WASHINGTON — Twenty years ago, when no Democratic presidential candidate had even considered supporting gay marriage, a newly elected district attorney, Kamala Harris, performed one of the first same-sex unions in the United States.
It was San Francisco’s so-called Winter of Love. The mayor at the time, Gavin Newsom, had ordered the county clerk to approve gay marriages, even though there was no law on the books recognizing them. His act of rebellion led to a bipartisan political backlash, but Harris didn’t waver.
“You could tell she was so overwhelmed and had so much joy in 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 candidates, who did not begin their political careers as supporters of same-sex marriage. Four years after the Winter of Love, the issue was still off the table in the party primaries. And it took another four years for Democratic President Barack Obama, running for reelection against Republican Mitt Romney, to support same-sex marriage.
For LGBTQ leaders, Harris’ history reaffirms their deep support for the Democratic candidate.
“It’s not just that she’s held a position supporting basic equality for gay and lesbian couples. A lot of politicians are taking positions and holding positions,” said Chad Griffin, former director of the Human Rights Campaign, who serves on Harris’ national fundraising committee. “Fewer people are actually stepping up and using their power to make lives better.”
In her book, “The Truths We Hold,” Harris writes that her decision to perform the marriages was impulsive. She was on her way to the airport before deciding 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 thrilled to be a part of it,” she wrote. “There was a tremendous excitement that built as we welcomed the crowd of loving couples, one by one, to be married on the spot. It was unlike anything I had ever been a part of. And it was beautiful.”
Witherspoon recalls that it wasn’t just he and his new husband who were excited.
“They did too,” he said. “We both cried and hugged each other.” Witherspoon said Harris told them, “I really wanted to be a part of this.”
All marriages performed in San Francisco that month were annulled later that year, a move 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 began her political career in San Francisco, a city with a vibrant gay community.
Sean Meloy, a senior executive at Victory Fund, a political committee focused on increasing LGBTQ representation in politics, called Harris’s story an example of why “representation matters.”
“A lot of people didn’t know LGBTQ people,” Meloy said of the national atmosphere during the Winter of Love. “In San Francisco, (LGBTQ people) were already a political force and out, so they understood much earlier that we’re just people.”
Some of Harris’s early political advisers were gay, including Jim Rivaldo, who Harvey Melkthe first openly gay elected official in California as supervisor of San Francisco. At a recent fundraiser, Harris recalled that after Rivaldo fell ill with AIDS, her mother helped care for him before he died.
Growing up in the Bay Area, “almost everyone knows a gay couple who’s been together for a long time,” says Debbie Mesloh, who served as Harris’s communications director when she was a district attorney.
Mesloh said Harris paid particular attention to legal and criminal justice issues involving homosexuals, and she organized a national symposium to train prosecutors on how to deal with the “gay panic” defense used in Wyoming by the two men who killed him. Matthew Shepard in 1998. The defense tactic, which suggested that defendants could be incited to violence by the victim’s open sexuality, “only infuriated Kamala,” Mesloh said.
Supporting gay rights was not without political risk for ambitious politicians, a lesson Newsom, now governor of California, learned after the Winter of Love began. He was denied a speaking slot at the 2004 Democratic National Convention because Republicans, led by President George W. Bush, turned gay marriage into a wedge issue among voters.
Still, Harris was eager to participate in and officiate at weddings, Mesloh recalled.
“There was no judgment or analysis,” Mesloh said. “She wanted to do it. She was excited. She loved it.”
Witherspoon and Cobane, the couple Harris married, assumed she would want to climb the political ranks in the future, which only increased their admiration for her.
“That adds to the courage of her stand to come out and perform gay marriage,” Witherspoon said. “It’s one thing to say I support gay marriage, but it’s another thing to put yourself out there and perform gay marriages knowing that at some point you’re going to want to go to a national level.”
“She had national ambitions, but she supported it before the time and before anyone else,” Cobane said. “And I give her credit for that.”
The issue of gay marriage came up again when Harris ran for California attorney general in 2010, just two years after that state’s voters banned gay marriage with Proposition 8.
“For her, it wasn’t an academic issue. It was a personal issue — people whose lives she knew intimately,” 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 official. But she said she would defend the death penalty despite her personal opposition to it.
“She got a lot of flack for that,” Brokaw said, and was accused of cherry-picking the laws she wanted to support. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately struck down Proposition 8 in 2013.
When Griffin heard a rumor that gay marriage would soon be legal in San Francisco, he called Harris while Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, two of the plaintiffs in the case, were at City Hall so she could marry them.
“‘Don’t say anything else — I’ll meet you there,’” Griffin recalled Harris saying. “I bet the call was less than 30 seconds,” he said. “She didn’t jump in a car and have a driver pick her up. She walked to City Hall.”
The Democratic Party embraced same-sex marriage more broadly in 2012, when Obama became the first presidential candidate to support the right. His announcement was hastened by Joe Biden, then vice president, announce his own supportHillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, did not support gay marriage until 2013, after she resigned as Secretary of State.
Today, gay marriage is a cornerstone of the party platform, and even occasionally receives support from Republicans. But some Democrats still see Harris as a pioneer in the issue because of her early involvement.
“It’s not lost on me, in a very personal way,” said Malcolm Kenyatta, the Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania auditor general. He married his partner, Dr. Matthew J.M. Kenyatta, in 2022. “Whether it’s popular at the time or not, she’s doing the right thing.”
