In 1975, Australian Anthony Sullivan, legally married to American Richard Adams by a rogue Colorado clerk, applied for U.S. citizenship with his newly minted marriage licenses in hand.
What he got instead was a letter denying him that right.
"You have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots," the Department of Justice INS director wrote, denying Sullivan's request.
While certainly not the first or the last time homophobia would be used in a government action in America, it solidified my understanding of how I, as a gay man, was viewed by my country when I learned about the exchange.
But Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision will help change that — while obstacles still exist, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s straightforward interpretation of Title VII claims by three fired LGBTQ employees has helped put a stake in the heart of one of this country’s oldest pastimes: legal discrimination against queer folks.
I learned about Sullivan and Adams when I was the editor of a small, LGBTQ publication here in Richmond, Virginia. I was fresh out of journalism school and, in the wake of the 2008 crisis, media jobs were still in short supply. So in the fall of 2012, I took a break from my pizza delivery shift to meet with the editor of a local alt-monthly who told me they were buying the well-known, albeit more as a bulletin board than a news source, publication GayRVA (a colloquial acronym for Richmond).
I am a gay man, and I’d never really hidden it, and while I jumped at the chance to use my training in the real world, I — and my parents — couldn’t help but wonder how it might impact the rest of my career. Would I forever be known as a gay journalist? Would “normal” publications hire me considering I worked for a gay publication? Would I not be hired because a future employer just didn’t like gays?
I accepted the job and it changed my life forever — and for the better.
George W. Bush and his evangelical allies put the work in to make sure being gay was nearly impossible in most states. Existing law allowed you to fire, not hire, deny housing or services to someone for being gay, bi, lesbian or transgender. Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriage had passed with over 60% of the vote less than a decade earlier. And attempts to change these laws were laughed at or seen as stones around a campaign’s neck.
And I was now the face of a publication hoping to change all that.
Luckily President Barack Obama, who’d just won re-election, was an ally, though slowly at first. It was actually then-Vice President and current Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden who first offered his support for sexual minorities.
“I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in 2012.
Only a few years earlier, Josh Block got his gig as senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s LGBT and HIV Project.
While Block was obviously making impacts on these issues nationally, I had more than a few opportunities to cross paths with him long before his team would be a part of Monday’s Supreme Court ruling, changing the lives of LGBTQ Americans forever.
“From the very beginning, people filed cases saying being fired for being gay or transgender violated Title VII,” Block told me in a phone interview Monday afternoon. He said the same argument that made up Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion, that LGBTQ people are protected under the “sex” class of the Federal Civil Rights law.