When Is a Kiss More Than Just a Kiss? When It’s Been ‘Forged in Fire’
John Duran and Mark Morris Wedding Reflects the Arc of LGBTQ+ History
May is a magical month, memorable in the march to marriage equality. On May 3, civil rights and defense attorney John Duran and Mark Morris, his partner of 27 years, were married in West Hollywood before family and forever friends. The wedding was officiated by Duran’s first legal and political mentor, attorney Diane Abbitt, an image that softly represented an arc of defiant LGBTQ+ love through California history from MECLA to LIFE AIDS Lobby to ANGLE to EQCA.
The couple wed on the anniversary of the day they first met - May 3, 1999.
But why get married now – after all Duran has done to help win marriage equality?
“I think one of the most painful lessons that we learned around HIV and AIDS and around Karen Thompson and Sharon Kowalski’s story was that our relationships without legal protections would be really painful if a partner is sick, hospitalized or dies. And we learned those very painful lessons and realized that equality of marriage was gonna be the remedy that we would seek long term,” Duran said during a recent Zoom interview.
Karen Thompson’s fight for legal guardianship after her partner Sharon Kowalski became incapacitated in a Nov. 1983 traffic collision in Minnesota dragged on for years. Despite having exchanged rings and named each other in insurance policies, the couple’s relationship was not recognized by Kowalski’s family and Thompson was denied visitation rights.
‘’There is no other case that approaches this one in symbolic importance,” Tom Stoddard, executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, told the New York Times in Aug. 1988, on the eve of Kowalski’s 32d birthday. The Minnesota Court of Appeals eventually ruled in Thompson’s favor on December 17, 1991, apparently the first appeals court to recognize a lesbian or gay partner’s rights as equivalent to a heterosexually-married spouse.
Personally, Duran always looked at marriage as political, something for other people. He didn’t need government or religion to certify his love for Morris, a State employee at the DMV. But a year ago when he and Morris mused about a quick Vegas wedding, Abbitt and her wife Bernadette Abbruzze said, “Absolutely not, we’re having a wedding.” Duran had officiated their nuptials in 2017.
“This is something that we fought for and darn it, John, I’m glad you’re gonna finally make use of it for yourself,” longtime Orange County friend Pat Callahan told Duran.
That the once unimaginable is now normal doesn’t mean it’s unassailable. After Trump’s Supreme Court scuttled women’s reproductive rights and eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, ending marriage equality is next on the Project 2025 agenda. Before that history is erased, here’s a look at the Duran-Morris nuptials through the lens of that long fight for love.
California has a history of creating change, originating the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of Bilitis and ONE Magazine during the Lavender Scare in the 1950s, for instance. However, in a terrible irony, the Black Cat pushback in Silver Lake and the pivotal Stonewall uprising in New York’s Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969 sent many back into the closet fearing police arrests at bar raids.
“There was a lot of shame. People were terrified of losing their jobs. A lot of them were teachers and professional people,” Abbitt said in 2019.
Diane Abbitt came out in 1973 as a divorced mother for whom freedom was costly. She went to law school at night so she could keep custody of her two sons, as did her partner Roberta Bennett. Founders of LA NOW’s Lesbian and Sexuality Task Force, they testified before the California Legislature in favor of a bill to decriminalize homosexuality, sponsored by Assembly member Willie Brown and State Senate leader George Moscone. Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill on May 12,1975.
By 1977, LGBTQ+ people and allies started advocating for gay rights as human rights. California ally Assembly member Art Agnos started pushing for a gay rights job bill, AB 1, at every opening legislative session. Nationally, lesbian feminist Jean O’Leary of the National Gay Task Force strategized with her closeted lover Midge Costanza, President Jimmy Carter’s Public Liaison, to hold an historic meeting of 14 gay and lesbian activists (including MCC Founder Rev. Troy Perry) in the White House on March 26.
Meanwhile, orange juice shill Anita Bryant and the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his new Moral Majority ignited the homophobic Religious Right “Save Our Children” fuse that overturned a sexual orientation-protection ordinance in Dade County, Florida and inspired the anti-gay Briggs Initiative/ Proposition 6 in California.
Gay people were scared. After the progressive promises of Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism, Prop 6 proposed to ban gays, lesbians and their straight allies from teaching and working in public schools.
Political consultant Peter Scott, who co-founded the closeted gay professionals group Orion with attorney Stephen Lachs, devised a response: they changed their name to Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles (MECLA), becoming the nation’s first gay political action committee, invited lesbians to join and reached out to influencers. Abbitt, a prodigious fundraiser, was elected MECLA’s first female board co-chair. Their mission,” Abbitt said later, “was legal protections and full equality, including a seat at the legislative table, for gay people.”
Nationally renowned politico David Mixner, who had just headed LA Mayor Tom Bradley’s reelection campaign, came out, joined MECLA and helped form the No on Prop 6 campaign. Chaired by Abbitt in the South and San Francisco Supervisor candidate Harvey Milk in the North, Mixner and Scott served as campaign managers with “lavender menace” lesbian feminist Ivy Bottini and Torie Osborn hired to organize in SoCal. Jeanne Córdova, a second-wave feminist, was media director.
The Briggs Initiative was overwhelmingly defeated on Nov. 7, 1978. Twenty days later, Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were assassinated.
After Abbitt was admitted to State Bar in 1979, she and Bennett formed Abbitt & Bennett, a law firm in which Bennett focused on family law and Abbitt specialized in business law and estate planning, including helping same-sex couples secure inheritance rights.
MECLA became so prominent by 1979, Gov. Jerry Brown gave the keynote speech at a roast for businessman and “Democratic heavyweight” Sheldon Andelson; Lily Tomlin emceed and President Carter’s mother Lillian attended.
But same sex relationships eluded official legal recognition. San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein vetoed the nation’s first domestic partnership ordinance in 1982. Three years later, galvanized by the AIDS crisis, the new City of West Hollywood created the nation’s first domestic partnership registry.
Meanwhile, anti-gay sentiment worsened with Ronald Reagan’s presidency and in 1986, rabid right-winger Lyndon LaRouche sponsored a ballot initiative to quarantine people with AIDS. Abbitt co-chaired the “No on 64” campaign with Harry Britt and resoundingly defeated the proposition.
Abbitt went on to co-found or sit on the boards of AIDS Project Los Angeles, the Human Rights Campaign Fund and the post-MECLA Book Club, which evolved into Access Now for Gay and Lesbian Equality (ANGLE). After Feinstein refused to say the words “gay and lesbian” while campaigning to be California’s Governor in 1990, she and ANGLE friends founded the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund to elect more LGBTQ+ people. She also fought for marriage equality through Evan Wolfson’s Freedom to Marry and Equality California, headed by attorney Geoff Kors.
Abbitt and Bennett split in 1995, not long after becoming the first lesbian couple to waltz around the East Room ballroom in the White House on Jan. 5, 1994. In 1997, Abbitt met Abbruzze, owner of the green fuel-efficiency company Envirolution. They married 20 years later in 2017.
Abbitt met John Duran in 1983 when he was still working at Disneyland, in law school at Western State University in Orange County and called her for a job. He clerked for Abbitt & Bennett for six months in 1984.
Everything changed for Duran in 1985 when his best friend Scott Fleener suddenly died of “HIV disease." “Scott was the first person I knew who died,” Duran told The LA Weekly in Nov. 2004. “I was robbed of the chance to say goodbye, and at his memorial service I had one of those ‘As God Is My Witness’ moments when I vowed to find a cure for this disease.”
When the Prop 64 AIDS quarantine initiative hit the California ballot in 1986, Duran went to Pat Callahan, co-chair of Elections Committee of the County of Orange (ECCO), and asked to be put to work.
“That was the start of my political career,” Duran told the LA Weekly. “It completely overturned my sense of the way the world should work… Everything changed.”
Duran clerked with Joel Loquvam for Marjorie Rushforth and Georgia Garrett-Norris (1985-1986) in their Santa Ana law firm. He passed the bar in 1987 and started a new law firm in Anaheim with Loquvam and Tom Kendricks in 1988.
It was hard. The Ronald Reagan-pumped OC world was dominated by right-wing political extremists and Religious Right evangelicals, spurred on by Rep. Robert “B-1 Bob” Dornan (R-Santa Ana) and Rep. William Dannemeyer, (R-Fullerton), author of Shadow in the Land: Homosexuality in America. In 1989, Dannemeyer’s obsessive fixation with homosexuals – intensified by the AIDS crisis – prompted him to read the sexually graphic statement “What Homosexuals Do” into the Congressional Record (see pages 69-73 in the June 29, 1989 Congressional Record).
Dannemeyer’s wingman was rabidly anti-gay Rev. Lou Sheldon, founder of the Traditional Values Coalition, who could quickly muster threatening “Christian warriors” stewed in the Biblical belief that God allowed them to kill homosexuals.
Janet Avery, President of Orange County Cultural Pride, hired Duran to secure the Pride festival permit she obtained from the city. Sheldon had organized hundreds of protesters to demand the permit be revoked.
“The whole thought of the First Amendment being dictated by a religious leader is . . . repugnant,” Duran told the LA Times before the July 17 City Council meeting.
Mayor Dan Young seemed sympathetic to Sheldon’s demand. But after Duran’s rousing speech, City Attorney Ed Cooper said that OCCP “has a constitutional right of free speech and assembly, which the [city parks] director is bound to observe.”
After the council vote, Duran was suddenly rushed by Sheldon and his Christian storm troopers who placed their hands over his head and screamed, “OUT, SATAN! OUT!” Guards rushed to pull Duran to safety and escorted him out of the building.
The first Orange County Gay Pride Festival was held Sept. 9-10 in Centennial Regional Park, marred by clashes with Sheldon’s protesters. Nonetheless, Duran wrote on his Facebook page commemorating Avery’s July 2018 passing, “the first amendment ruled the day.”
Duran later discovered his law office had a swastika and the initials WAR – White Aryan Resistance - carved into it. Black scorch marks on his back porch looked as if someone tried to set it on fire.
But political work called. After the NO on Prop 64 campaign in 1986, roughly 200 HIV/AIDS bills were introduced in Sacramento. The next year, Duran joined LIFE AIDS Lobby, a new coalition of 102 organizations from across California that “had to find a common table to hash out policy and stand united. And that’s what we ended up doing,” Duran said later.
They met with legislative leaders and their deputies, such as AIDS expert Stan Hadden. When Hadden died of AIDS at age 35, advocates carried a gigantic rainbow flag through the streets of Sacramento after his funeral.
Though only 27-28 years old, Duran was elected statewide co-chair because he was HIV-negative and the elder statesmen were sick and dying. “We all realized, no matter what our political differences or our great diversity or gender or race or anything else — it didn’t really matter, we were all in the fight for our lives, and we were there to do what was best for the common good,” he told the WeHo AIDS Monument project.
In 1990, Duran and his partner Jim Keltner moved to West Hollywood. He was already involved in WeHo politics after helping local attorney Chris Fairchild get his client, fired gay sheriff’s deputy Bruce Boland, reinstated. He then joined Mixner, Abbitt and others in founding ANGLE to scrutinize and contribute to state and federal electoral candidates. He met Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton during an ANGLE interview on Sept. 29, 1991, who they endorsed and helped to elect President.
That was the same day California Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed the “Gay Rights Bill,” AB 101, that Duran, his co-chair Ken Jones and their LIFE Lobby team had worked to craft and pass with executive director Laurie McBride. Wilson’s betrayal of his promise to sign AB 101 resulted in two weeks of protest.
The veto of AB 101 also prompted LIFE Lobby to run gay and lesbian candidates in Democratic primaries. Duran ran against Assemblymember Burt Margolin in West Hollywood and lost. However, Councilmember Sal Guarriello and his wife Rita encouraged him to run for West Hollywood City Council “someday.” Duran eventually joined the WeHo City Council in 2001.
“I was forged in fire,” Duran later told the LA Weekly.
In 1996, Duran got sober and a miracle triple-drug AIDS cocktail had staunched the dying. In 1998, after eight years of State Republican majority rule, voters elected moderate Democrat Gray Davis as Governor with Sheila James Kuehl already a star as the first out gay person serving in the legislature. LIFE Lobby’s funding dried up and the organization folded.
San Francisco-based politicos responded, creating the California Alliance for Pride and Equality (CAPE) in 1999 with Jean Harris as executive director. CAPE helped pass Assemblymember Carole Migden’s AB 25 domestic partner registry bill and Kuehl’s AB 537, the first statewide LGBT-inclusive anti-bullying law.
But America changed again in 2000. The US Supreme Court seemed to award Republican born-again Christian George W. Bush the presidency over Democratic Vice President Al Gore, injecting questions about election integrity into the national political consciousness. On Sept. 11, 2001, the World Trade Towers fell and the Pentagon was severely damaged in coordinated Al-Qaida terrorist attacks. Defying history, Republicans won both the House and Senate in the midterms.
Harris left CAPE in 2003. Geoff Kors, a lawyer recruited by Harris to serve on CAPE’s Board of Directors, stepped in as interim executive director. With little money, virtually no staff but a hard-working Board, Kors worked 24/7 to expand the Board to 14, recruiting Abbitt and Duran, develop a strategy and change the name to Equality California (EQCA).
Kors was no pedestrian politico. A graduate of Stanford Law School, he’d been Director of several ACLU of Illinois Gay and Lesbian Rights/AIDS projects and in 1990, he helped lead the nation’s first successful campaign to pass a ballot measure to grant same-sex couples domestic partner rights. In 1996, as a legal adviser to San Francisco Supervisor Bevan Dufty, Kors originated the groundbreaking and successful Equal Benefits Ordinance, alerting companies and corporations that to do business with San Francisco, they must provide equal benefits to same-sex partners.
Kors developed coalition partnerships and strategies with the ACLU, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. This led to out lesbian Assemblymember Jackie Goldberg’s 2003 comprehensive AB 205, giving same-sex couples virtually all the rights and responsibilities of marriage. Gov. Davis signed the bill on Sept. 19, 2003, effective on Jan. 1, 2005.
In 2004, the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s Goodridge decision prompted San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to conspire with staff and NCLR’s Kate Kendell to bring a constitutional challenge by officiating a surprise marriage of lesbian icons Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin on February 12, Valentine’s Day.
Newsom ordered city officials to issue marriage licenses to approximately 4,000 same-sex couples who stood in line at city hall to grasp their dream.
Meanwhile, out gay Assemblymember Mark Leno introduced his first marriage bill, AB 1967, The California Marriage License Non-Discrimination Act, co-sponsored by the LGBT Caucus and EQCA, that would “define marriages in California as a civil contract between two persons, allowing same sex couples access to the same rights and responsibilities of marriage as heterosexual couples in the state.” It stalled in committee.
In June, the California Judicial Council ordered that six active marriage cases be consolidated into one case for trial, becoming In re Marriage Cases. Separately, on August 12, the California Supreme Court ruled that Newsom did not have the authority to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and declared those 4,000 licenses invalid.
“Del is eighty-three years old and I am seventy-nine,” said Phyllis Lyon. “After being together for more than fifty years, it is a terrible blow to have the rights and protections of marriage taken away from us. At our age, we do not have the luxury of time.”
“One very real consequence of the Court’s action is that if one of the women were to die before the other, the surviving partner would have no right to social security or pension benefits and no protection against losing their family home,” the ACLU noted.
Worried that evangelical voters would stay home without a reaction, Karl Rove and Bush’s re-election team generated successful constitutional amendment initiatives in 11 states barring same-sex marriages.
The next year, the California Legislature passed Leno’s AB 849, which was then vetoed by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Meanwhile, In re Marriage Cases trudged along until May 15, 2008, when the California Supreme Court issued a 4-3 ruling with Chief Justice Ronald M. George that marriage equality is “the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship.”
West Hollywood started issuing marriage licenses and performing weddings in West Hollywood Park on June 17, 2008.
For one couple, marriage was urgent. The lesbian-in-charge and her two sons had driven for hours with her partner living on borrowed time. The ill wife died five months later, just as voters overturned marriage equality through Prop 8 in Nov. 2008.
Five years later, on June 26, 2013, the Supreme Court overturned Prop 8 in Hollingsworth v. Perry and ruled against part of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in United States v. Windsor.
Geoff Kors didn’t wait for Obergefell v. Hodges on on June 26, 2015. He married his love James Williamson in 2014.
Kors left EQCA in 2011, have passed more than 70 pieces of LGBTQ legislation. In 2015, he was elected to the Palm Springs City Council, including serving as Mayor. He left in 2022. Meanwhile Williamson shone brightly as an elected member of the Palm Springs School Board.
On May 3, Geoff and James and Diane and Bernadette welcomed John and Mark into their tribe of aging LGBTQ+ pioneers whose love was forged by fire.
Please enjoy our Zoom conversation about marriage, the First Amendment and today’s politics.
I am writing about the Kowalski case - so was esp delighted by this post. And Karen Ocamb, would love to interview you! Fkornbluh@gmail.con.