock, filed a lawsuit. That suit triggered the release of an avalanche of embarrassing DNC staff emails as detailed here. In one, DNC Deputy Finance Chair Julie Tagen wrote that she uses the Blade for “the bottom of the birdcage.” How original! And DNC Communications Director Karen Finney plots revenge against the Blade for our critical coverage, suggesting they hand an exclusive interview to the Advocate to get back at us. It all came to an ugly head weeks later when two attorneys arrived at the Blade offices for a meeting with me and our publisher, Lynne Brown. They said they represented Dean’s chief of staff, Leah Daughtry, but DNC officials later bragged about the lawyers’ performance, strongly suggesting that the DNC was behind the visit and the threats against us. The two yelled at us, red-faced, threatening to sue the Blade and us personally over our criticism of the DNC and its handling of the Hitchcock lawsuit and our criticism of Daughtry, whom we learned was a member of a conservative Pentecostal church whose members speak in tongues. 

The two dropped the “f bomb” several times during their abusive, unhinged tirade. I’ve never appreciated Lynne more than in that moment when she calmly informed them that their threats don’t scare us and our coverage would continue. She then showed them the exit. I later wrote about the incident, of course, triggering some blogger demands for DNC resignations. The episode illustrated how much the LGBTQ movement was co-opted by the DNC, which paid lip service to our issues and delivered next to nothing in return for our votes and, more importantly, donations. 

On escorting Laverne Cox to the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner:

My favorite celebrity dates for the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner have so far been Judith Light and Laverne Cox. This piece recalls my memorable night on the town with Cox, just one day after Caitlyn Jenner’s big coming out as trans interview. 

Laverne arrived at the Washington Hilton with full glam squad in tow — hair, makeup, stylist. She looked stunning and the squad handed her off to me at the start of the red carpet. I carried her purse while she walked the carpet. My Mom was watching on C-SPAN and texted me, “I see you! Are you carrying a purse?” The night before the dinner, Caitlyn Jenner’s interview with Diane Sawyer aired during which she came out as transgender. So Laverne became the hottest ticket at the dinner, with everyone wanting her opinion on Jenner. She graciously moved from CNN to MSNBC to Fox News down the gauntlet of TV cameras, then she finally turned to me and whispered, “If I have to answer one more question about fucking Caitlyn Jenner, I’m going to lose it.” So I escorted her away from the cameras and we headed for security. As we walked in, Laverne stopped to talk to Katie Couric, who brought Antonin Scalia as her date. 

What I didn’t write about then was what happened once Laverne and I got to our table. The lights dimmed and the program was starting. Laverne was wearing a spectacular loaned bracelet worth tens of thousands of dollars. As the lights went down, she turned to me and said, “Kevin, the fucking bracelet is gone!” We both panicked. I got down on the floor and crawled under the table using my cell phone as a flashlight hoping the bracelet had fallen off. No luck. So I went and found the head of security and told him what had happened. “Well, if the staff finds it, it’s gone,” he said. “Maybe Jane Fonda will find it and turn it in,” I replied. I returned to the table and Laverne was frantically texting her stylist, trying to find out the value of the bracelet. She feared they would accuse her of stealing it. At the end of the dinner, I returned to security but no one had turned it in. Laverne and I bid each other good night and I felt terrible about the lost bauble. Then, a few hours later at 4 a.m., my phone rang. It was Laverne. She found the bracelet in the bottom of her purse. It must have fallen off while she was grabbing something inside. Crisis averted.