Have you spent the past month celebrating those history-making election victories for LGBT rights? Then, maybe you should write Squirrel Hill native Evan Wolfson a thank-you note. The founder and president of the Freedom to Marry Coalition was, after all, the primary engineer behind the November 6 coup for marriage rights in Maine, Maryland, Washington, and Minnesota.
“It’s really quite exciting,” Wolfson says. “Freedom to Marry set out some very bold and important goals for ourselves this year, and can now celebrate that we’ve been able to deliver on all of them.”
The Taylor Allderdice alum’s crusade for equal marriage has been a long one. His résumé reads
like a “best of” list for gay rights issues, from his work as co-council in the Hawaii case that kicked off the global marriage movement to arguing before the Supreme Court in Boy Scouts of
America vs. Dale. It’s gratifying to know that after all that hard work, Wolfson (who is now a New
York resident) can finally sample his own product. A year ago, he married his partner of 10 years,
and readily admits that he’s “still glowing.” I got a laugh when I asked if first hand experience has changed his take on the institution. The familiar question must be an occupational hazard.
“We are the couple we’ve been, the couple we’ve made ourselves over the last 10 years. But it does feel very different. It’s been a wave of happiness, and it really has felt like a deepening of the commitment to one another.”
Wolfson went on to hypothesize that it’s the very language we use to talk about marriage that has made the new phase of his relationship feel so different. “[My husband and I] get to share with so many people who, through the vocabulary of marriage and even the vocabulary of the
wedding, want to talk about it and celebrate it.”
This argument for the importance of marriage, not just as an institution but also as a word, comes up again when we start to talk about what we can do here in Pennsylvania to help the cause.
“You should never start by bargaining against yourself,” he says, referring to the separate-but-equal arguments for civil union and domestic partnership. “The key work really needs to be
with people in Pennsylvania telling their stories, making the ask, keeping at it, and beginning the
conversations by making clear that we do care about this, and we want them to care, too. If we
go in and we say things like, ‘Oh, we don’t care what it’s called, you can call it whatever you want, just give us legal protections… ‘ Well… if we don’t care, why should they care?”
He went on to praise the strides that Pittsburgh has made for LGBT rights since his high school
days, and the conversation closed with a call to action:
“Pittsburgh’s done what it can. Now we need to organize the people in Pittsburgh to get Pennsylvania to follow Pittsburgh and Philadelphia’s lead.”
