Fifteen years ago today was the first legal wedding of a same-sex couple in the United States—moms Hillary and Julie Goodridge. Now they and their daughter Annie are sharing more about their fight to marry and the stress that it caused on their relationship—stress that caused them to divorce five years later. It’s a sobering tale about the price that progress can have on activists and their families.
In “How Making History Unmade A Family: What one family sacrificed in leading the fight for gay marriage in Massachusetts,” Gabrielle Emanuel of WGBH talks with the Goodridges about their experience. Hillary spoke of “the stress of feeling like I have the entire community resting on our being likeable.” Annie, now 23, notes, “It was a lot of stress for all of us, all the time. When you have to be on all the time, it’s hard to turn yourself off.” The moms never spoke about how this affected them, but they separated two years after their marriage, avoiding counseling for fear that word would get out. They divorced five years after that. After years of enduring outrage from the right, who said they were destroying the sanctity of marriage, now they had to endure it from some within the LGBTQ community itself, who felt let down.
I urge you all to go read the piece to learn more about these heroes of the LGBTQ rights movement and what they had to go through in order to create change for themselves and for us all. My own marriage in Massachusetts just a little over two years after theirs owes much to them; I only wish it had not come at such a cost.