Marriage's grass roots: the activist who led the equal marriage movement in Hawaii recalls the long road to Massachusetts.

Getting married. I hope there is a very long pause as you read those words.

As I write them I am flooded with the overwhelming desire to scream and grab that husband of mine, Lance--at least in Canada he's my husband.

May 17, 2004, is expected to be the grand day when Americans will finally have the right to marry in the United States, to make the choice to live and share their lives in a legal institution established to preserve and support two human beings in their continuing pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.

My own pursuit of legal gay marriage did not begin as a personal goal. Why would anyone need a piece of paper to demonstrate, they had a loving relation ship? I thought. But it was a choice I believed should be available for all.

It all started in 1981. That year I began research to identify the underspinnings of gay and lesbian inequality in order to find legal reasons to have such laws reversed. In issues such as employment, housing, and public accommodations, I learned, sexual orientation was the specific issue to be addressed. In contrast, marriage laws were strictly based on the sex of the individuals involved, not on their sexual orientation. In fact, many gay men were married to lesbians for reasons other than love and devotion.

That led to my decision to focus my fight for civil rights on marriage--a word that I found granted more than 1,000 rights, privileges, and responsibilities. I would work through the legal system in states with strong laws prohibiting sex discrimination. One of the strongest such laws just happened to be part of the constitution of Hawaii--one of the many reasons that I love my home state.

From 1981 through 1988 I contacted more than a dozen civil rights experts and national gay rights leaders and presented them with the concept of a marriage equality lawsuit. Without exception they said to me, "Bill, you are clear and correct on the merit and direction, but you'll never get support to bring it about." Little did I know that some of these people would actually work to prevent a lawsuit from happening.

In 1989 the Pride Parade and Rally Council secretly adopted my plan to bring together 30 couples to be married at our state's first gay pride parade and rally in Honolulu. These couples would then be the basis of our lawsuit. We asked the Reverend Troy Perry, founder of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, to come to Hawaii and perform the ceremony, and we requested that the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii support the legal actions. Perry rejected the idea, saying that marriage was for heterosexuals and that his church was for holy unions. The ACLU-Hawaii dragged its feet, commissioning a poll to determine whether it should take on the case--its first poll to determine whether an injustice merited its attention.

These actions--or inactions--confirmed what we'd been learning for years: To fight for marriage we would also have to fight against many of those we expected to be our supporters. One by one, 29 of the 30 couples who had signed on for our ceremony dropped out. The board of directors of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center in Honolulu, which I had founded in 1973, formally opposed our legal effort after several members were reportedly contacted by members of the ACLU board. And as word spread that we were planning a lawsuit, national organizations began to attack our efforts in gay media outlets.

In November 1989, with two new couples on board as potential plaintiffs, I went with all three couples to the Hawaii State Department of Health. They completed all the forms necessary to get marriage licenses and swore that all information provided was correct and accurate. Then the state refused to issue the licenses.

I contacted the one attorney, Dan Foley, whom we wanted to represent the effort and who knew the legal issues, and we filed our lawsuit in late spring of 1991. The result? Two state supreme court decisions in 1993 staling that same-sex couples had all the rights of other citizens, including the right of legal marriage. The justices ordered a lower court to determine if there was any compelling state interest to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and a media-saturated trial resulted in a verdict of full support for our right to marriage licenses.

But the court also issued a stay, preventing the issuance of licenses until the state could appeal that decision back to the state supreme court. The delay allowed opponents of equal marriage rights to wage a multimillion-dollar campaign and pass, by statewide ballot, a constitutional amendment that gives our legislature the power to limit the definition of marriage. The effect of the amendment was to recognize legislation establishing the "one man, one woman" definition.

But our 10 years of work did not go to waste: The Hawaii lawsuit, our supreme court's 1993 decision, and the court trials have provided ammunition for activists in more than 170 countries to pursue legalization of same-sex marriage. The organization we developed, the Gay and Lesbian Education and Advocacy Foundation, tins assisted hundreds of organizations, politicians, and community leaders to work toward marriage equality. We also maintain a marriage, registry of more than 49,000 couples who want to pursue marriage as it becomes legal.

The struggle remains a grassroots effort. Over 18,000 gays and lesbians have received licenses in recent months as different jurisdictions have moved to allow same-sex weddings. They are the new educators. They are the source of our global grassroots power, the force that has brought about success in Hawaii and full marriage equality in Belgium, the Netherlands, and three provinces (and counting) in Canada.

Civil marriage is no longer just a piece of paper to me. It is a declaration of so many of our values as a society and a people. Thus it was that in the summer of 2003, when British Columbia legalized same-sex marriage, Lance and I decided to "do it'--to get married in Vancouver. It was complicated: One of us had to go to British Columbia to get the license in person. So I went, scratching out the words "Bride" and "Groom" and deciding who was going to be "Groom 1" and who would be "Groom 2." While I was in Canada, the Honolulu newspaper ran an article about our upcoming wedding--meaning that Lance was outed statewide. He handled that and the subsequent television interview on his own. He's strong.

With the help of our "best persons," Bill Eckhart and "Leather" Sharyle Lyndon, in just a few weeks we arranged sumptuous quarters at the Coast Plaza Hotel, sparkling wine from Canada's own Summerhill Winery, orchid lets for all our guests and staff, loose orchids to cover all the walkways, a wedding cake (it had to be chocolate), and so many other details. A few snapshot memories: Lance's office throwing us a shower, my new brother-in-law, Bob Baker, telling me that ours was the first wedding he'd cried at; the absurdity of dodging four camera crews during the service; the subsequent photo shoot that turned into a news conference; our "best person" actually forgetting the rings and almost tripping into the water fountain as he tried to sneak out to get them; going through U.S. Customs on one family declaration form.

And so on August 31, 2003, in Vancouver, at a ceremony officiated by my partner's sister, The Reverend Diane Baker, and Canadian member of parliament Svend Robinson, in front of family and friends--on our eighth anniversary--Lance Baker and I legally became husbands, lance will tell you I cried--really, I just had tears in my eyes. But there in the garden terrace of the Coast Plaza, I was shaken to my core by the reality of a whole new way of life as a full equal citizen--at least in Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

And so we throw our Hawaiian lei to the Massachusetts couples who will be next.