IGF CultureWatch

Politics is hard, even at its best. But if you're a very small minority trying to overcome a history of misunderstanding and outright prejudice, political victories may seem inconceivable. The legislative efforts to overturn state sodomy laws were victories of unimaginable importance to the gay rights movement in the 1970s, but as in California, those legislative changes came mostly through adoption of many other reforms to state laws having nothing to do with sexual crimes, reforms recommended in the Model Penal Code.

That strategy of change through coalition was not lost on Tom Coleman in California. With the demise of the criminal sodomy laws, it was finally possible for ordinary lesbians and gay men to engage in open political activity with others as homosexuals, without having to fear arrest and imprisonment simply for being homosexual - a constant threat in jurisdictions that still had sodomy laws on the books. It is worthwhile here to express my awe of the conviction and bravery of those extraordinary men and women in the 1950s and 60s who had publicly fought for gay equality irrespective of the possibility of imprisonment: heroes like Harry Hay, Morris Kight, Frank Kameny, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons.

In the mid-seventies, there were already some individual legislators who were willing to carry bills on behalf of gay equality, but they understood these would have little chance of actually obtaining a majority vote. This was, of course, still during the time when the common vocabulary to discuss homosexuals included words like "perverts" and "deviants." When homosexuality came up in polite conversation, even our heterosexual friends could be heard referring to us as being "that way."

So political activity at the retail legislative level was still a futile effort. However, Tom had seen reports in 1975 that Governor Milton Shapp of Pennsylvania had issued an executive order to the many state agencies under his control to help end discrimination against people "because of their affectional or sexual preference." This was wholesale politics, and Tom flew to Pennsylvania to see how it would work. Gay rights supporters were taking full advantage of the order to convene meetings with heads of agencies and policymakers throughout the administration to discuss their status under the various laws, not as criminals but as citizens. This was particularly parodoxical in Pennsylvania which, unlike California, still had its criminal sodomy law on the books.

Shapp was running for President at the time, and during the campaign, Tom met him personally and asked if he would send a letter to California's then-governor, Jerry Brown, about Shapp's executive order. Shapp did so in early 1976, mentioning it had come at the request of Tom Coleman. Tom continued writing about the issue of executive action in a publication he had founded, the Sexual Law Reporter.

A couple of years later, he had his chance to act. The Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles was a group of well-heeled and well-connected lesbians and gay men who were willing to use their positions and money to get politicians to support gay rights. In 1979, Assembly Speaker Leo McCarthy was their guest (a tribute to MECLA's influence in 1979), and he mentioned the possibility of an executive order. Tom was at the meeting and saw that his idea was gaining traction. He immediately followed up with a letter to Jerry Brown, citing his work in the Sexual Law Reporter. Less than a month later, he got a call from the Governor's legal affairs secretary who had a draft order the Governor wanted to issue that day. He wanted to go over the wording with Tom, who offered a few suggestions. The final version was issued that afternoon. While Brown certainly deserves credit for taking this action, it's also important that he didn't take, or even seem to want, any credit for it. Instead, his press for the day focused on him and Linda Ronstadt leaving for a trip to Africa. Somehow, the executive order didn't make it into the papers.

Nevertheless, Tom's connection to the Governor's office served California's gay rights movement extremely well. Tom took advantage of the order and began working with the administration and other gay rights activists on some pending issues related to employment and housing discrimination. He also used it to help put pressure on some gubernatorial appointees to commit to changing existing anti-gay policies. The mere idea of gay activists having political pressure at that time was, itself, revolutionary. This was, at last, the exercise of politics to advance gay rights. Rather than trying to change policies through the courts, Tom and others were able to use the executive order to convince the agencies directly responsible for housing and employment discrimination that they were, in fact, sometimes part of the discrimination lesbians and gay men suffered, and that they could do something to stop that -- as the Governor had demanded.

But there was still work to be done to correct notions in the broader culture about homosexuality. Tom began lobbying the administration to create a large commission to study the issue of sexual orientation. Working with gay allies at both the state and the national level (in 1980, Governor Brown was in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination), Tom convinced the governor to create the Commission on Personal Privacy. Again, this was a coalition effort - a practical, and often necessary part of any political effort by a minority group - and the Commission hired Tom as its Executive Director. In Tom's signature fashion, the Commission dealt with a range of issues, including aging and disability.

The Commission held hearings throughout the state, and its report was issued in 1982. It made a number of recommendations that were still novel in the political landscape, but one of them provided the foundation for the gay marriage movement: a state registry for "alternate families." This was based on San Francisco's political trainwreck that year in trying to adopt the nation's first domestic partnership ordinance before the political culture was ready for it. Supervisor Harry Britt had seen the idea being explored across the bay in Berkeley, and without preparing either the local gay community or in particular then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein, Britt brought it up for a vote in the Board of Supervisors. The press caricatured it as legal protections for live-in lovers, and the mayor vetoed the ordinance because no one even knew how much such a proposal would cost the city.

The Commission on Personal Privacy's recommendation for a state family registry took San Francisco's failure and massaged it into something people could begin to think seriously about. In 1982, that put California into the history books; at that time, virtually no one else in the political world was thinking seriously about the rights of same-sex couples.