"Of Course It Started In San Francisco"
Washington Post, February 22, 2004

Perhaps it's the light. Visitors have long noted the peculiarly Mediterranean cast of the sun that gives San Francisco's wooden and stucco neighborhoods the sharply etched clarity of Riviera hill towns. Maybe it's the tidal water that laps the city's shores on three sides, lending it the smug insularity of Manhattan or Venice. Or it could be the billowing topography of the Coast Range, over which the builders threw a city like a thin coverlet, or the silent glaciers of summer fog that cascade over Twin Peaks and into Eureka Valley, renamed the Castro after its main street in the 1970s, when the district became the heart of a world-famous gay community.

Whatever it is, the contrariness of the people is this city's glory or shame, depending on where you stand; like the light, this quality is palpable, and it cannot be ignored. People have come here since the Gold Rush hoping to find the freedom to be themselves, even if that means fighting for the space in which to be so. In that way, at least, San Francisco is quintessentially American. And it was in that tradition that people flooded into City Hall again last week, like modern Gold Rushers clamoring for a thing of great value, after the mayor unilaterally declared that the city would issue marriage licenses to gay couples. By Friday, the city had issued more than 3,000 same-sex marriage licenses.

Oscar Wilde famously wrote in 1891 that "It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world." One of those attractions is an absurdly ornate movie palace called the Castro, which is the focal point of its namesake neighborhood. And one of its most frequent features is MGM's "The Wizard of Oz," popular among gays and lesbians who have for decades migrated over the rainbow from Tampa and Sheboygan to a place that dazzled them as the Emerald City did Dorothy.

A mile down Market Street stands City Hall, its French Renaissance grandeur surpassing that of many state capitols. Early in the 20th century, San Francisco's leaders felt certain that the city's splendid harbor and commanding position on the Pacific Basin fated it to outshine New York as the nation's leading metropolis, and they built accordingly. City Hall's gilded dome represents a self-perceived city-state, what urban geographer Richard Walker has called a republic in miniature.

As it has been since Feb. 12, when Mayor Gavin Newsom directed the city to begin issuing the controversial marriage licenses, the building has long been a site of resistance as well as of unity. In 1960, police turned fire hoses on protesters against the House Un-American Activities Committee, forcing them down the marble stairs of the place where Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio were married in 1954. On the night of May 21, 1979, thousands of gays converged on City Hall to torch police cars and attack the building, enraged by a jury verdict that wrist-slapped Dan White, an ex-member of the Board of Supervisors, for gunning down gay supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in their offices. The verdict said to the rioters that a clean-cut family man was almost within his rights to execute a gay man, along with Milk's liberal friend and supporter.

The mood was very different last Sunday when my partner of 11 years and I left the Asian Art Museum that faces City Hall across Civic Center Plaza. We could hear the commotion across the plaza, so we walked toward it, and unwittingly into history.

We had thought that Mayor Newsom's dramatic decision to issue same-sex marriage certificates was a stunt, and that we didn't really care. Sanctity, after all, is not a description that either of us would apply to our own parents' marriages, and we were not about to splurge on rings in order to repeat their mistakes.

But our convictions dissolved as we watched ecstatic couples emerge from City Hall and descend the granite steps to the cheers, tears and applause of gays and straights alike, as well as to the affirmative honks of cars passing on Polk Street, and to the appreciation of those people waiting in a line that stretched around the block for their turn at legal recognition, many with their children. Marriages were taking place throughout a City Hall kept open during the long weekend for just that purpose, and everyone present was aware of being party to something momentous. We knew that in the present political climate beyond the Bay Area, Newsom's seeming defiance of state law, and that of the thousands of couples who have filed through the building, may have been foolish and even perilous. President Bush and Karl Rove could whip and ride the divisive issue to another term. But events can create their own unexpected consequences, just as the televised spectacle of citizens flushed down the stairs with fire houses 44 years ago helped bring down the HUAC.

The infectious joy at City Hall made the risk of defiance worthwhile, because what happened there went far beyond an out-of-step city that is almost an island in more ways than one. It was worthy of a nation that, every July 4, celebrates those who seek freedom more than security.

What those couples did made me and my partner, Bob, both understand that we had become comfortable sitting at the back of the bus, that we had acquiesced to our own second-class citizenry. Others in San Francisco had the guts to walk to the front and demand a seat.

We may soon be grateful to be riding the bus at all. Reacting to an international movement to recognize same-sex unions, Ohio lawmakers joined 37 other states to define marriage as a sacrament between a man and a woman. Ohio went the extra mile, and denied benefits to state workers' partners. Some other states and cities, however, such as New Mexico and Chicago, are moving to follow San Francisco's example.

City Hall isn't the only institution here struggling with civil disobedience. City Attorney Dennis Herrera has refused a Justice Department subpoena served on San Francisco General Hospital, among others, to obtain medical records related to partial-birth abortion. Herrera called the order "a gross violation of our patients' privacy rights, and the unjustifiable harassment of our physicians." That battle is still being waged in the courts.

These sorts of incursions on cherished principles that we all recently took for granted -- such as equality before the law or the separation of church and state -- have awakened a great many people like Bob and myself from our lethargy. Given San Francisco's history and culture, it's no surprise that a stand should be taken here.

A majority of Americans polled before last weekend (and not present at City Hall during it) may well believe that the state should reserve marriage for two people of opposite sexes. But I trust that their answers would change if they were asked whether they are ready to see discrimination canonized in the Constitution -- especially when that discrimination could apply to their own children, relatives, friends and associates. It was for that reason that Newsom says he defied one law to honor another, higher, one. Others would have done the same had they experienced last week a happiness common to humanity of whatever persuasion. Blame it on the light.

Gray Brechin is a geographer and writer living in Berkeley. He is the author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, (University of California Press).

© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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