'The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle' Book Talk, "Part Four: Marriage Equality", Lillian Faderman, 2015/10/18
[caption: Lillian Faderman Historian & Author of, The Gay Revolution, Marriage Equality]
Faderman: The last section that I’m going to read is about Edie Windsor, who, was of course, the plantiff in the Supreme Court case that repealed the part of the Defense of Marriage Act that said that even if a state recognizes same-sex marriage, the federal government doesn’t have to. I call this section “SCOTUS”, that is, the Supreme Court of the United State, “SCOTUS Hears a Love Story And Gets It.”
In the early 1960s, Portofino, a smoky Italian restaurant near Bleecker street in Greenwich village, is where upscale lesbians went for a dinner on Friday nights; when Thea Spyer came over to say hello to a friend at the table where Edie Schlain Windsor sat, they were introduced. They had a lot in common: both smart dressers, silver-screen glamorous; Spyer like the butchy Greta Garbo in Queen Christina; Windsor, a Liz Scott platinum-blonde, high-breasted, fuschia-polished nails. Both were also Jewish, quick-witted, ambitious.
Windsor had been married to a man for less than a year before she realized she preferred women and parted with her husband on friendly terms. In 1955, she went back to school at NYU where she got an M.A. in applied mathematics. She became a pioneer in the new computer industry, working for IBM as one of its rare women program developers.
Thea Spyer, who’d escaped from Amsterdam with her affluent family when Hitler’s invasion of the Netherlands was imminent, had been kicked out of Sarah Lawrence as an undergraduate, caught kissing a woman, but now she was getting a Ph.D. in Psychology from Adelphi University.
Spyer and Windsor also had in common that they loved to dance. “We immediately just fit, our bodies fit,” Spyer liked to say when she remembered their first meeting and how they danced so long and hard the first night that Windsor wore a hole in her stocking. They were each involved with someone else at the time, so after the meeting at Portofino for a couple of years they saw each other only at occasional parties. Their partners would be buttoning coats, ready to go home, but Spyer and Windsor would seek each other out for one last irresistible dance together.
In 1965, they both happened to be single again. When Windsor heard that Spyer, who never quite left Windsor’s mind, would be spending the weekend at the Hamptons, she got herself invited to the home of friends whom she knew Spyer would visit. Spyer came by when the friends were out. “Is your dance card full?” Windsor quipped. “It is now,” Spyer answered, and all that afternoon they made love.
Two years later, Spyer, always a romantic, got down on her knees and proposed to Windsor. Windsor said yes before Spyer could finish the poetic speech she’d composed. Same-sex couples couldn’t get married anywhere in 1967, but Spyer wanted to buy Windsor a diamond engagement ring. “How can I wear it at IBM?” Windsor asked. She got along fine with her co-workers, but always turned down their invitations, such as going to weekend wine tastings, because she didn’t dare bring Spyer: an engagement ring would have prompted questions she knew she couldn't answer honestly in an era when people lost jobs if they were found to be gay or lesbian. So, instead of a ring, Spyer gave her a diamond brooch, which Windsor wore on her lapel, even 45 years later, when her picture was appearing in newspapers and magazines all over the globe.
Thea Spyer was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1977; she was 45 years old. The disease was progressive. First she needed a cane to walk; then two canes; then she was confined to a wheelchair; finally she became quadripalegic. Through it all, she continued to work as a psychotherapist, seeing clients on the 8th floor apartment on lower 5th Avenue where she and Windsor lived. In the last years of her life, Spyer required oxygen to breathe, and Hoyer lifts and slings to get in and out of bed. Though she and Windsor couldn’t make the “in sickness and health” vow legally, they made it anyway to each other. When it became mostly “in sickness,” Windsor took early retirement at IBM to be able to minister full-time to her lover.
But even in sickness, they didn’t stop dancing. Windsor on Spyer’s lap, the two of them twirling in the motorized wheelchair. Windsor liked to remember that they were never on the dance floor together when they didn’t scream out to each other above the music, “I love you!” Spyer’s multiple sclerosis became complicated by heart disease. In 2007, she was told by her doctor she probably had less than a year to live. She was 75 years old. But what she wanted in 1967, she still wanted. When the doctor left the examination room after breaking the news, Spyer turned toward Windsor and asked, “Do you still want to get married?” Windsor did very much. She’d attended a meeting of the Human Rights Campaign at New York’s LGBT Center, and during the Q&A, she’d asked when the organization would seriously start pushing for marriage. The speaker told her that it was “on the agenda” for the future. “I’m 77 years old,” Windsor shouted, “I can’t wait!”
Same-sex marriage was legal in Massachusetts, but that didn’t do Spyer and Windsor much good because Massachusetts had a residency requirement. To move their household and all the equipment Spyer needed to stay alive to another state when she was facing imminent death, it would have been impossible. But marriage was also legal in Canada. All that was required there before you could get a license was a one-day visa. Spyer and Windsor knew what they must do: six friends, two Best Men and four Best Women, agreed to do it with them. On May 22nd, 2007, they flew to Toronto, lugging duffle bags with tools to dismantle and put together again Spyer’s motorized wheelchair, which couldn’t be driven onto the small plane. The two men carried her to her seat on the plane, and, once landed, carried her off the plane to her reassembled wheelchair.
Spyer, still a handsome woman, sitting tall in her wheelchair, and Windsor perched on the arm of the chair, decked out in pearls, her beautiful quaffed hair, still platinum-blonde thanks to Clairol now, were married by Canada’s first openly-gay judge, Harvey Brownstone. Windsor and Spyer had agreed they wanted to make the ceremony as traditional as possible; they wanted to say, “with this ring, I thee wed.” When Spyer was to say it, her arm had to be lifted by two of the Best Women so she could hold up the ring. Windsor slipped her finger through it. When they got back to New York, Spyer said happily, “I can die now, because it’s completed.” She died in their home on February 5, 2009.
A week later, Edie Windsor had a heart attack. “Stress cardiomyopathy,” the doctor called it; Windsor called it a “broken heart.” Though she recovered, her problems were far from over: New York still didn’t allow same-sex marriages, though in 2008 the state had started recognizing those performed elsewhere. But the federal government did not. Not long after Spyer’s death, Windsor received an estate tax bill from the IRS. As far as the federal law was concerned, she’d “inherited” from Spyer half the value of the apartment–[coughs] pardon me–and the little cottage that the two woman had bought in the Hamptons. To the federal government, she and Thea Spyer, despite their 40+ year history, despite their legal marriage, were no more than strangers to each other. The estate tax bill was for $363,053. Windsor had no choice but to pay it. To do that, she had to sell investment bonds that she’d counted on to see her through the rest of her life. After paying, she figured she had enough left to live on for no more than four year. If she’d been married to a Theo instead of a Thea she knew, she'd had to pay no estate taxes whatsoever, not even if she’d met and married Theo a month before he died.
Windsor called Lambda Legal–Lambda Legal, defence and education group, and I want to–let me just read another paragraph of this and then I’ll skip a bit. “Sorry, it’s the wrong time in the movement to bring up a case like this,” Windsor says a Lambda lawyer told her. None of the rights groups were interested in her case. Lawyer Mary Bonauto, deservedly revered for her pioneering same-sex marriage successes in Vermont and Massachusetts and dubbed the “Thurgood Marshall of the same-sex marriage movement,” had warned LGBT lawyers back in 2004 that they mustn’t rush into federal court to challenge DOMA with a case about some quote “wealthy individual who had to pay a tax bill because the federal government wouldn’t recognize his or her same-sex marriage.” “I can’t think of a less sympathetic prospect,” Bonauto had said. But, as it turned out, it was a very good case. Edie Windsor went to a wonderful lawyer who was in private practice, Roberta Kaplan, and Roberta Kaplan understood why this was a powerful case, why after all of these years of devotion and service to the woman she loved, and a marriage that was recognized in the state where she lived, Edie Windsor should not have to pay a huge federal tax bill that heterosexually married couples would never have to pay.
So, I’m just going to read one more section. Windsor, with Roberta Kaplan arguing her case, won in the US District court, and the Republican majority in Congress decided they would challenge the win, and they used our money–they used taxpayer’s money–to hire a lawyer, a right-wing lawyer, Paul Clement, to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. But by now, American had really changed in important ways: President Obama had not only repealed “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” he’d come out in favor of same-sex marriage and that helped to change public opinion hugely. And for the first time, polls showed that most Americans were saying that same-sex couples should indeed be allowed to get married, and their marriage should be treated under the law just as heterosexual marriages were treated.
So finally I’m going to pick up with what happened at the Supreme Court. On June 26, 2013, Justice Anthony Kennedy delivered the majority opinion. DOMA writes inequality into the entire US code,” he declared. “It singles out a subset of people and makes them unequal. It disparages and injures those whom the state, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. It humiliates tens of thousands of children, now being raised by same-sex couples.” What the decision meant was that not only would married same-sex couples be treated by the IRS as their heterosexual counterparts were treated, but also that they could get Social Security, and veteran survival benefits, they could hold onto their homes when widowed, they could get green cards for an alien spouse, they were eligible for over a thousand other benefits that only straight couples had enjoyed before.
So I’m going to stop reading now and take your questions. Thank you.
[applause]
[END OF VIDEO]
Interviewee: Lillian Faderman
Interviewer: None
Transcriber: Sam L.
Formatter: Serena R.
Recording Date: October 18, 2015
Release Date: October 25, 2015
Location: City Council Chambers in West Hollywood, California
Interview Length: 00:14:15