WASHINGTON (news agencies) — Two decades ago, when a Democratic presidential nominee wouldn’t dream of endorsing gay marriage, a newly elected district attorney named Kamala Harris was performing one of the first same-sex unions in the United States.
It was the so-called Winter of Love in San Francisco. The mayor at the time, Gavin Newsom, had directed the county clerk to approve gay marriages even though there was no law on the books recognizing them. His act of rebellion prompted a bipartisan political backlash, but Harris had no hesitation.
“You could tell she was so overwhelmed and had so much joy about performing this ceremony,” said Brad Witherspoon, whose marriage to Raymond Cobane was officiated by Harris on Valentine’s Day 2004.
The moment represents a stark difference between Harris and all previous Democratic presidential nominees, who didn’t begin their political careers as gay marriage supporters. Four years after the Winter of Love, the issue was still off the table during the party’s primary. And it took another four years for Democratic President Barack Obama, running for reelection against Republican Mitt Romney, to back gay marriage.
For LGBTQ leaders, Harris’ history validates their deep support for the Democratic nominee.
“It’s not just that she held a position in support of fundamental equality for gay and lesbian couples. A lot of politicians take positions and hold positions,” said Chad Griffin, former head of the Human Rights Campaign, who is on Harris’ national fundraising committee. “Fewer actually roll up their sleeves and use their power to make lives better.”
In her book, “The Truths We Hold,” Harris writes that her decision to officiate the weddings was spur-of-the-moment. She was on her way to the airport before she decided to stop by City Hall. She and other local officials were sworn in and performed marriages in “every nook and cranny” of the building, Harris recalled.
“I was delighted to be a part of it,” she wrote. “There was all this wonderful excitement building as we welcomed the throngs of loving couples, one by one, to be married then and there. It was unlike anything I had ever been a part of before. And it was beautiful.”
Witherspoon recalls that it wasn’t only him and his new husband who were caught up in the excitement.
“She was as well,” he said. “We were both crying and hugging each other.” Witherspoon said Harris told them, “I really wanted to be a part of this.”
All the marriages performed during that month in San Francisco were invalidated later that year, a move that Harris described as “devastating.”
Harris’ early embrace of gay marriage is rooted, at least in part, in geography. She grew up in California’s liberal Bay Area and started her political career in San Francisco, a city with a vibrant gay community.
Sean Meloy, a top operative at Victory Fund, a political committee aimed at increasing LGBTQ representation in politics, calls Harris’ story an example of why “representation matters.”
“A lot of people didn’t know LGBTQ people,” Meloy said of the atmosphere nationally during the Winter of Love. “In San Francisco, (LGBTQ people) were already a political force and also out, so she understood we are just people much earlier.”
Some of Harris’ earliest political advisers were gay, including Jim Rivaldo, who had worked with Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California as a San Francisco supervisor. During a recent fundraiser, Harris recalled that after Rivaldo fell sick with AIDS, her mother helped take care of him before he died.
When you grow up in the Bay Area, “almost everybody knows a gay couple that has been together for a long time,” said Debbie Mesloh, who served as Harris’ communications director when she was district attorney.
Mesloh said Harris paid particular attention to legal and criminal issues involving gay people, and she organized a national symposium to train prosecutors how to handle the “gay panic” defense that was used in Wyoming by the two men who killed Matthew Shepard in 1998. The defense tactic, which suggested that suspects could be goaded into violence by the victim’s overt sexuality, “just enraged Kamala,” Mesloh said.
Supporting gay rights was not without political risk for ambitious politicians, a lesson that Newsom, now California’s governor, learned after beginning the Winter of Love. He did not get a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 as Republicans, led by President George W. Bush, turned gay marriage into a wedge issue with voters.
Nonetheless, Harris was eager to participate in and officiate weddings, Mesloh recalled.
“There wasn’t an assessment or an analysis,” Mesloh said. “She wanted to do it. She was excited. She loved it.”
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