John and I discussed it and said, “Well, why not?”
Al came to visit, and in walked this brilliant, kind, gentle man. He sat down and talked with us. He pulled out a piece of paper—a blank Ohio death certificate.
He said, “Now, guys, I’m sure you haven’t thought about this”—because who thinks about a death certificate when you’ve just gotten married?—“but do you understand that when John dies, his last official record as a person will be wrong? Ohio will say he’s unmarried. And, Jim, your name won’t be there as his surviving spouse.”
We were speechless.
Al was right. We hadn’t thought about it, and goddamn it, we’d just jumped through all these hoops to get married, and the state of Ohio is going to pretend that we don’t exist. They’re going to erase our marriage from John’s last official record?
It hurt. It was painful, and it was personal.
So John and I, we were never political. We weren’t activists, other than signing checks. But we decided to fight for our marriage and for people like us across Ohio.
We filed suit. We sued the state of Ohio to say the state had to fill out John’s death certificate accurately when he dies and recognize our marriage.
Eleven days after we married, I left home to John’s words, “Go kick some ass, Jim.”
I went to federal court, and I took the stand, and I had the chance to read a statement to Federal Judge Timothy Black. I got to explain to him what John meant to me, what our marriage meant to us. And how harmful and hurtful it was to know that the state of Ohio wanted nothing more than to erase the most important relationship of our lives from his last record as a person.
The state of Ohio kept saying, “But the people of Ohio voted for this, and that carries more weight than your constitutional rights.”
I will always remember how Al, our attorney, replied to that.
He said, “The surest way to abridge the rights of a minority is to allow the majority to vote on it.”
At five o’clock that day, Judge Black released his ruling, starting with the sentence “This is not a complicated case.”
He ruled in our favor and said, “When John dies, the state of Ohio must recognize their marriage on his death certificate.”
John and I had three months more together as husband and husband, and in October of 2013 I read out loud to him from one of his favorite books, Weaveworld, by Clive Barker.
I still remember the last sentence I read: “Lions. He’d come with lions.”
And then he died.
I’m grateful the last voice John heard was mine.
A few months later, the state of Ohio couldn’t let this lie, so they appealed to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. And our case, along with several others, was heard by that court.
About a year after John died, I got a phone call. “Jim, the court of appeals just ruled against you. They have given Ohio the ability to erase your marriage from John’s death certificate.”
I worried every day when I went to the mailbox. I thought, Is this the day I’m going to pull out John’s updated death certificate with the most important relationship of my life erased?
But I wasn’t going to give up. I was going to fight, and I was going to take this all the way to the Supreme Court if I had to.
And that’s what happened. In April I walked into the Supreme Court of the United States of America. I took in this grand room—the marble walls, the marble columns, the red-white-and-blue ceiling, and these dark red drapes with gold fringe that honestly put me in mind of a French whorehouse.
I wondered, Will the court live up to those four words inscribed in the pediment of their very own building, “Equal justice under law”?
I thought about John. I thought about our marriage. I thought about my co-plaintiffs—another widow, parents, couples, children. And I wondered, Are we going to walk out of here knowing that our marriage licenses, our death certificates, our birth certificates matter? Are they accurate, do they hold value?
Now we had to wait for the court to deliberate and write an opinion.
A short two months later, I was back in that courtroom waiting to hear their decision. The chief justice announced that Justice Kennedy would read the first decision, and they read our case number. I startled in my seat, and I grabbed the hands of the friends sitting on either side of me. I listened as Justice Kennedy read his decision.
I struggled to understand the legal language, and I thought, Well, we won…but then I wasn’t so certain. And once it finally hit me that we did indeed win, that the Supreme Court had made marriage equality the law of the land, I burst into tears.
And I wasn’t the only one breaking the usually staid decorum. The typical silence of that courtroom was broken by gasps and tears and sobs.
It was such a beautiful feeling realizing I could walk out and no longer worry about getting that updated death certificate.
Al and I led our group of plaintiffs and attorneys arm in arm through this amazing crowd to the plaza of the courthouse. The air was electric with a palpable sense of joy. As we wound our way through the crowd, it split before us, and we were showered with cheers and tears and smiles and this amazing, utterly happy feeling of celebration.
In that moment, for the first time in my life as an out gay man, I felt like an equal American. And I did it all because I loved my husband.
Now, a bit over a year later, I chuckle when I think about Obergefell v. Hodges. I have to pinch myself that the “Obergefell” is me. And I laugh when I think about all those law students, for the rest of time, having to learn how to pronounce and spell Obergefell.
But mostly I think about John. I think about the love we shared, and I think about the fight that we were willing to fight, along with so many other plaintiffs.
We fought for pieces of paper: marriage licenses, death certificates, birth certificates. When I realize that it was all about a piece of paper, it takes me back to how I ended my vows the day we got married:
“I’m overjoyed that we finally have a piece of paper that confirms what we’ve always felt in our hearts—that we’re an old married couple who still love each other. I give you my heart, my soul, and everything I am. I am honored to call you husband.”
* * *
JIM OBERGEFELL, the named plaintiff in the Supreme Court marriage equality case Obergefell v. Hodges, is an LGBTQ activist, speaker, and author. Jim is the cofounder of Equality Vines, the first cause-based wine label that supports organizations devoted to civil rights and equality for all. Jim is a speaker with Keppler Speakers, and he coauthored the book Love Wins with Debbie Cenziper, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist with the Washington Post. Jim is a member of the board of directors for SAGE, the nation’s oldest and largest organization devoted to advocacy and services for elder LGBTQ Americans. Jim is also a member of the national advisory board for the GLBT Historical Society and the advisory board of the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC, Equality Florida, Equality North Carolina, Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland), the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, the Ohio Democratic Party, the Santa Clara University School of Law, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the City of Cincinnati, and more have honored him. Jim was inducted into the Ohio Civil Rights Hall of Fame in 2018. Foreign Policy magazine named Jim one of its 2015 Global Thinkers, and Out magazine named him to its 2015 Out 100 list.
This story was told on September 19, 2016, at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. The theme of the evening was Going for Broke. Director: Meg Bowles.
After graduating high school, I was looking for a way out of my quiet hometown in Northern California. A military recruiter on campus told me that if I enlisted, they’d pay my tuition to any college I could get into.
I’d be able to travel the world. And if I got lucky, I might be able to blow some shit up.
He sweetened the pot by saying that he would give me a
ten-thousand-dollar bonus by extending a three-year enlistment to a short six-year enlistment. And ten thousand dollars was a lot of money for a nineteen-year-old, so I was sold.
Six months after basic training, I found myself in Kirkuk, Iraq, which is one of the largest oil fields on the planet. Because it’s one of the largest oil fields, it’s also one of the most dangerous places on the planet—it’s a hotbed for terrorism.
Now, my job was mainly to patrol the city around the base’s perimeter, but sometimes I would be posted at the front gates or at checkpoints—patting down potential suicide bombers, hoping to live another day.
Working those “suicide gates,” as we called them, was like this sick lottery that you didn’t want to win.
I knew a few guys who weren’t so lucky.
But for every suicide bomber, for every enemy insurgent, there were a thousand friendly faces in Kirkuk. And one of those friendly faces belonged to a teenager named Brahim.
Brahim was one of a group of kids of all ages that would follow us around while we were on patrol. They would ask us for candy, soda, magazines. They wanted to talk American pop culture.
And I’d always entertain Brahim. I loved having him around. But some of the guys in my squad, not so much, because, after all, we were in a war zone where enemy combatants didn’t wear a uniform.
But in my heart I knew that these kids weren’t terrorists—they were just trying to make the best out of a bad situation, kind of like I was.
This kid Brahim, he reminded me of my younger brother, Rory, back home. They were both very mature for their age. That was to be expected. I mean, Brahim was raised in a war zone, so he’d probably seen things that none of us ever had.
Over the course of that deployment, we had some very deep and intellectual conversations about life and death and religion and politics—conversations you shouldn’t be having with a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old.
When he was a kid, my brother Rory would follow me and my friends around. He’d tag along everywhere. So by the time he was a teenager, he had this very adult sense of humor.
Rory was five years younger than me, but he was my best friend. We did everything together.
And I think in a way Brahim filled that void for me. He was like a little brother.
Brahim worked on our base as a janitor. I thought that was kind of odd, because my brother, who was the same age, was back home going to prom and applying for college.
So I asked Brahim, “Why aren’t you going to school?”
He said, “I don’t have a school to go to. It was bombed out.”
He told me that he was biding his time to become an interpreter for the US Army, because that’s where the real money was. You could make two hundred fifty dollars a week.
See, the US government had this agreement with Iraqis that if you worked a certain amount of years as a translator, once your contract was up, you’d get a visa to come to the United States. The opportunities were there because there was high turnover—not because Iraqis were quitting but because they were all getting killed.
These terror groups, they would execute anyone they suspected of working with the Americans. And sometimes they would kill your family or your friends, just to prove a point.
Brahim said that he understood the risks, but he was willing to do anything it took to feed his family and help end the war in Iraq.
Now, as the deployment went on, I learned a lot of things about this kid. We became really close. He told me about all the friends and family members he’d lost in the conflict. He told me about how he was the sole provider for his household, a house that only had electricity every other week because of the rolling blackouts. The house had piss-poor plumbing, so something as simple as personal hygiene became a struggle.
And I felt partially responsible for that, because after all I was a cog in this war machine that had destroyed this kid’s home country.
So when I got a chance, I went down to the base’s PX, which is like a mini grocery store, and I bought him twenty dollars’, maybe thirty dollars’ worth of soap, shampoo, deodorant, toothpaste—just, like, the bare necessities. The next time I saw him, I presented him with this box of toiletries, and he looked at me with tears in his eyes, like I had just handed him the keys to a brand-new house. And it was an incredibly humbling experience.
I wanted to see how Brahim was living up close. So one day I snuck off base.
He gave me a tour of the city. We hailed taxis, hitched rides, walked for miles. Along the way he pointed out historical landmarks. He pointed toward an ancient citadel that was built two thousand years before Jesus was born. He showed me the tomb of the prophet Daniel from the Bible; he said people of all faiths went to pray there—Jews, Muslims, Christians. He told me how Kirkuk was one of the oldest regions in the history of human civilization.
I could tell how proud of his culture he was. It was pretty impressive stuff.
I told him that Campbell, California, the town I’m from, is famous for inventing the fruit cup.
He didn’t know what a fruit cup was.
We went to a marketplace, and we stopped for kabobs and fresh-baked bread. And I don’t know if I’m romanticizing this meal in my head, but to this day I say that that was the best meal I’ve ever eaten.
I asked Brahim, “How is this bread so good?”
He looked at me and rolled his eyes, and he said, “Because we invented bread.”
A few months later, toward the end of my deployment, Brahim finally got the chance to become an interpreter. And for me that was bittersweet. I knew that he was finally able to provide for his family. But on the other hand, he had just volunteered for his own death.
I knew that I was leaving him to die.
That was a sickening feeling, but what could I do? I wished him the best, and I got on a plane and flew home.
When I got home, things were different. I was different. There was this ultra-vigilant muscle memory that I had.
I remember walking in downtown San Jose with my friends, and I would look at rooftops and windows, searching for snipers. Or I would be at a gathering somewhere, or at a restaurant, and I would be looking at the torso of every single person that walked in the building just to make sure they didn’t have a suicide vest on—it was just second nature at that point. Living like that can be hard—it can make a person angry—and my behavior was straining all my relationships.
I decided I needed a change of scenery, a fresh start, so I moved to Phoenix, Arizona.
I enrolled in college, went to ASU. But things didn’t get better. Actually, for the next five years I struggled with my mental health. I started abusing drugs and alcohol. It was hard to keep a job, because I was in and out of the court system.
There was even a period of homelessness.
But despite weekends spent in the county jail and different homeless shelters, I was a pretty decent student and was able to muscle my way through college.
Then one Saturday morning, I woke up to a dozen missed phone calls and text messages. I called my mother back first, because her name was the first and the last on the list.
When she picked up the phone, there was this fear in her voice that I’d never heard before. Then there was silence. She couldn’t get out what she was trying to say.
But when she did finally speak, she told me that the night before, my brother had been murdered in a carjacking.
I didn’t believe it, because things like that didn’t happen where I was from. I had just purchased plane tickets to fly home to spend the holidays with my family. Only now I was flying home to bury him.
I remember spending that Thanksgiving in a morgue. And then a few days later, I spent my birthday staring at his freshly engraved tombstone.
That Friday, when Rory was killed, he was walking out of a grocery store with his best friend. They were celebrating—he had just gotten a new car, a new apart
ment, a new job. He was about to turn twenty-two. He was starting his adult life.
As he was sitting in his car, two men wearing ski masks, brandishing firearms, ran up on him. They told him to get out, but for whatever reason they didn’t even give him a chance to comply. One of the men shot Rory three times in the chest and face as his best friend watched in horror from the passenger seat.
I know these details because I watched it.
I watched the high-definition security-camera footage during his killer’s trial.
I watched my brother take his last breath, and it’s something I can still see every time I close my eyes.
I had been through a lot in Iraq. I’d survived suicide bombings and mortar attacks and sniper attacks. But Rory’s death caught me more off-guard than any roadside bomb in Iraq ever could.
I was destroyed.
I decided I should move home to be closer to my family, but before I did that, I would have to go back to Arizona to pack up my apartment.
When I landed in Arizona, I got off the plane and exited the terminal. I remember thinking it was odd that the sky was gray and it was pouring rain.
I went straight down to the taxi stand and got into the first taxi I saw.
We were driving down the 202, and I wasn’t feeling very conversational, but the taxi driver didn’t know that. He started up that standard small talk: Where you from? What do you do? Why are you here? That sort of thing.
And obviously I didn’t want to talk about my brother’s murder, so I half lied and said, “Oh, I just got out of the military a few years ago, and I got this new job in California.”
When I said military, he asked if I’d been anywhere special.
I said, “Sure, I’ve been all over the world. I just recently did a year in Iraq.”
He said, “Iraq?”
And when I said Iraq, his tone changed a little bit, and he said, “I’m from Iraq.”
The Moth Presents Occasional Magic Page 29