Long before gay marriage was popular, Kamala Harris was at the forefront of the equal rights battle

Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — 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.”

Her decision to officiate was made in the moment

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.”

Harris was an early supporter when it was politically fraught

Witherspoon and Cobane, the couple married by Harris, assumed she would want to climb the political ranks one day, which boosted their admiration for her.

“That adds to the bravery of her stance to come out and perform a gay wedding,” Witherspoon said. “It is one thing to say I support gay marriage, but it’s another thing to put yourself on record and perform gay marriages, knowing at some point you want to move to a national level.”

“She had national ambitions, but she supported it ahead of the time and before anyone else,” Cobane said. “And I give her credit for that.”

The issue of gay marriage resurfaced when Harris ran for California attorney general in 2010, just two years after the state’s voters banned same-sex unions with Proposition 8.

“To her, it was not an academic issue. It was also a personal issue — people whose lives she knew up close,” said Brian Brokaw, a Democratic consultant who worked for Harris on the campaign.

Harris said she would not defend Proposition 8 as the state’s top law enforcement officer. But she said she would defend the death penalty despite her personal opposition to it.

“She took a lot of heat for that,” Brokaw said, and she faced accusations that she was picking and choosing which laws to support. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually overturned Proposition 8 in 2013.

When Griffin heard a rumor that same-sex marriages would soon be allowed in San Francisco, he called Harris as Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, two of the plaintiffs in the case, headed to City Hall so that she could marry them.

“’Say no more — I will meet you there,’” Griffin recalled Harris saying. “I bet you the call was less than 30 seconds,” he said. “She didn’t jump in a car and have a driver take her. She walked to City Hall.”

The Democratic Party more broadly embraced gay marriage in 2012, when Obama became the first presidential nominee to endorse the right. His announcement was precipitated by Joe Biden, then the vice president, disclosing his own support. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee in 2016, did not endorse same-sex marriage until 2013, after she stepped down as secretary of state.

Now gay marriage is a cornerstone of the party’s platform, and it even has occasional support from Republicans too. But some Democrats still view Harris as a trailblazer on the issue because of her early involvement.

“It’s not lost on me, in a very personal way,” said Malcolm Kenyatta, Pennsylvania’s Democratic nominee for auditor general. He married his partner, Dr. Matthew JM Kenyatta, in 2022. “Whether that is popular at the time or not, she does what is right.”