John (CAS’94) and Duncan (SFS ‘94) Crabtree-Ireland have considered themselves married since 1993. But in February, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom gave them the opportunity to put it on paper. At 9:13 a.m. on a bright San Francisco morning, city Assessor-Recorder Mabel Teng declared John and Duncan “spouses for life” and placed their marriage in the public record. They were among the first 100 same-sex couples to get married in San Francisco; there would ultimately be more than 2000 before the California Supreme Court stopped the marriages.
The wedding was hastily arranged, coming at the end of an overnight from Los Angeles. John had heard that Newsom was marrying gay couples, and he immediately called Duncan. “I said, ‘I think we need to get to San Francisco as soon as possible,’” John recalled. They had barely had time to pack their clothes as they drove in a race against time and two injunction hearings, which could have put an end to the marriages, to be heard by the court that day.
Luckily for John and Duncan, the weddings would not be stopped until the California Supreme Court acted a month later. As they stood on the steps beneath City Hall’s imposing French Renaissance rotunda and pledged their lifelong vows, the partners were finally able to fulfill a wish born humbly in a small ICC classroom 13 years ago.
John came to Georgetown in 1988 from his hometown of Modesto, Ca. He was attracted by the opportunities cosmopolitan Washington D.C. had to offer and the promise of a traditional Jesuit education. John is Episcopalian, but he had read about the Jesuits and was fascinated by their intellectual tradition.
And what of the Catholic Church’s anti-homosexual stance? It didn’t faze John, because at the time, he didn’t accept that he was gay.
1988 was a good year for a young man struggling with his sexual identity at Georgetown. For years, the Gay People of Georgetown University (GPGU) had sought recognition from the University under the District’s Human Rights Act, passed in 1977. The act prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, but the University argued that its first amendment right to freedom of religion overrode the District law. GPGU filed suit, and for seven years neither party would compromise.
During this time, former GPGU President Kurt Schade (SFS ‘89) recalled, the campus was simply angry at the gay community for challenging the University and depleting University funds. “If it rained they blamed gay and lesbian people,” he said.
And English Professor Rev. Ed Ingebretsen, a member of the American Catholic Church, noted that until he came to Georgetown in 1996, there were no courses with the word “gay” in the description. When he initiated his Unspeakable Lives course, he said, he faced significant opposition. “I had to go to class early to make sure the board was erased,” he said.
The University and GPGU remained in deadlock. Then, one year before John came to Georgetown, then-Mayor Marion Barry stepped in. Georgetown needed tax-free bonds to build the Leavey Center. Barry refused to grant those tax exemptions until Georgetown recognized GPGU. The lawsuit settled out of court with confidential terms. When John came to Georgetown, GPGU, soon to be renamed the Gay and Lesbian Student Alliance (GALSA), was just like any other Georgetown club.
In fact, John didn’t know about the lawsuit when he arrived, and he didn’t know how hard the gay group had worked to gain recognition. And when he walked up the path onto Copley lawn at his first Student Affairs Commission club fair, the very first person he saw was the president of the gay student group. Standing in front of his folding table, the charismatic young man was calling to the new students, gesturing emphatically, and speaking with confidence. John’s reaction was to walk in the opposite direction. But this young man’s charisma established the gay community in John’s mind. “From his energy I felt there was a very strong presence on campus of the gay group,” he said.
That group would become an important part of John’s life. He first made contact with the gay community during his sophomore year. He describes the event lightly now, but at the time he says he was petrified. His plan was simple: he would walk up to Kurt Schade’s first floor Copley dorm room and knock on the door. But going through with this plan proved a little more complicated. He paced in the hallway several times, then finally came to stand in front of the door. He stared at it for a few minutes. And then he knocked.
Kurt’s roommate opened the door, to John’s surprise. But the encounter was brief, as the roommate grabbed a backpack and said he’d be back in an hour. “Apparently this was not an unusual experience,” John said, laughing.
Kurt invited John into the room, and they talked. John doesn’t really remember what they talked about; Kurt remembers that they mostly discussed his family, his upbringing, and his sister. John couldn’t admit that he was gay, but it was the beginning of a friendship. “From that conversation grew a confidence,” John said. “Just expanding my group of friends to include gay people helped me see them as role models, to build my confidence in myself. Pride is the rope-ladder with which you pull yourself out of that hole.”
John eventually came out during his junior year, which he spent studying in Germany. “Being away from the U.S. probably helped, being away from friends probably helped,” he remembered. “I needed space before I could come to terms with it.”
When John returned from Germany, he learned that he had been elected President of GALSA in his absence. He agreed to take the job, and he soon became an active member of the gay community. “Then I had crazy closeted people stalking me!” he joked. He also had a new leadership position in the gay community at Georgetown. It was in fulfilling that role that he met Duncan.
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Duncan arrived at Georgetown in 1990, while John was still in the closet. Duncan was closeted too, he said, but only to his family and friends. He had already accepted his own sexuality.
Georgetown wasn’t new to him: he had spent the summer of 1989 there as a debate camper. And unlike John, he had been following the GPGU lawsuit, and he knew that Georgetown had not historically been open to homosexuals. But Duncan, then an aspiring Foreign Service officer, said that the lawsuit hardly deterred him. “I thought, ‘There must be a viable group of gay people at Georgetown that I can join,’” he said.
By the time Duncan arrived, however, the “welcoming and inclusive” group he has heard John describe had changed. “The public face of the group was that of very confrontational and aggressive activists,” he said. He said that outspoken advocacy is important, but that it was of little help to a young gay man trying to figure out how to tell his family and friends the truth.
Despite this, Duncan said that he never really felt like he was alone at Georgetown. John echoed that Residence Life staff, then-Dean of Student Affairs John J. DeGioia and even many Jesuits openly supported gay students at Georgetown. Duncan also praised the faculty and staff who supported him both before and after he came out. At the same time, however, he chose his words carefully to avoid overstating their support. “There was not a palpable, obvious anti-gay sentiment among the faculty or staff at the University,” he said.
Duncan came out to his friends at Georgetown two months into his freshman year, and the next year he joined GALSA. His first meeting was one he would remember.
In November 1991, John was preparing to lead a GALSA meeting in a small ICC classroom. Duncan and John can’t agree on which one it was, and its location was the subject of a few minutes of a married couple’s bickering. John swore it was near the computer lab, but Duncan said it was under the ICC auditorium. “It was on the first floor of the ICC. There is no computer lab on the first floor,” Duncan told John. They couldn’t figure out which one it was, but they agreed that it was at the end of a very long hallway.
Before the meeting, John was waiting in the room, accompanied by his friend Karla, whom he described as a “blonde Nordic goddess” in complete seriousness. Karla had provided a lot of support to John over the years. John came out to her during their freshman year, she said, after realizing that she had a “huge crush” on him. “It took all the tension out of the relationship,” she remembered. Karla was also a political poet at the Eclectic Monthly, a now-defunct literary magazine Duncan founded and edited.
“He walked in the door, and she screamed his name,” John said, recalling Duncan’s fashionably late entrance. “I was mortified, not realizing that he was out.”
Duncan said he was shocked too, but it had nothing to do with his sexual orientation. “I was also late,” he said. “You know how when you’re late for class you try to sneak in the side, and hope that nobody notices? And I couldn’t leave, because there was that long hallway behind me.” So he came in with embarrassment that seems to have not entirely disappeared.
It was an awkward start, but John and Duncan quickly became friends, and a few months later they started dating. Duncan came into his own at Georgetown, sitting on the Board of Directors of the Credit Union for three years and acting as the “Coordinator for External Relations” for GALSA. No one could be called the president, he remembered lightheartedly, because at the time the group did not want hierarchy. John and Duncan’s relationship continued and strengthened through these successes, and through Duncan’s leave of absence the next year. 18 months after they started dating, the couple decided to get married.
Legal same-sex marriage was a pipe dream in 1993, but that didn’t stop John and Duncan from wanting to affirm their relationship. They sought this affirmation in the centuries-old Episcopalian tradition of the holy union. “It’s a church sanctioned joining of two people that would not normally be allowed to be married,” Duncan explained. “It’s actually refreshing that such a long tradition exists.”
On Sept. 4, 1993, John and Duncan had a holy union presided over by an Episcopalian priest and attended by friends and family. The priest made it clear that it was not a wedding, as sanctified by the church. But John and Duncan made a commitment to love each other for a lifetime, and the importance of that pledge in their relationship is difficult to overstate.
The couple acknowledges that they were young when they first professed those vows, but they do not regret their decision. “Love is revolutionary. It’s always a risk when you try to forge a connection like this,” John said. “But I still feel like I am very much in love.”
Duncan agrees completely.
Twelve years later, John and Duncan are still professing vows. For them, their San Francisco marriage is just another step in a long and successful relationship. “We are celebrating and reconfirming a relationship that we have been working on for a very long time,” Duncan said.
After their own marriage, John and Duncan stayed in San Francisco to help manage the enormous demand for marriages that materialized in the next few days. They were sworn in as Deputy Marriage Counselors, and in that capacity they officiated dozens of marriages. They saw couples at all different stages, from 20-year-old boys who had been together for three months to a lesbian couple who had been active in the gay rights movement of the 1950’s.
The atmosphere may have been somewhat chaotic: Ingebretsen, who was in San Francisco on the same weekend, described trucks driving by throwing rice and flower trucks arriving with bouquets from Ohio. “The line was six people broad and it went around the building,” he said.
And without doubt, on that weekend same-sex couples were seizing the marriage rights they have sought for years. “They knew it was largely symbolic, but so was the Emancipation Proclamation,” Ingebretsen said.
Schade disputed the argument that civil unions achieve the same thing as marriages, because federal marriage laws do not recognize those unions. Without marriage, when one spouse dies, the one surviving risks losing his or her house, Schade said. Marriage also has implications for adoption rights and child support. “There’s this huge pent-up desire to have marital rights and the societal stamp on the relationship,” Duncan said.
But despite these goals, for most of the couples, that weekend was not about activism. “Going to a march is activism,” John said. “The joy that was overflowing out of city hall, literally onto the street, to me is not political. It is intensely personal.”
