As a young women studies major at San Francisco State University, I studied the work of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons. They were already legends. When I met them I felt like I was meeting royalty, and I was. They were part of the legacy of our department, one of the first women studies department in the country, and they engendered the very vision of that program: to put feminist scholarship to work.
Together Lyons and Martin founded the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955, which was the first national lesbian organization. Del helped lead a successful campaign to get the American Psychiatric Association to take homosexuality off its list of mental illnesses. Phyllis became the first open lesbian on the board of NOW in 1973, and although they left the organization in 1979, citing homophobia within it, they came back in 1989 and were no less instrumental in ensuring that lesbian rights were implicit in the mission and work of the organization.
They write together and work together and have been in love for 51 years. And tonight, after the state Supreme Court decision kicks in at 5:00, they are going to be the first same-sex couple to get married in San Francisco, in what will be another historic moment in their lives together. They were the first to wed four years ago, when Mayor Newsom asked the county to stop prohibiting same sex couples from getting marriage licenses, but had that cruelly stripped away. Today they will reclaim it. And they deserve it. As do all the committed couples who have been denied this right for so long. Congratulations to Del and Phyllis and to all you about-to-be-newlyweds out there!
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