Richard Adams, early figure in gay marriage, dies
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Richard Adams, who used both the altar and the courtroom to help begin the push for gay marriage four decades before it reached the center of the national consciousness, has died, his attorney said Sunday.
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After a brief illness, Adams died Dec. 17 at age 65 in the Hollywood home he shared with Tony Sullivan, his partner of 43 years, attorney Lavi Soloway told The Associated Press.
Adams and Sullivan met at a Los Angeles gay bar called "The Closet" in 1971, but their life and relationship would soon be on display for a worldwide audience.
They were granted a marriage license in 1975, but for years fought in vain to see it recognized by governments and a population for whom the idea of two married men was still strange and foreign. They were subjected to anti-gay slurs even from government agencies.
"They felt that in the end, the most important thing was their love for each other, and in that respect they won," Soloway said. "No government or no law was ever able to keep them apart."
The couple's public life began when they heard about a county clerk in Boulder, Colo., named Clela Rorex, a pioneer in her own right who took the unprecedented step of giving marriage licenses to gay couples after learning from the district attorney's office that nothing in Colorado law expressly forbade it.
Rorex's office became what The New York Times soon after called "a mini-Nevada for homosexual couples."
Among the first six couples to take advantage were Adams and Sullivan, who traveled to Colorado, had a ceremony at the First Unitarian Church of Denver and were granted a license from Rorex, before the state's attorney general ordered her to stop giving them to gay couples. Rorex remained in contact with Adams throughout his life.
Adams and Sullivan's primary motivation in marrying was to get permanent U.S. residency status for Sullivan, an Australian, and they promptly put in an application with what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
They received a one-sentence denial from INS that was stunning in its bluntness.
"You have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots," the letter said.
The INS issued a follow-up response that removed the offending language but gave no ground in its thinking.
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