One afternoon, still during the era of clacking typewriters, rolodexes and manila folders, Jefferson County, Ky. Clerk James Hallahan saw his low-tech civil service office in downtown Louisville surge into modernity. But it wasn’t new technology coming through the door July 6, 1970 that pushed local government toward the future.
It was two people. Of the same gender.
The clerk wasn’t sure what to make of the request. The first thing Hallahan told Jones and Knight was not that Kentucky law forbade them from marrying, but that it required a two-day waiting period before a license application could be turned down, a rule by which he would abide.
So for 48 hours at least, the two women won the slightest of victories for equal treatment. But on July 8 came the official and predictable denial of the request.
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Jones, then 39, and Knight, 25, weren’t about to give up. They went to court, asserting that their 14th Amendment rights to equal protection of the law were violated by being denied a marriage license.
In the courtroom, Hallahan displayed none of the tentativeness he had shown behind the clerk counter, testifying that same-sex marriage, while not literally forbidden in Kentucky state law, could be “dangerous,” cause “breakdowns” in government and slow “the continuity of the human race.”
Researcher Catherine Fosl, writing a few years ago in the Filson Society historical journals, said of Jones and Knight’s quest:
“In a courtroom climate that ranged from raucous to quizzical to aggressively hostile, the women lost their case and a subsequent appeal.”
The plaintiffs -- who to protect their safety used false last names in their lawsuit -- said they went to court to move their community and nation forward.
“We did it to help get a gay liberation movement started,” Marjorie Jones told Fosl in 2012. “To make people realize that we’re human beings the same as (heterosexuals) are.”
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| Among the news stories that day... |
Despite the depth of those issues, the Louisville establishment didn’t take Jones and Knight’s matter that seriously. County Attorney Bruce Miller, then in his first year of a 16-year stint at that post, said that while researching state law before the trial he found Jones and Knight’s case “amusing.”
Reporter Finley employed a common gender double standard of journalism during that male-dominated era, focusing inordinately on the plaintiffs' looks.
His Courier-Journal story the day after the women requested their marriage license described Jones as a “blonde with a bouffant hairdo,” and after writing that Knight had produced photographs of herself working as a dancer in a Louisville club, added “indeed they showed that she is a dancer -- an attractive and scantily attired one at that.”
On the first day of the civil trial, Judge Lyndon Schmid gave a very different fashion review. He ordered Knight to leave the courtroom and change out of her beige pants and return in a dress, putting the case on hold for an hour while she went home.
"She is a woman... and she will dress like a woman in this court," Schmid said, as quoted in a Courier-Journal story by Stan MacDonald. This more on-topic story said the trial included testimony by anthropology professor Edwin S. Segal, who told the court women sometimes marry other women in the cultures of the Nupe, Ibo and Nuer peoples of Africa.
"I can see no disruption to what we now consider normal marital relations... by allowing marriage by two persons of the same sex," Segal testified.
MacDonald's story said about 25 onlookers occasionally chuckled during the trial, drawing a stern order by Judge Schmid for silence.
Knight’s go-go dancer profession wasn’t the only atypical angle for the first lesbian couple in the nation known ever to have filed for a marriage license and only the second same-sex couple to have done so. Attitudes of various people involved in their case often went against what we have come to expect in LGBT rights cases.
For example, Knight told the Courier-Journal she did not want to adopt children with Jones, who was a twice-divorced mother of three, because “I don’t think it would be fair to raise a child in a gay home.”
But from the domestic front of Jones’ second heterosexual marriage came support for marrying Knight. Jones told the newspaper two of her children had been told of her wish to marry a woman and enthusiastically approved, as did her second husband.
Though their case directly spurred the formation of the Louisville Gay Liberation Front, which in turn led to a thriving array of LGBT groups and actions in the city, Tracy Knight and Marjorie Ruth Jones receded into private lives after 1970. Even as Louisville and its Jefferson County suburbs went through fierce gay rights struggles, then adopted anti-discrimination ordinances in the 1990s, there was no documented local public comment from either, at least using the same last names as in 1970.
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| On magazine covers, and in upscale store windows, same-sex unions are mainstream in Louisville today. |
Though Jones spoke to Catherine Fosl for the Filson historical files in 2012, online searches show no statement attributed to her or Knight regarding the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges U.S. Supreme Court ruling guaranteeing same-sex marriage rights, the ultimate victory they sought 45 years before.
Fosl said the women's identities have been better known to students of legal texts nationwide than many Louisville LGBT activists.
Those include same-sex couples who today can walk in Marjorie and Tracy’s footsteps into the Jefferson County Clerk’s office and walk out married.
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Brian Arbenz is a radical justice activist in Louisville.
Interesting piece and about a piece of history I didn’t know.
ReplyDeleteI’ve known a few folks here in MA that were involved in the LGBTQ community over the years, including some previous housemates after college; and good friends of my wife were the first lesbian couple to get married and have children together legally when same sex marriage became law in this state.
Massachusetts was the big breakthrough state. I remember Elaine Noble as the first out gay person elected to a state legislative office. Then the marriage decision. Great people there!
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