Read Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality for Free Online

drugs to treat the disease, had given way to a sort of entrenched “Gay Inc.” health care delivery bureaucracy. The result, Jones believed, was a generation of leaders unwilling to rock the boat for fear of losing corporate donors, and willing to settle for just a fraction of equality.
    But Chad seemed different, he thought as he listened to him spell out his vision for a federal lawsuit. He was aggressive, a control freak in a good way, and, most important, he wanted to win.
    Midway through breakfast, Chad excused himself and walked away to make a phone call. He had saved the best for last, but needed permission to share the information with Black and Jones. When he came back, he said, “I have something to tell you. We can get Ted Olson to represent us.”
    Jones drew in a sharp breath; this actually might work. Black lit a cigarette. Imagine, he thought, going home and telling his Texas friends and Mormon family that someone like Olson was on their side.
    “What can we do?” Black asked.
    Twice a year, some of the richest gay donors in the country gather at an event called OutGiving. It is a place where donors learn about the work being done on both a political and charitable level to help improve the lot of the gay community. It was, Chad thought, the perfect venue to test the waters on the new direction the group was contemplating. The event was to be held later that month at the Ritz-Carlton Lake Las Vegas. Black had been invited, but had yet to accept.
    Come with me, Chad urged. Give a speech that builds upon your Oscar acceptance and let’s see how it flies.

    Standing before the audience of donors in Nevada on March 21, Black knew before uttering a word that he was in for trouble. Hours earlier, he had been confronted in the hotel’s courtyard by Evan Wolfson, the fifty-two-year-old founder of a group called Freedom to Marry and the primary author of the cautious state-by-state marriage strategy that the gay rights movement had been pursuing.
    Wolfson had berated the younger man over his Oscar speech, explaining asthough to a willful but ignorant child his ongoing, twenty-five-year plan to build support for marriage equality nationwide. Twenty-five years? Black had practically gasped. But he had said little; it was intimidating, to say the least, to be dressed down by a pioneer of the marriage equality movement.
    Wolfson had devoted his life to the cause, writing his third-year thesis at Harvard Law School in 1983 on the right of gays and lesbians to marry, an idea considered so radical at the time that he had trouble finding an academic adviser. He had served as co-counsel in the first state court case challenging a same-sex marriage ban, filing a lawsuit in the early 1990s in Hawaii. He had won the case but lost the battle when voters there enacted a Prop 8–like constitutional amendment. His book on the subject had been called “perhaps the most important gay-marriage primer ever written.”
    Following the encounter, a shaken Black had called Chad in his room for reassurance.
    There was, both felt, a generation gap at work. Younger activists like Chad and Black had grown up in a relatively safer world, where gays and lesbians were not forced to congregate in bars with no windows for fear of being raided and attacked, where courts did not routinely strip custody from gay parents in divorce proceedings, and where they saw themselves reflected positively in television shows like
Will &
Grace
. It was easier for them to envision success now.
    “This just means we are doing the right thing,” Chad had said.
    Still, it was with some trepidation that Black launched into his speech. Following the passage of Proposition 8, he told the crowd, he was shocked when a leader of one of the largest gay rights organizations in the country offered this advice: “He said, ‘If we just quiet down, they’—whoever they are—‘will let us do whatever we want.’
    “Those are the words of one of the leaders of our