In the spring of 2009, I knew three things about Edith Windsor. First, she was a math geek, an apparent computer genius who had worked for many years as a software programmer at IBM. Second, she had been hit with a huge estate tax bill after her spouse, Thea Spyer, had died. And third, she was hard of hearing.
That third fact was the reason I walked four blocks from my West Village apartment to hers on the morning of April 30. Edie and I had never met, but we had spoken the day before about whether I would be willing to help her file a lawsuit to get those estate taxes back. She was having trouble hearing me over the phone, so I said, “Why don’t I just come over and see you tomorrow? We can talk about it in person.”
The next morning, I walked to her building, one of Manhattan’s massive 1950s white-brick complexes just north of Washington Square Park. The doorman sent me up, and as I knocked, I was expecting to be greeted by a nerdy elderly lesbian in a flannel shirt and comfortable shoes. But when Edie opened the door, I stared at her, dumbfounded. She was a knockout—a slender, impeccably dressed woman with a blond bob, a string of pearls, and perfectly manicured nails. It took me a moment to compose myself, but after Edie’s “Come in,” I followed her into the apartment.
And then I was dumbfounded all over again. The apartment looked exactly as I remembered it from the summer of 1991, the first time I had been there.
I was twenty-four then, just starting to come out as a lesbian, and for the first time in my life, I was seriously depressed and anxious. I had asked around for therapist recommendations, and one name kept popping up: Thea Spyer. I didn’t know Thea from a hole in the wall, but she had a reputation as a talented and caring psychologist who understood “gay issues,” so I called her to set up an appointment. I saw Thea for only two sessions, right in that very apartment, before moving to Boston later that summer.
Eighteen years had passed since then. But when I walked into Edie’s living room, it was exactly the same as I remembered it from those two therapy sessions so long ago. And as I looked at the chair where Thea had sat while I, sitting across from her, had poured out my fears, my heart began to pound.
“I’m sorry,” I told Edie. “I need a minute.” I had known, of course, when I was walking over that this was the same apartment where I had met with Thea, but I did not expect to feel it so viscerally; walking into that room felt like returning to the scene of an accident, and I experienced emotions that I had not felt in years. I took a deep breath and told Edie, “I’ve actually been here before”—and then I told her why.
In the summer of 1991, I had just graduated from law school at Columbia University and was living in a tiny one-room studio apartment at 80th and Amsterdam while studying for the bar exam. My parents had flown in for a visit from my hometown of Cleveland on the last weekend in June—coincidentally, the weekend of New York’s Gay Pride Parade (as it was then called). On that Sunday morning, as my parents made their way through Manhattan to my apartment, they found themselves having to navigate around the parade.
My mother happened to see then–Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, the mother of one of my college roommates, riding in the parade in support of gay rights. By the time she and my father got to my apartment, she was in quite a state about the whole thing.
“I can’t believe Ruth Messinger would actually join in a gay parade,” she said.
“Okay, Mom,” I said. “Enough.” For about a thousand reasons, this was not a conversation I wanted to have with her.
My mother ignored me and kept going, criticizing the very idea of a “pride” parade: “It’s just horrible seeing all these mobs of gay people marching openly in the streets.”
“Mom, enough already,” I told her. “I don’t want to hear this.”
But she continued, “Well, I’m just saying, I think it’s horrible.” And that was about all that I could take.
“Stop!” I snapped. “Just stop it! Enough already!” Now she turned to look at me, her eyes narrowing.
“Why do you want me to stop?” she asked. “What’s the matter? Are you gay or something?”
I stared at her, shaking. I had started seeing my first girlfriend only a few months earlier, but I had known for much longer that I was a lesbian, so this was a moment I had been dreading for years. I was trembling, scared of how my parents might react, but now I was angry as well.
“Yes,” I told her. “I’m gay.”
My mother did not say a word. She simply walked to the edge of the room and started banging her head against the wall. Bang. Bang. Bang.
I watched for a moment in complete shock, and then somehow, in one of the saner moments of my life, I managed to turn and walk out of my own apartment. My mother’s reaction was so over the top that there was no way to engage with her. So I left and went to a friend’s place a few blocks away to try to calm down. I had known that my mom would not be happy about this news, but her reaction was even worse than I had expected. And it only served to confirm my fears about what my life would be like now that I had finally admitted out loud that I was gay.
For a newly out gay person in 1991, there was little reason to expect that a normal life was possible. This was pre-Ellen, pre–Will & Grace—a time when most gay characters in Hollywood movies tended to be sad, lonely, or dying, or all of the above. The AIDS epidemic was raging, the antigay Religious Right was gathering steam, and laws still on the books in many states made sexual relationships between gay people a criminal offense.
Ever since high school, I had suspected that I might be gay, but I couldn’t really confront the issue until my third year of law school, in part because I was terrified of the very reaction that my mother had just had. The consequences seemed clear: Being gay meant losing the love and support of your family. It meant never being able to get married or to start a family of your own. It meant living a covert life on the fringes of society, a life where none of the promises of a happy, secure adulthood applied. I didn’t feel empowerment or relief when I came out, I felt depression and despair. And my mother’s reaction sent me into a downward spiral.
And then I went to see Thea Spyer.
When I walked into her apartment for our first session, just a few weeks after the incident with my mother, I was immediately struck by Thea’s commanding presence. She had a Hepburnesque high-cheekboned beauty and a regal bearing. She was also a quadriplegic. Thea had been diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of multiple sclerosis back in 1977, and by 1991 she was using a wheelchair and had only limited use of her hands. Yet even though her body was weak, she exuded strength, calm, and self-assurance, three qualities I had in very short supply at that time.
In that first session, I told Thea about my deepest fears: that I would never have a normal life, a successful relationship, close ties with my family, or a family of my own. For years, my mother and I had talked almost every day, but since the episode in my apartment, we had not spoken at all. I missed her terribly, but there did not seem to be any way to bridge the enormous rift my coming out had created between us. And even though I had finally allowed myself to become involved with a woman, I had no expectation that my current relationship would last. It seemed self-evident that by admitting I was gay, I had scuttled any chance of ever being at peace with myself. I had never felt so alone, and I saw no way to make it better.
And then Thea told me about her own long-term relationship with a brilliant mathematician named Edie. She and Edie had been together for twenty-five years by then, living together as a committed couple through thick and thin, in sickness and in health. Their relationship had started in the 1960s, pre-Stonewall, at a time when it was even more difficult to be gay. But they had persevered and continued to love each other through the decades, building a stable and joyful life together. It is unusual for a psychologist to talk so much about herself or her spouse during a therapy session, but Thea’s message to me was clear: it was possible to have a fulfilling relationship and a happy life, even if you happened to be a lesbian. She and Edie were the proof.
Thea’s words gave me the comfort I desperately needed. I only saw her for one more session before moving to Boston, but I never forgot the sense of relief I felt after talking with her. At last I had heard from someone who knew and could prove that it was possible to create the kind of life I wanted, one that included a lifelong partner, strong family ties, and maybe even children of my own one day.
Eighteen years later, when I walked into Edie and Thea’s apartment, I had created that life for myself. I had a fascinating job, a close relationship once again with my parents, a loving wife named Rachel, and our amazing son, Jacob—my life was full of fulfillment and purpose. I had everything that I had ever wanted, and Thea Spyer was the one who had first given me the strength to think it was possible.
So that morning in 2009, as Edie Windsor described her situation to me—her forty-four-year relationship with Thea, the marriage they had celebrated when they were in their seventies, and the federal government’s refusal to acknowledge that relationship—all I could think was, I will do this for Thea. In Yiddish (which I had grown up with since my maternal grandmother, Belle, was fluent), the word bashert means, in its most basic sense, “it was meant to be.” In other words, it was as if God had dropped this case in my lap as a way to pay Thea back for helping me so much through some of my darkest days.
GROWING UP IN Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1970s, I never thought that I would turn out to be gay. In fact, for a long time I did not even know what gay meant. But I did always know that I would become a lawyer.
For one thing, from the moment I started talking, I apparently never stopped. When I was very young, my mother wrote letters to her brother, Benjie, who was then serving in the Peace Corps in India. Her descriptions of me tended to focus, with love and pride, on my loquaciousness and assertiveness. From July 1969, when I was three, she kvelled: “Robbie can recite the alphabet as well as give a rousing rendition of ‘Ducky Duddle.’ . . . She plays with five-year-old kids and all I ever hear her say is, ‘Now it’s my turn.’ ”
August 1969: “Robbie, especially, enjoys being in the limelight. . . . She thinks she’s a real big shot and her mouth supports her.”
July 1970: “Robbie is a real doll. You have to converse with her to appreciate [it]. . . . If she lets you get a word in, that is.”
Grandma Belle noticed this too: “Robbie is a doll and bright as a whip. I asked her to please stop talking for fifteen minutes, and she answered, ‘I can’t, Grandma. I’m a big talker.’ And she surely is. On & on & on.”
So I liked to talk. And I had heard that lawyers got to talk a lot as part of their jobs. With that in mind, at the mature age of twelve, I plotted out the rest of my life. We then lived in a suburb of Cleveland, but my mom had a subscription to New York magazine, and after flipping through the latest issue one day, I became a girl on a mission—I decided that I would move to New York City one day and become a lawyer.
Actually, I was pretty logical about it. First, I decided that I would have to go to an Ivy League college, and then I would move on to law school in New York. Twelve-year-old kids—especially those who talk as much as I did—come up with a lot of silly ideas. But what is more than a little frightening is that this is exactly what I ended up doing. (The fact that Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed by President Reagan to be the first woman Supreme Court justice three years later when I was in high school only strengthened my resolve.)
I am sure my parents did not expect me to follow through on my grand pronouncement, but they did encourage my brother, Peter, and me to think independently. My mother especially was very curious about the social issues of the day. Mom was involved in the women’s movement of the 1970s and belonged to a consciousness-raising group. She also wanted to expose us to as much art, music, and culture as she could. One day in 1981, she exposed me to something I’m sure neither of us expected.
I was fourteen that spring, and Mom brought me along to a former synagogue in Cleveland Heights, where a group of women were installing the feminist artist Judy Chicago’s famous piece The Dinner Party. The installation is huge—a triangular banquet table measuring forty-eight feet long on each side, with dozens of place settings and hundreds of engraved floor tiles all representing different women throughout history. Whenever it was exhibited in a new venue, Chicago enlisted numerous local feminist volunteers to help set it up. My mom is not exactly a do-it-yourself type, but she was eager for us to participate in what was a great artistic happening.
The only thing I remember from that day is all the butch women wearing tool belts (literally). Everywhere I looked, there were women carrying hammers, pulling wrenches out of leather pouches, whipping out tape measures. I had never seen anything like these women. I was definitely exposed to something new that day, and it made me self-conscious, uncomfortably so.
From that point on, I was aware that there was something different about me, something that needed to be hidden. By the time I was in high school, a lurking fear had taken root: What if I turn out to be gay? I could not bear that thought, so I just kept pushing it down as deep as it would go. Even though my parents never made negative comments about gay people, I knew that they would not be happy if I turned out to be a lesbian. So I tried to change and I tried to hide. I dated guys throughout high school. Ironically enough, my high school prom date, a guy named Aaron Belkin, would also turn out to be gay. Later, he became an activist for LGBT rights, one of the key players behind the 2010 repeal of the U.S. military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. There must have been something in that prom punch. Or maybe it is not surprising that two of the few gay kids in a graduating class of ninety students would be drawn to each other. Unconsciously, perhaps, we sensed each other’s secrets.
Despite my fear of exposure, or maybe because of it, I was even more driven to succeed academically, to be part of the exciting world I had dreamed of since I was young. And just as I had planned so carefully at the age of twelve, I set off for Harvard in the fall of 1984. Upon arriving in Cambridge from the hinterlands of Cleveland, however, I initially found myself intimidated by the hordes of East Coast private-school girls—one of whom, a young woman from New York City, asked me in all innocence whether Woody Allen films ever made it to Cleveland movie theaters. My new classmates all seemed able to read Kant in the original German, planned someday to be president or secretary of state, and seemed not to have an iota of self-doubt. Navigating my new social life was difficult enough, even without the additional layers of confusion and anxiety about the possibility that I was gay.
Every time that I had a crush on a girl, my fear about my mother’s reaction to my lesbianism intensified, even though I still did not have the nerve to actually go out on a date with a woman. If only I could have worried less about what others, even my mother, thought of me and more about learning who I was. If I had expended half the energy on dating women that I did on fearing what my mother might say about it, I would have had a much better time in college. But I was paralyzed not only by my own shame but also by a realistic assessment of the consequences that could result when a gay person was honest about who she was.
There was one story going around campus that epitomized my fears. I knew a sophomore who had lived a seemingly charmed life, attending Manhattan’s best private schools while growing up in a wealthy, sophisticated New York family. Yet during her freshman year at Harvard, when she told her mother she was a lesbian, her mother (with whom she had been very close) responded by disowning her, cutting her off both emotionally and financially. Several people told me this story, and each time it intensified the sick feeling that I had in my stomach whenever I thought about telling my own mother. I also heard of other students who had been forced into so-called reparative therapy by their parents to “cure” them of their homosexuality. Most of those people had not chosen to come out, had not shoved their “lifestyle choice” into other people’s faces. They had hidden, like me, and still they had been found out. In other words, there were very real reasons to be afraid.
In fact, my anxiety during college became so acute that I was not sure I would ever tell anyone I was gay. I wondered whether it might be possible just to marry a nice man and make do. But in my heart of hearts, I knew such a false marriage would not only be terribly unfair to my theoretical husband but also doomed to failure.
I could not think my way into a solution, my first and favorite way of dealing with problems. And following my feelings to solve the issue was completely unacceptable. The trade-off of certain social jeopardy versus possible emotional fulfillment and love was simply not worth it for me. Instead, I chose my familiar habits of caution and repression. I just boxed up my feelings and hoped they would somehow disappear. They did not, of course. Instead, I fell in love with a classmate I’ll call “Kate.”
Kate and I met freshman year, and there was an instant connection between us. We spent hours together—talking, studying, arguing politics, and figuring out the world’s woes. By the end of freshman year, we knew that we wanted to room together as sophomores. I was falling hard for Kate but could not admit it, even to myself. Instead, I would lie awake at night thinking, If only Kate were a guy, everything would be so much easier. That is as close to self-awareness as my mind could manage.
Throughout my sophomore year, my feelings for Kate deepened as we lived and studied together, becoming almost inseparable. In the spring of my junior year, having declared Russian history and literature as my major, I spent a semester studying in Moscow. Being in the Soviet Union at that time was an incredible experience. Perestroika was just beginning and I had a front-row seat to history in the making. I was lucky enough to become friends with extraordinary members of the Russian intelligentsia—dissidents, artists, and Jewish refuseniks. It was heady stuff for a young woman who had grown up in the Cleveland suburbs.
When I came back to the States, I could not wait to see Kate. I was so excited to reconnect with her, but when we met again she broke my heart. That first evening as we sat on the roof of her building, Kate told me she was dating someone. And that someone was a woman.
I listened to Kate’s news and felt my heart shatter. And the worst part was I could not even let myself, much less Kate, understand that my heart was breaking. Yet even if I did not understand what I was feeling, I nonetheless felt it: wave after wave of grief, rage, disappointment, and frustration. It is hard to explain to people who have never had to hide a key element of themselves how corrosive it is. It is not simply that you do not allow others—your family, your friends, your neighbors—to truly know you. It is also that you give up on knowing yourself. And you give up on that which makes you most human: your capacity to give and accept love. From that hurt and corroded place in my soul, I only knew that I had come back from the Soviet Union to find Kate and that she had rejected me. Or at least that is how it felt to me at the time—not that she had found love, but rather that I had lost it.
And, in that vein, I retaliated. The Cold War might have been thawing internationally but, on a personal level, I chose the nuclear option. On some level I must have believed that Kate and I had a tacit agreement. We would be each other’s primary person but we would pretend otherwise, dating boys neither of us took seriously. Kate had unilaterally violated that agreement. She had chosen someone else—someone female who was not me.
Rather than acknowledge that truth, I attacked. All my years of anger and frustration became focused on one target: Kate. My feelings were not wrong, hers were. Sobbing and screaming, I told her that what she was doing was wrong, hurtful, and incredibly damaging. What I did not do was explain why I was so upset. I could not name or face the sickening jealousy that surged through me, because there was no reason for me to be jealous. So instead of honesty, I went for moral disapproval.
Kate, in turn, was enraged. Her response to my litany of criticisms was to conclude, not unfairly, that I was homophobic. We had been planning to room together again for our senior year, but she told me flatly that there was no way she could live with a person like me. Our friendship was over. Back on campus, we had to switch around our rooming arrangements—and that’s how the rumor spread throughout Cambridge that Robbie Kaplan was a neoconservative, reactionary homophobe. What else could explain the explosive reaction I had had to the news that my old friend Kate had a girlfriend?
So my final semesters at Harvard were not the best period of my life. Kate and I did not reconcile until two decades later when I ran into her in New York and brought her home to meet my wife and son. I graduated in 1988 never having revealed my secret. I still did not know if I could live as a lesbian, and I felt less inclined than ever to try to find out. My life plan was still on track, however: just as I had envisioned, I enrolled in law school at Columbia University in New York City.
I had a better time at Columbia, making great friends whom I remain close to even today. Yet I still could not admit that I was gay—not even to my gay friends. I was so tightly wound, so self-hating, that nothing happened until almost the end of my third year of law school—and even then only with the aid of copious amounts of alcohol. At long last, while drunk with a friend one night, I finally let myself kiss a girl. I knew immediately that it felt right. I was twenty-four years old and still petrified of coming out publicly, but after a decade of struggling with my feelings, my longing finally outweighed my fear. Once that happened, I knew that there was no going back.
I RELATE ALL this now because, given the dramatic sea change in American attitudes toward LGBT people over the last few decades, it is easy to forget how difficult it was for gay people to come out in the 1980s and early 1990s. It is still very difficult for many people today, of course, especially those who live in more conservative parts of the country. But there is no doubt that times were different back then.
In 1991, the year my mother banged her head against the wall, the AIDS epidemic was raging through the gay community. NBA superstar Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive, and Freddie Mercury of the rock group Queen (who was hugely popular among my Russian friends during the time I spent in the Soviet Union) died of AIDS-related complications, having concealed that he had AIDS until the very end of his life. The antiretroviral drug treatment that would make AIDS survivable for many people was still several years away, making the disease essentially a death sentence, and as the number of cases worldwide hit ten million, much of the national discussion about gay people was tinged with ignorance and hysteria.
That same year, a poll conducted by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center asked whether sexual relations between two adults of the same sex were always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all. In 1973, the first time the poll was conducted, 73 percent of respondents answered that it was always wrong. By 1991, the year I received my JD from Columbia, that number had actually risen to 78 percent. In most of the United States, gay people had no rights or legal protections.
L.A. Law—a program my roommates and I watched obsessively in our first year of law school—showed the first lesbian kiss ever broadcast on network television, to a mixed response: the show’s ratings soared, but numerous advertisers pulled their ads. Very few high-profile people came out publicly that year, though some, like then–Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams (now the Supreme Court reporter for NBC), were outed by gay journalist Michelangelo Signorile out of a sense of growing impatience with closeted people in powerful positions. One could argue (and many did) that outing fellow gay men and lesbians was not simply exposing hypocrisy, it was being complicit in bigotry. But some LGBT activists, watching their friends and lovers die by the thousands, felt that desperate times called for desperate measures. At that time, the U.S. military could and did dishonorably discharge soldiers simply for being gay. As Signorile has since written, “Pete Williams was not personally responsible . . . for ruining the lives of over ten thousand discharged queer servicepeople; he was a spokesperson for an organization that was.”
On May 1, 1991, three same-sex couples in Hawaii attempted to change that. The couples—Ninia Baehr and Genora Dancel, Tammy Rodrigues and Antoinette Pregil, and Pat Lagon and Joseph Melillo—had applied for marriage licenses at the state’s Department of Health the previous December. When the Department of Health turned them down, the couples decided to sue the state for the right to marry. Neither the American Civil Liberties Union nor Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund would agree to represent the couples, despite the efforts of Evan Wolfson, then a staff attorney at Lambda Legal. The couples retained a local civil rights lawyer and litigated the case all the way to the Hawaii Supreme Court. The ripples from that case would eventually grow into a tidal wave, altering the course of gay rights in this country forever. Conservative fear over what was happening in Hawaii would lead not only to a backlash against President Bill Clinton’s stated goal in 1993 of opening the military to gay men and lesbians but also to the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996.
At the same time that these determined couples were fighting for their legal rights, I was going back into the closet. In the late summer of 1991, I moved to Boston to clerk for United States District Court Judge Mark Wolf. When a young male attorney clerking for another judge asked me out, I said yes. He and I dated on and off, despite the fact that I was involved in a long-distance relationship with a woman in New York. I never told him the truth about my New York girlfriend, because I still could not admit to others what I could barely admit to myself. There is no doubt in my mind that the struggles in the LGBT rights movement of the 1990s, and the brave gay activists who fought those battles, laid the foundation for the battles and victories to follow, including marriage equality. While I wish now that I, too, could have been one of those courageous pioneers, I was definitely not ready.
When my clerkship ended, I went to work full-time at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the New York firm where I had been a summer associate during law school. At Paul, Weiss, I knew I would finally get to fulfill my dream of litigating high-profile, cutting-edge commercial cases. (Yes, that was actually my dream.) I settled into the usual routine of a first-year attorney in a big firm, working ninety hours a week, and I loved it. Pretty soon, my girlfriend and I moved in together—not that I told anyone at work, of course. I was content being a closeted New York corporate lawyer with a nineties haircut and an actual closet full of dark suits with padded shoulders.
And that is how things might have stayed if it were not for a particular New York judge, who had something different in mind for me.