Taking the Cake: The 1970s Movement for Same-Sex Marriage Rights in Canada and the United States

This paper will examine the “first wave” of the gay marriage movement in Canada and the United States. The emergence of a modern gay marriage movement is typically traced to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Legal recognition of monogamous, intimate, same-sex relationships became paramount when large numbers of gay men found themselves excluded from their dying partners’ lives by biological families. As parents for whom only one adult family member had legal rights over their children, lesbians confronted a different but equally pressing set of legal obstacles; many added their voice and organizing energy to the civil union and gay marriage rights movement. While not unsympathetic to their cause, queer activists and many lesbian and gay historians remain committed to a liberation model that rejects special privileges for nuclear families – gay or straight -- in favour of a system of social benefits that places care for all citizens, regardless of marital or relationship status, at the fore. For them, gay marriage is understood as part of a pro-market, neo-liberal gay rights agenda.
This paper challenges current historiography’s tendency to view the gay marriage movement as neoliberal. It documents the small but vocal handful of Canadian and American lesbian and gay activists who drew on the success, experience, and rhetoric of the civil rights movement to demand equal access to state and church marriage. Though rejected by most liberationists, these early pro-marriage activists caught the attention of the mainstream media and represented a new frontier of post-sexual revolutionary social life. Whereas Miriam Smith highlights how the policy changes of the late 1960s led to an “accelerating divergence” between the United States and Canada, this paper demonstrates how, on the ground, the “first wave” demand for equal marriage laws on both sides of the border were more similar than different.