By Jeanne Rizzo and Pali Cooper–
San Francisco Gay Pride weekend marks the anniversary of our first date—the one and only anniversary we celebrated from 1989 until 2008.
When Gavin Newsom defied DOMA (The Defense of Marriage Act) and started marrying gay couples on Feb 12, 2004, Jeanne was traveling for work. We made an appointment for March 11 and with our son, Christopher, and family and friends we sang “Going to the Chapel” all the way into San Francisco.
As we picked up our marriage license and were headed to the Clerk’s office, news crews were racing into City Hall frantically yelling that the Supreme Court was shutting down the marriages. We raced to the counter in hopes that we could beat the ruling. But as we watched couples leaving in tears, we knew we were too late … the window was shut.
As cameras flashed and microphones were aimed at us, we sensed our names were on that moment and that we had to stand in for all the gay and lesbian couples who deserved the right to marry yet were formally denied. We waited as a straight couple had their papers stamped with approval. The Clerk had tears in his eyes as he pointed to the sign: “By Order of the Supreme Court of the State of California … .”
That began a four-year journey of being plaintiffs in the California marriage case. The next morning, after being up all night providing declarations, instead of a “honeymoon” we headed to Court represented by NCLR (the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which is now the National Center for LGBT Rights), the ACLU (The American Civil Liberties Union), Lambda Legal, and scores of pro bono attorneys. We spent the next four years identified very publicly as “plaintiffs,” traveling up and down the state with filmmakers Geoff Callan and Mike Shaw screening their documentary, Pursuit of Equality, as the courts meandered around the issue.
When we finally were able to get legally married in California in 2008, Mayor Newsom. true to his word, married us in his chambers. But Prop 8 put us back in a weird limbo that we called the “marriage island’ where thousands of couples lived between legal and suspect until 2015 when the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled in our favor.
Now, in 2025, 36 years later, as senior citizens with all the rights and responsibilities afforded married couples, we remain deeply grateful for all the activists in the LGBTQ+ movement, the media that covered the stories, and the attorneys who fought for us, sacrificing their time and treasure to back the bold act by then Mayor and now Governor Newsom.
Jeanne Rizzo and Pali Cooper, together as a couple for 36 years, were two of the plaintiffs who sued the State of California for the right to marry. Their four-year struggle was documented by filmmakers Geoff Callan and Mike Shaw in the 2005 film “Pursuit of Equality” https://www.pursuitofequality.com/
Published on June 26, 2025
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