Heterosexual people usually take their opportunity to marry for granted. One of the many positive externalities of the gay movement is to make us aware of how meaningful that opportunity is. I should not have needed reminding. Since 1989, I have had the privilege of being married to David Forkosh. Neither this book nor most of the other elements of my good life would have been possible without the consistent love and support he has so generously bestowed upon me during our life together.
Victory has the proverbial multiple ancestors. The incomparable editor Gail Winston figured out that it should be and what it should be in the course of a lunch. Then she encouraged, supported, read, edited, and listened to endless narcissistic blather from the author for the ensuing two years. This tale of the brilliant gay revolution would never have come into being without her courage, judgment, skill, and generosity of spirit. Not only the (narcissistic) author but everyone involved in the movement and who will learn from its victory is in her debt.
The other parent, literary agent David Kuhn, took on a complete stranger and shepherded her through a thousand iterations. Lunch with Gail Winston was just one of his endlessly resourceful and creative ideas about how to get from notion to publication. His commitment to this project was unswerving and his tough-minded judgment dead on at all the crucial junctures. The term “agent” does not do him justice; he is a full partner in his clients’ enterprises.
In many ways I owe my brilliant career to the gentle ministrations of my private editor and guru Sarah Blustain, who was, once again, responsible for clarity of thought and expression.
Thanks are also due to the team at HarperCollins, especially Gail’s smart and interesting assistant, Maya Ziv, and the omniscient copy editor, Stephen Wagley.
I’m not Dante, but Virgils abound. Cleve Jones, Robby Browne, Sue Hyde, Richard Socarides, Rick Jacobs, Rex Wockner, Michael Rogers, and John Aravosis deserve special thanks for passing me along to everyone they thought might help. Almost without exception, they all did.
No one did more for this enterprise than the writer and historian Eric Marcus and journalist Karen Ocamb. Eric’s Making Gay History: The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay Equal Rights was a significant source in almost every chapter of this book. His friendship and support, however, were beyond any measure of significance. Karen’s blog, LGBTPOV, guided me brilliantly through the thickets of the California wing, and her good offices of introduction were just the visible manifestation of her generous spirit. When I met Eric, at the 2009 NGLJA panel on the fortieth anniversary of Stonewall, I was a complete stranger to him. When I met Karen, outside the courthouse door on the first day of trial in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, in January 2010, I was a complete stranger to her. How lucky for me to start this story of the gay revolution, dependent, after all, on the kindness of strangers.