Times: Gay marriage pioneer Adams dies

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20121224/world/gay-marriage-pioneer-adams-dies.450750
Monday, December 24, 2012, 07:48 by PA

Richard Adams, who used the altar and the courtroom to help begin the push for gay marriage 40 years before it reached the centre of America's consciousness has died.

Mr Adams, 65, died on December 17 after a brief illness in the Hollywood home he shared with Tony Sullivan, his partner of 43 years, his lawyer Lavi Soloway said.

Mr Adams and Mr Sullivan met at a Los Angeles gay bar called The Closet in 1971, but their life and relationship would soon be on display for a worldwide audience.

They were granted a marriage licence in 1975, but for years fought in vain to see it recognised by governments and a population for whom the idea of two married men was still strange and foreign.

They were subjected to anti-gay slurs even from government agencies.

"They felt that in the end, the most important thing was their love for each other, and in that respect they won," Mr Soloway said. "No government or no law was ever able to keep them apart."

The couple's public life began when they heard about Clela Rorex, a county clerk in Boulder, Colorado, a pioneer in her own right, who took the unprecedented step of giving marriage licences to gay couples after learning from the district attorney's office that nothing in Colorado law expressly forbade it.

Ms Rorex's office became what The New York Times soon after called "a mini-Nevada for homosexual couples".

Among the first six couples to take advantage were Mr Adams and Mr Sullivan, who travelled to Colorado, had a ceremony at the First Unitarian Church of Denver and were granted a licence from Ms Rorex, before the state's attorney general ordered her to stop giving them to gay couples. Ms Rorex remained in contact with Mr Adams throughout his life.

Mr Adams and Mr Sullivan's primary motivation in marrying was to get permanent US residency status for Mr Sullivan, an Australian, and they promptly put in an application with what was then called the Immigration and Naturalisation Service.

They received a one-sentence denial from the INS that was stunning in its bluntness.

"You have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots," the letter said, using a derogatory term for gays.

The INS issued a follow-up response that removed the offending language, but gave no ground in its thinking.

Mr Adams' attempt to have that decision overturned was the first federal lawsuit seeking gay marriage recognition, according to the Advocate magazine and the Los Angeles Times, the first media outlets to report his death.

He took the INS to court in 1979 and later filed a separate lawsuit on the constitutionality of denying gays the right to marry.

Despite reaching the highest appeal courts, he was met only with rejections.

The couple became a hot topic, especially as Mr Sullivan's deportation became likely in the mid-1980s and they appeared on the Today show and The Phil Donahue Show, giving some of the first national attention to gay marriage when it was considered an oddity, even by future supporters.

Mr Adams' application for Australian residency was also denied, so the couple spent a year in Europe before returning to the United States and leading a low-profile life in Los Angeles.

But they recently re-emerged as their issue finally gained traction in courts and voting booths.

They are the subject of an upcoming documentary, Limited Partnership and just two days before Mr Adams' death were working with Mr Soloway on a challenge to the Defence of Marriage Act, one of two gay-marriage laws the US Supreme Court has agreed to review.

"After 40 years of fighting he missed the outcome at the Supreme Court," Mr Soloway said, "but he felt optimistic".

He got to see what he deemed a major victory for his particular cause, gay couples and immigration, in October when the Obama administration issued written policy guidelines saying same-sex couples in long-term partnerships "rise to the level of a 'family relationship" when it comes to deportation.

"You can draw a straight line from Tony and Richard's efforts in the 1970s to that piece of paper in 2012," Mr Soloway said.