Recap of historic week on the gay marriage front

This is a historic time to be a reporter covering LGBT news.

I spend a lot of my time now monitoring what is going on in states such as Washington and New Jersey but this week, much of the focus was on California.

On Wednesday, the 9th District Court of Appeals ruled that Proposition 8, the voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage, is unconstitutional.

This has led to all kinds of excitement and cautious optimism among the LGBT community and its straight allies.

At a rally in West Hollywood that night, the mood was jubilant.

On a night like that, this just seemed like the perfect place to be.

“West Hollywood was the first to recognize domestic partnerships,” West Hollywood Mayor John Duran reminded the crowd.

“You’ve got to think about where this came from. Why did we need domestic partnership laws? Because gay men with HIV and AIDS were dying in 1984 and were being denied hospital visitation, being denied the right to inheritance, being denied the right to their children. Because lesbians were losing their kids in custody battles. You’ve got to think about where this came from. Why did we need domestic partnership laws? Because gay men with HIV and AIDS were dying in 1984 and were being denied hospital visitation, being denied the right to inheritance, being denied the right to their children. Because lesbians were losing their kids in custody battles.”

On Wednesday morning, I had driven to downtown Los Angeles from my home in Silverlake for a press conference held by the American Foundation for Equal Rights and was so happy to be able to sit with my friends Karen Ocamb, news editor of Frontiers IN LA and Ted Johnson of Variety’s Wilshire & Washington for the proceedings which I wrote about in this story.

I was also fortunate to be in the front row a few seats away from AFER board members Rob Reiner and Dustin Lance Black so I was able to get comment from them after the press conference.

“This is a very, very big piece of the puzzle,” Reiner said. “This is a very big building block so we’re really happy about it.”

Here is a LINK to my interview with Lance Black.

(Karen, bless her heart,  took a photo of me chatting with Lance Black which I was not aware of so that was cool to see later. She also snapped Ted interviewing attorney Theodore Olson.)

I had to rush home to write a series of stories about the decision for Gay Star News but did a quick interview with my old friend Carol Rock who is news director for KHTS-AM radio station. She wanted to get my thoughts on the ruling so I talked off the top of my head for a few minutes. Here story is HERE.