Gerry Studds

America's First Openly Gay Congressman

Mark Robert Schneider

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781613765173
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Representative Gerry Studds served the Massachusetts South Shore, Cape Cod, and New Bedford congressional district from 1973 to 1997. During his first decade in the House he helped pass legislation that protected American fishermen from overfishing by international boats and limited President Ronald Reagan's wars in Central America.The defining moment of his career, however, came in 1983, when he was censured by the House for having had an affair with a page ten years previously. On the floor of Congress, Studds confessed to having behaved inappropriately and then courageously declared that he was a gay man—becoming the country's first openly gay member of Congress. Defying all expectations, Studds won reelection in a bruising campaign. For the rest of his career, he remained loyal to his constituents' concerns while also championing AIDS research and care, leading the effort in Congress to allow gays and lesbians to serve in the military, and opposing the Defense of Marriage Act. Once a deeply conflicted man, he ultimately found a balance between his public service and his private life, which included a happy, legally recognized marriage.

1

Wedding Day

“LOVE IS PATIENT, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast . . .” These simple, direct words are spoken by millions of men and women as part of their wedding ceremony. But they had never, until recently, been spoken by two men, or two women, in a legal ceremony in the United States. The arc of the universe was bending toward justice.

“I, Gerry, take you, Dean, to be my spouse, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; until death do us part.” And Dean Hara repeated this vow to Gerry Studds.1

“By the power vested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I now pronounce you spouse and spouse,” minister Tom Green intoned. Historic words—“spouse and spouse.” They were being repeated around the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in mid-May 2004 for the first time in the country’s history.

Studds never thought that he would see same-sex couples marry in his lifetime, and certainly never thought that he would be married himself. The concept of being allowed to marry someone they loved was unfathomable to gay men of Gerry’s and Dean’s age. Ever since the landmark November 2003 Goodridge decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the possibility of getting married was coming close to reality. After months of political and legal challenges, the first day was to be Tuesday, May 17, 2004. Studds did not want to get caught up in the inevitable media circus, so early on the following day, he and Dean filed for their marriage license. The clerks recognized Gerry, the country’s first openly gay congressman, and wished the couple well.

Gerry and Dean had been together and exchanged rings in 1991, a personal commitment with no legal standing. Now they wanted to perform a legal ceremony as soon as possible, and scheduled it for May 24, the same date when Dean’s parents had married.

The wedding was a private affair with only six people present. Tom Green, an ordained United Church of Christ minister and an acclaimed architect, performed the simple ceremony in the Beacon Hill apartment he shared with his partner, David Simpson. Gerry knew Tom and David from Provincetown, dating back to an unhappy period in the summer of 1983. Tom Iglehart, a former student of Gerry’s, took the pictures. Another friend then solemnized David and Tom’s marriage.

Eight years earlier, Gerry had delivered a stirring address on the floor of the House of Representatives protesting the Defense of Marriage Act, which seemed to shut the door on federal acceptance of same-sex marriage. No one in those heady days of May knew whether or not some federal court would enjoin the Massachusetts marriages.

Gerry and Dean, both over six feet tall, wore dark suits and big smiles. Dean chose a solid blue necktie, and Gerry’s sported diagonal multihued red stripes. Seated, they posed for wedding photos with the “flower girl,” their black and white English springer spaniel. Standing, David and Tom flanked the happy couple, champagne glasses raised, as light streamed in. The clouds of earlier in the day had parted.

“He was so much in love,” Dean remembered, years after Gerry’s sudden death just three years after the wedding. “He had been a man desperate for love.” For Gerry, this was a happy climax to a private life that had been lived in the shadows and hidden in plain sight until his forty-sixth year. Dean was twenty years younger than Gerry. They had grown up in different times.

“Oh my God,” Dean thought that day. “I’m getting married! Growing up gay—you couldn’t imagine getting married.”

Yet some people had imagined it, fought for it, and made it happen. Those people stood on the shoulders of the activists of Gerry’s generation, and the commitment of all of them would change the world.

2

A New England Boyhood

THE ALGONQUINS who fished the dangerous waters called it Quonahassit—“long rocky place” in English. That was the language spoken by the pale-faced invaders who arrived in a year they denominated 1614. A negotiation between the white men and natives turned into a fight, and the strangers were driven off in a hail of arrows, but not before one Algonquin was wounded and another killed by the white men’s guns. Three hundred years later, the villagers of Cohasset, having Anglicized the Indian name for the place, erected a commemorative marker on the probable spot of this bloody skirmish between Captain John Smith of the Virginia settlement and the native people.

After this first encounter, the Algonquin people began to die of exposure to European diseases. English settlers arrived at Plymouth in 1620, Wessaguscus (modern Weymouth) in 1622, and Shawmut (Boston) in 1630. In the 1630s, English Puritans established themselves at Bare Cove, which they renamed for their original home and incorporated as Hingham of Massachusetts Bay Colony. More than a century later, at the southern extremity of this settlement, some villagers, seeking a church and town meeting nearer to themselves, organized the separate village of Cohasset, a poor cousin to Hingham.

The Algonquins had named it well: spectacular granite outcroppings marked its unique geography, and threatening coastal rocks would sink many a ship in the following years, necessitating the construction of lighthouses. The townspeople turned to catching lobsters and fishing for herring and mackerel. In the rich forest they found ample supplies of timber for homes, boats, and firewood; inland lay arable land for corn, hay, and vegetables, and space for animal husbandry.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Cohasset was a rural fishing village, connected to the thriving commercial hub of Boston by a railroad. The village green, located between the cove at the Scituate border and the Little Harbor, hosted plain white frame Congregational and Unitarian churches and a town hall. In the 1980s, when a movie company shooting The Witches of Eastwick sought a perfect representative of a quiet New England town, they located in Cohasset.1

As Boston became crowded with new immigrants beginning in the 1890s, some members of its wealthy Brahmin class began turning their Cohasset summer homes into permanent residences. The attractions of the town’s coastline brought visitors for day trips and weekend excursions. Hotels like Kimballs at the cove and the Red Lion Inn in the village still survive today. Circus entertainers including England’s acrobatic Hanlon Brothers made Cohasset their headquarters. Summer theater became the South Shore Music Circus on Sohier Street. In 1894 the Brookline real estate tycoon Henry M. Whitney, who was the genius behind the new Boston subway, set up a golf course on his estate; then a yacht club was established. Along the winding Jerusalem Road, wealthy businessmen constructed magnificent homes. Among them was Clarence Barron, the financial writer who founded the eponymous stock market report. These new estates transformed the humble fishing village’s identity within the metropolitan area, but by the end of World War II, Cohasset, despite its wealthy newcomers, remained a semi-rural fishing village and modest bedroom community.2

This was the town to which Elbridge Gerry Eastman Studds (he abjured the first two names) and his wife, Beatrice, moved with their three children in 1946 from Garden City, New York. Eastman Studds had been born to Colin Auld Studds and Maud Eastman. Colin and Maud had married in 1899 at Nashville’s First Baptist Church. “The bride is the representative of old and prominent families of Tennessee,” gushed a Nashville society column. Maud “has been admired as one of the handsomest and most attractive members of Nashville society.” The groom “is a Virginian and possesses that happy quality of making friends wherever he goes. . . . He occupies the position of District Passenger Agent of the Southeastern Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad.”3

Probably because of Colin’s job, the couple moved to Hempstead, Long Island, a suburb of New York. Soon two sons were born, Colin II and Elbridge Gerry Eastman, named for Maud’s grandfather.4 One of the Eastmans had married a descendant of the illustrious Gerry family of Marblehead, Massachusetts, but there was no direct lineage between other Eastmans and Gerrys. Elbridge Gerry had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Massachusetts delegate to the Constitutional Convention, Massachusetts governor, and vice president to James Madison. His name has remained famous in American history for the politically motivated designs he crafted for a North Shore Senate district. A critic branded one such district a “gerrymander,” for its salamander-like shape, and the term stuck.

Eastman Studds grew up in Hempstead. In 1915, when he was eleven years old, his father died, and the boys were raised by their mother and her brother. Eastman attended Yale University and established himself as a Park Avenue architect. In 1933 he married Beatrice “Bonnie” Murphy, one of four children of Walter and Clara Murphy of neighboring Garden City. Eastman and Bonnie had been introduced by her brother, a fellow student of Eastman’s. Bonnie’s father, Walter Murphy, was a wealthy coffee importer whose fortunes sank in the 1929 stock market crash. Although Bonnie had been raised in affluence, her father died penniless. Bonnie was an intelligent young woman who had been accepted at Smith, but her father disapproved of higher education for girls, so she did not go to college. The Murphys were Catholics, and this untraditional Episcopalian-Catholic marriage flew in the face of socially conservative norms, although neither Eastman nor Bonnie was religious. On May 12, 1937, Bonnie gave birth to Gerry Eastman, in nearby Mineola. The boy’s first name was pronounced with a hard “G,” as in Elbridge Gerry.5

Thus the circumstances of Gerry Eastman Studds’s birth put him at variance with the person he later seemed to be, through no fault of his own. His name, Cohasset address, elite education, skill at elocution, and dignified bearing suggested that he was an old-line Yankee of proud and comfortable stock. He wasn’t. In fact, his bloodline embodied the mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts Yankee nightmare. In 1854, the American or “Know-Nothing” Party captured the state government by warning against a nonexistent conspiracy between the southern slaveholders and the Roman Catholic Church, both of which, to the old-line Yankees, represented un-American tendencies. Gerry Studds was descended from exactly that lineage.

For young Gerry, Cohasset was an idyllic place in which to grow up. Although his earliest years were spent on Long Island, during World War II Eastman moved the family to Birmingham, Alabama, where he had secured a job. Two more children were born, a sister, Gaynor, in 1940 and a brother, Colin Auld, in 1944. Gerry felt himself to be an outsider among his southern schoolmates and remembered his early boyhood years there as miserable.

After the war the family returned briefly to Long Island. Then in 1946 Eastman took a job in Boston and commuted from Cohasset, picking the town sight unseen. They took up residence in a series of rented homes on Jerusalem Road and later on Elm Street, all right near the village. Their first rental on Jerusalem Road, near the cemetery, overlooked the marshy inner harbor; later, on Elm Street, the family lived closer to the village and the inviting yellow brick Paul Pratt Library. In 1952 Eastman purchased a house at 16 Black Horse Lane, which was to remain the family home throughout Gerry’s congressional career.6 This colonial house on a quiet lane seemed unprepossessing enough from the street, but Eastman built an attractive addition. The side of the building faced a saltwater tidal marsh, and to the rear lay a wood. The Studds family did not move there until Gerry was away at boarding school, but he entered young manhood with the sense of having a permanent home and loving family.

Gerry attended fifth and sixth grades at the town’s only school, on Ripley Road. Cohasset was still an intimate village of only 3,700 in 1950, with most of its land dedicated to forest and farm. Some Portuguese American fishermen clustered around the cove, and most of the Yankees worked as farmers and tradesmen. The big estates may have made Cohasset look rich, but it wasn’t.7

The cove, where the lobster boats lay at anchor, was a short walk past the village. For two summers, young Gerry apprenticed himself to an old lobsterman. Gerry would peg the lobsters as the old man removed them from their traps. Together they harpooned tuna, swordfish, and sometimes even a shark. Then they would retire to the old mariner’s quarters, where he would regale Gerry with tales of the sea. The old man had shipped as a cabin boy from Marblehead to Hawaii and later sailed to Cuba once by himself. “There’s other kinds o’ knowledge that you don’t learn at college,” the old salt rhymed. Gerry wrote to his Long Island grandmother, informing her that he wanted to be a lobsterman too when he grew up. “Be careful,” Gerry’s parents warned him. He didn’t understand what they meant until many years later, and he felt hurt and confused that his parents seemed to distrust his dear friend.8

Gerry remembered his father as a “quiet, gentle, and unassuming man, without the hard, competitive edge necessary to flourish in business.”9 He was a capable architect but apparently delivered such thorough service that he spent too many uncompensated hours with contractors and homeowners. Gerry’s mother was loving and sociable, an avid gardener. Having been raised among the elite, Bonnie had grown up with a cook, but as a wife and mother had to learn to run a household herself. Socially correct to a fault, Bonnie and Eastman dressed properly for cocktail hour and dinner.

They wanted the best for their children, especially for their firstborn, for whom they purchased Brooks Brothers clothing, an expense they denied themselves. They joined the yacht club, and Gerry learned to sail. The house was more than Eastman could afford, until his mother moved in and paid off the mortgage with the proceeds from the sale of her Long Island home. Gerry sensed that his parents’ fortunes had declined, and that they had invested their own aspirations in him. Throughout his life Gerry worried about money. Like Cohasset itself, Gerry Studds looked richer than he was.

Gerry excelled in school and suffered for it socially. He had been moved ahead one grade, and began committing deliberate errors, the better to fit in with his peers. For seventh grade, his parents obtained a scholarship for Gerry to attend the Derby Academy in Hingham, where academic achievement was prized. Nonetheless, Gerry’s lasting memory of the school was of its tedious dancing classes conducted by a prudish octogenarian; already he was a rebellious personality constrained by the strictures of conformity. Gerry played with neighborhood friends, among them Lew Crampton and Barbara DuBois, who joined the Studds family on Christmas Eve to sing Handel’s Messiah around the piano. Over the years, the Black Horse Lane home became a gathering place for Gerry’s companions. Gerry, Gaynor, and Colin lived harmoniously with happily married parents, and the siblings remained friends throughout their lives. As Gerry concluded eighth grade in 1950, his parents obtained for him another scholarship. Their intellectual, nautical son had been accepted at the distinguished Groton School.

Groton

Studds remembered Groton as “close to heaven on earth.”10 He never described the United States Congress, or any other institution with which he was associated, in remotely the same terms. The school was set on four hundred acres in the town of Groton, thirty-five miles northwest of Boston. Its campus was arranged in a circle around a common designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. An American version of an English prep school, this was a place for the academic elite. Its graduates included Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dean Acheson. Dormitory living was barracks-like so that no boy could flaunt his wealth, a tradition for which Studds was duly appreciative. Its Latin motto emphasizing public service guided headmaster John Crocker and the school’s teachi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Wedding Day
• 2. A New England Boyhood
• 3. “Bored with Trivia and Impatient with Stupidity”
• 4. With Gene McCarthy in New Hampshire
• 5. Studds for Congress
• 6. The Sacred Cod
• 7. The Congressman in the Closet
• 8. The Mashpee Wampanoag and the New Bedford Portuguese
• 9. Knocks on the Closet Door
• 10. “The President Has Certified That . . . Black Is White”
• 11. The Fisherman’s Friend Caught in a Net
• 12. A Gay Man Runs for Congress
• 13. Plague of Silence
• 14. Studds versus the Contras
• 15. Provincetown
• 16. Spilling Oil, Spilling Blood
• 17. Gay and Lesbian Warriors
• 18. Gerry Gerrymandered
• 19. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and a Memorable Address
• 20. Saving the Whales . . . but Not Much Else
• 21. A True Defense of Marriage
• Epilogue
• Interviews
• Notes
• Index