IGF CultureWatch

There are many reasons for the increasing acceptance today of same-sex marriage among the American public, but one has received virtually none of the acclaim it deserves: the invention, in the late 1940s, of Adolph's Meat Tenderizer. The gay rights movement owes a lot to that little shaker.

Lloyd Rigler and Larry Deutsch were two ex-GIs who, after WWII, found each other -- as well as a restaurant in Los Angeles that served cheap but delicious meat. They got the chef to sell them the secret, and introduced the product with the chef's name. After making a big splash in L.A. and the west coast during the late 40s and early 50s, Adolph's Meat Tenderizer leaped onto the national stage in 1953 when Reader's Digest featured it in a consumer report. Sales skyrocketed to $20 million that year and kept going.

They kept the nature of their three decade relationship ambiguous, as convention dictated. But when Deutsch passed away in 1977, Rigler faced one of the most tangible forms of discrimination -- the economic kind. If they had been married, Rigler would have inherited the entire fortune, but since they weren't, it was subject to a 50% tax rate. Rather than accept that, Rigler let the money go to a charitable foundation named using a combined acronym from their initials - LEDLER. However, Rigler had some control over how the money would be used.

In the mid-1980s, Tom Coleman had a solid reputation among L.A.'s politicos, because of his connections with Governor Brown's office, his legal work with gay defendants, his persistence on local gay issues, and his work with the Police Commission on anti-gay discrimination. In 1985, the former L.A. City Attorney, Burt Pines suggested Tom meet with Rigler.

The two hit it off. Rigler was still steamed about the federal tax discrimination, but he was a cautious man when it came to gay issues. Tom's interest in moving the culture slowly toward acceptance of same-sex couples could not have been a better fit. More important, they were in sync on strategy. Both strongly believed that gay issues needed to be pursued as part of a larger agenda that included related issues for other groups. Rigler agreed to fund appropriate parts of Tom's work - a relationship that would last for the next two decades.

That included developing materials for a new class Tom had been asked to teach at the USC Law Center. Dean Lee Campbell had originally asked him to teach a course on gay rights, but Tom felt that would be too narrow a focus, and would appeal only to gay students - not the kind of approach he favored. Instead, he offered to develop and teach a course on the rights of unmarried couples - the first in the nation. California had two major Supreme Court cases related to that topic: the landmark palimony case of Marvin v. Marvin and City of Santa Barbara v. Adamson, recognizing that the right to form a family extended somewhat beyond the existing restrictions of blood, marriage or adoption.

At about the same time, the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles was continuing to exercise its political muscle. L.A.'s 13th District included the increasingly gay area of Silverlake, and the two candidates for that office, incumbent Peggy Stevenson and challenger Mike Woo, had both been made aware of the domestic partnership ordinances in Berkeley and West Hollywood, and promised to do something similar in L.A. Woo won, and the day Woo was sworn in, Tom dropped by his new office to meet Woo's chief of staff, Larry Kaplan.

Tom suggested that Woo should not bring the proposal up immediately, but should take time to lay the political groundwork. San Francisco's failure to pave the way for its ordinance was still vivid in Tom's mind. Woo eventually agreed to convene a formal, high profile group to survey the issue, and established the Task Force on Family Diversity. Following up on the 1980 White House Conference on Families, the task force would examine how the notion of "family" had changed over many decades, particularly in the crucible of Los Angeles, which had its share of traditional families with two married parents and their children, as well as all the variations that existed, from step-parent and blended families, to childless couples to single-parent families to unmarried couples - which would obviously include same-sex couples. The question to be asked was how city policy affected all of those family forms with its conventional legal focus on families related by blood, marriage or adoption?

It is impossible to understate the importance of this for gay equality. Historically, gays had been viewed almost exclusively as sexual beings. What made them different from everyone else was their propensity to have sex with people of their own gender. Neither the criminal law nor social convention punished them for sexual orientation, per se; rather, they were outcasts because of their sexual activity. Getting rid of sodomy laws changed the formal rules, but did not change that cultural focus on homosexual sex. The closet was a social compromise allowing some degree of sexual liberty as long as a fiction of either heterosexual normality or, at the least, unmarried ambiguity were maintained. As the closet was being dismantled -- sometimes aggressively -- gays really did seem to be pushing their sex lives onto an unwilling heterosexual public.

The Task Force on Family Diversity sought to change the entire context of homosexuality from sex - always a highly charged social topic - to something more ordinary and, in fact, more mature: relationship. After all, in the normal course of a lifetime, sexual activity diminishes for some entirely pragmatic reasons, and like their heterosexual counterparts, homosexuals settle in to a more routine, less sexually charged life. Society's almost exclusive focus on the sex lives of homosexuals - "perverts" and "deviants" - left little room in the public imagination for what usually happened in homosexual people's lives.

Moreover, laws that excluded same-sex couples from the legal rights and responsibilities of family life actually reinforced the damaging, purely sexual notion of homosexuality. This had not been helped by the nearly universal association of the gay rights movement with the sexual revolution.

Both Tom and Lloyd Rigler saw gay rights - and experienced gay lives -- in the context of relationship. That also included sex, but it was not confined to it. They would need to wrestle the gay rights movement away from its origins in sexual liberty so the public could more easily see that sex was a vital part of the lives of lesbians and gay men, but it was not -- or did not need to be -- isolated from the rest of their human nature.

This would not be an easy sell either with gay activists or with the general public - who were, in the political arena, the primary target now. The Berkeley and West Hollywood domestic partnership ordinances were responses to a local political constituency. West Hollywood, in particular, had been incorporated as a city because of its much higher than average percentage of openly homosexual residents. L.A.'s Task Force had a more difficult - and far larger - political job. The Task Force would have to provide the background to show same-sex couples fit into social context that no culture had ever viewed them in before.

The White House Conference on Families, and the court cases had been helpful. Clearly, the notion of family was not a unified one, and L.A.'s demographics were a good case study for what family relationships looked like in Reagan-era America.

The LEDLER Foundation grants helped fund Tom's work as Special Consultant to the Task Force, with Christopher McCauley and Nora Baladerian as its co-chairs. The 37-member Task Force took two years to conduct public hearings, research projects, census studies, interviews and public outreach. Significantly, its membership included representatives from the religious community, as well as Republicans such as Frank Richiazzi, business representatives and law enforcement. In May of 1988, it released its final report, along with three volumes of supplemental material.

And the strategy worked. Later that year, Woo introduced the proposal as a recommendation of the Task Force, and with both political and reinforced cultural support for viewing same-sex couples in a new context, Los Angeles adopted its citywide domestic partnership ordinance with little fanfare or crossfire.

It is that hard political work that the judicial challenges to marriage laws have short-circuited. L.A.'s ordinance was passed five years before the court challenge in Hawaii set off the national firestorm over gay marriage. By that time, domestic partnership was well enough understaood in California that its legislature was already considering its first statewide domestic partnership bills. Those efforts finally succeeded in 1999 -- while the rest of the nation was still struggling to understand why gay people were bringing all these lawsuits, and didn't just settle down with someone of the opposite sex like everyone else.

By that time, Tom had lobbied the Hawaii legislature to offer domestic partnership as a compromise that would hold off a constitutional amendment; filed briefs in New York's highest court in Braschi v. Stahl Associates, a case similar to Adamson that would recognize family structures where the members were identified by their functional relationship to one another rather than just blood, marriage and adoption; argued another landmark case in California's Supreme Court on the scope of religious liberty and the rights of unmarried opposite-sex couples; and begun his work on the rights of single Americans.

His work, much of it funded by money that hadn't gone to the federal government because of Lloyd Rigler's refusal to accept a rule that treated the money of same-sex couples differently from the money of opposite-sex couples, gently forced the tectonic shift in America's view of homosexuals, putting isolated sexual acts into the broader relational context most Americans already understand for themselves. While that change is still controversial and subject to setbacks, it is as fine and substantial a legacy as any hero of this or any movement has left behind.