By the early 1980s, the sexual revolution was leaning back in bed smoking a cigarette. With the invaluable assistance of Anita Bryant in 1977, gay rights were getting national attention. That was the year the Gallup organization first began asking people about gay rights with the question, "Do you think homosexual relations between consenting adults should or should not be legal?" (It was not until 1999 that "legal" could get up to 50%.)
In the early 80s, gay activism had transformed from the angry riots prompted by police raids of gay bars in Los Angeles and New York into coherent organizations, mostly in big cities. Even television was flirting with openly gay characters in primetime shows like Soap, Dynasty and Love, Sydney.
And in 1982, the deadly constellation of symptoms first known as Gay Related Immune Deficiency was renamed AIDS. Over the next few years, this would bring more people out of the closet (some of them involuntarily) than anything history had ever seen. Those who fought or died from the disease - and particularly those who battled the political establishment that wanted so badly to ignore it - clarified for the culture, once and for all, that homosexuals existed in families and communities in every part of the nation.
It was in this context that Tom Coleman took the fight for gay equality in a direction it was only still beginning to imagine - legal rights for same-sex couples.
Up until the first experiments with domestic partnership in Berkeley and San Francisco, the struggle had been focused on, first, getting rid of laws that made homosexuals criminals (and thus, subject to arrest and imprisonment, or, at best, extortion and threats by government and private individuals), and then on enactment of some kind of non-discrimination laws, particularly in employment so people could make a living without having to hide their sexual orientation for fear of being fired.
These were protections for lesbians and gay men as individuals. But like most heterosexuals, homosexuals are prone to - and do - fall in love and form permanent relationships. With the elimination of sodomy laws in California, the neutering of section 647(a), and the administrative protections gained under the Governor's executive order - particularly at the Fair Employment and Housing Commission -- the first blocks were in place in California to allow lesbians and gay men to come out of the closet with rudimentary legal safeguards. And with the broader culture's radically changed notions of sex in place, lesbians and gay men could conduct a satisfying sex life congruent with their sexual orientation.
But the law does more than just allow people the liberty to have sex. It also encourages people to commit to one another, and rewards those who do. While gay rights rhetoric had sometimes included marriage as a goal, there was far too much bad law on the books and misunderstanding in the general culture that needed to be addressed first. Tom, himself, referred to marriage as the "penthouse" issue of the gay rights movement - you can't build, much less move into the penthouse until you've constructed the rest of the edifice.
Tom and his partner, Michael, may actually be among the world's first married same-sex couples. In 1981, they invited about 300 guests, including family, friends and co-workers, onto a boat that sailed into international waters, where a Catholic theologian and good friend performed their ceremony. The poster Tom had printed to celebrate the event said, "Recognized By No Nation -- Married In International Waters." Whether or not the marriage was "legal," it was certainly not "illegal" since no law applied.
But Tom's interest was not in marriage. He saw too clearly how much political and cultural work needed to be done before the state was ready for that. Instead, he seized on the broader issue that encompassed marriage - the notion of "family."
In 1980, Jimmy Carter's White House Conference on Families inadvertently stumbled on the culture war when it changed its original name from the conference on "Family" to the conference on "Families." In a replay of the Reformation, any questioning of the uniform doctrine was viewed as the destruction of the entire concept. In the view of the right, this linguistic change split the world in two.
That same year, California's Supreme Court had to address the same issue. In its decision in City of Santa Barbara v. Adamson, the court overturned a city single family zoning ordinance that defined "family" as those related by blood, marriage or adoption -- which allowed an unlimited number of people so related to live in the single family home - when the city cited a woman who shared her 24 room mansion with 11 adults. The court ruled that some relationships not based on blood, marriage or adoption could, in fact, be families.
Tom saw a relationship between that decision and the fledgling efforts in Northern California as the key to getting government and cultural acknowledgement of the rights of same-sex couples. Aren't their committed relationships also families?
The recommendation of a state family registry in the report of the Commission on Personal Privacy served as the debut of that idea. Then, after the failure of San Francisco's domestic partnership proposal, Berkeley was able to enact domestic partnership rights for its employees in 1984, followed the next year by the newly incorporated City of West Hollywood. Both were extremely small cities, but they showed that, taken a step at a time, local politics could be used for gay inclusion in the law.
At the time, the combined population of Berkeley and West Hollywood was less than 183,000. Los Angeles had a population of about 3.7 million. That was the kind of test domestic partnership needed.