Evan Wolfson: SPEECH: Love and Doing Something About It: A Tribute to Mary Dunlap ¹

The inaugural speech in the Mary Dunlap Memorial Lecture Series, delivered at the law school at Boalt Hall, University of California, Berkeley, February 24, 2005.

 

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Perhaps the last time I saw Mary was when she accepted an award from the Lesbian & Gay Law Association in New York, sometime in the mid-1990's.

In her speech that night, Mary told a story of the day in 1987 she argued before the U.S. Supreme Court — the first open lesbian to do so, in the Gay Olympics case.¹

In retrospect, I realize now that Mary didn't dwell on how scary or pressured or demanding that experience of arguing before the Supreme Court must have been, especially then.

Instead, in a very Mary way — wry and funny, but with a bite and a flash of righteous steel — she talked about having heard later through a clerk that Chief Justice Rehnquist after the argument actually expressed his disdain that this lesbian had the audacity to argue before the Court wearing pants. Mary told us this story as she stood before us in the very suit she had worn that day: a dark jacket and matching skirt.

One point of the story, of course, was, as Justice Blackmun put it in his magnificent dissent in Hardwick v. Bowers, "the willful blindness" of those who do not want to see us, do not want to see love and fairness, do not want to see the truth, do not want to act against injustice.³

Mary talked that night, as she often did, about that Supreme Court travesty, the Hardwick case, a decision in which the 5-4 majority said we could be denied constitutional protection for private sex and intimacy because, they claimed, "there is no connection" between homosexuality and family, child-raising, or marriage. Mary's brief in Hardwick focused on love and the right to choose and share love beyond the reach of the government.

Mary ended her speech that night in a way no one present would forget. Preaching the need to rebound from the blow of Hardwick and redouble the great effort of overturning it, she punctuated her story in characteristic Mary fashion — by proceeding to auction the suit off her body then and there to raise money for the work.

 

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But of the many times I was with Mary, perhaps my favorite memory was from a meeting of the Roundtable, the regular gathering of lesbian/gay rights litigators (later extended to include HIV/AIDS and transgender concerns) that some of us had been attending for years.

We began, as always, by going around the room with intros and updates on what we each were doing.

"I'm Mary Dunlap," she said. "And I am beginning my second childhood on the theory that it's never too late to have a happy one."

This seeming joke, I came to understand, embodied a central element of Mary's personal and political philosophy: that life is ours to shape and the world is ours to make as good as we can.

Mary believed in love, and in doing something about it.

One of Mary's poems read:

Chance throws us out, marbles rolling
Across the Rockies, down the Himalayas,
Every which way.
Sure, luck gave some the valley trail
And ample water
But mind, mind,
Mind drove the horses, found springs
Mind put the insight gleam
In Galileo's eyes
And in the eyes of Sojourner Truth
And in yours.
And neither chance's marble roll
Nor luck's draw can
Take away the insight gleam...⁴

That "insight gleam," that leap of mind and heart and soul, that personal obligation to engage and take action and not find excuses or leave it to others, to shape our world, our lives, justice — this was Mary's inspiration to us, and it was how she lived.

 

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In America now — and right here in California — we are at crucial civil rights moment, and it is up to us to act.

As in other such civil rights moments, our country is once again debating how the majority treats people in their midst us.

Once again the civil rights question is being contested on the human rights battlefield that marriage has always been.

The French suffragist, Hubertine Auclert, the woman who coined the word "feminism" in the late 1800's wrote something that has always stuck with me: "If you would obtain a right, first you must proclaim it."

Mary understood this feminist principle, and applied it to our struggle to end our unfair exclusion from marriage.

In 1989, she was one of the drafters of the resolution that passed the San Francisco Bar Association and, then, the California State Bar Convention, condemning the discriminatory denial of our freedom to marry.⁵

In 1991, as the Hawaii case launched the rich and powerful and ongoing debate over marriage equality, Mary wrote one of the early law review pieces on how we should think about this question of civil rights, build understanding within our own communities, and enlist new allies and public embrace of fairness for our families.⁶

Mary knew that the work of ending discrimination, of enlarging possibilities, of healing the world, is scary as well as exhilarating, painful as well as transformative.

"How to make change in a violent world, if not to dream aloud," Mary wrote.

But Mary believed in action as well as the dream, and would have understood well where we stand today and what, together, gay and non-gay, we must do.

 

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Mary would have understood that we are in a moment of peril now, confronted by a fierce campaign of assault that is anti-marriage equality, yes, but also, anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-women's equality, anti-civil rights, and anti-separation of church and state.

Scary and serious as the threat is, Mary would also have known that we are winning. She would have welcomed the attainment of marriage itself in Massachusetts and Canada. Mary would have heralded the strides for and toward marriage equality from South Africa to Israel, from Spain to Taiwan. Mary would have understood that by ending the exclusion from marriage, the thousands of couples in Massachusetts and elsewhere have made it real, giving the reachable-but-not-yet-reached public a chance to see families helped and no one hurt, take a deep breath, and embrace fairness. Mary would have grasped the power of our challenge to society, to see couples like Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon (and thousands like them) as no less worthy, no less entitled to equality in rights, responsibilities, and respect, no less whole, just because as two women building a life together, they don't have a man.

Mary would have seen that ours is part of a struggle larger than gays, larger than marriage.

Mary would have plunged into her share of the three important tasks confronting us: winning marriage in more states so as to keep making it real; repelling attacks, federal and state by state, constitutional as well as legislative, as much as possible and, where we can't win outright, engaging the battles so as to at least lose forward, moving public opinion from 30% support to 40% and on, empowering more voices in every corner of the country to champion equality; and enlisting more diverse messengers with compelling stories, gay and non-gay, into this debate, speaking to diverse constituencies and communities, geographic and demographic, to move them to fairness.

And Mary would have know that you here in California have a special obligation and opportunity to lead us forward and transform this civil rights movement yet anew.

With a promising court case moving ahead, we must create the climate of receptivity in which the judges can do their job and are emboldened to do the right thing.

With Assemblymember Mark Leno's "Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection" bill likely to move through the legislature this year, we need you to contact legislators and make it happen, get that bill to the Governor's desk, and work to persuade him that he can and should sign it into law.

And you need to understand that, alongside this affirmative opportunity and work, you are under attack. There will be a ballot measure to take away your rights, roll back your gains, and possibly lock second-class citizenship into the California constitution for a generation. You are already in a campaign and the clock is ticking; every day you are not campaigning is a day you are losing the chance to give the fair-minded, reachable public the two things they need to embrace fairness: information about our lives and the wrong of discrimination, and time to absorb it and rise to fairness.

Whatever organizations you belong to, gay or non-gay, ask them now: "Where's the campaign? How can I help? Where do I send the check? What can I do?"

And don't wait for them. Make a personal commitment, beginning now, to ask others around you, in concentric circles from easy to harder, to support an end to the exclusion from marriage and stand up against attacks on gay people, our families, and America's and California's commitment to equal justice under law.

 

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Mary didn't live to see the overturning of Hardwick.

She didn't live to see same-sex couples marrying in Canada and, as of last May in Massachusetts, on U.S. soil.

She didn't live to see us come within reach of marriage right here in California.

But Mary would not have hesitated in this civil rights moment, and would not have left the work for someone else to do.

Mary would have taken action and encouraged each of us to do the same, reaching out to non-gay and gay people to ask them to make their voices heard and end injustice.

Now is our time, and here in California is our place to seize what Mary captured in another poem nearly 15 years ago:

...[M]arriage —
The ones we couldn't have,
The ones we had,
The ones that had us.
[S]ee, somehow, beyond the hurt,
A future generous and warm with choices.⁷

 

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