Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

The Freedom to Marry Oral History Project

Sean Eldridge

Sean Eldridge on Politics, Communications, and the Freedom to Marry

Interviews conducted by Martin Meeker in 2015

Copyright © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California ii

Since 1954 the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History Office, has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Sean Eldridge dated March 27, 2016. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and properly cited.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/cite.html

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Sean Eldridge, “Sean Eldridge on Politics, Communications, and the Freedom to Marry: The Freedom to Marry Oral History Project” conducted by Martin Meeker in 2015, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2017.

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Sean Eldridge, 2013

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Sean Eldridge was Communications Director (2010) and Political Director (2011) for Freedom to Marry. Eldridge was born in 1986 in Montreal, Canada, and raised in the state of Ohio. Eldridge became active in the campaign to win marriage for same-sex couples after the New York state legislature voted down a law that would have granted the freedom to marry. After that election, he joined Freedom to Marry first as director of communications and then as political director. In this interview, Eldridge discussed the successful effort to win marriage in New York in 2011, engagement with President’s Obama team in advance of his declared support in 2012, and thoughts on what donors seek when funding social change organizations. v

Table of Contents—Sean Eldridge

Freedom to Marry Project History by Martin Meeker vi

Freedom to Marry Oral History Project Interviews viii

Interview 1: November 10, 2015

Hour 1 1

Growing up in family of Holocaust survivors — Sense of social justice and “Tikkun Olam” — Attending Deep Springs College — Transferring and studying political philosophy at Brown — Meeting husband Chris — Intersection between internet and politics — Starting “Legalize Gay Marriage” Facebook group — Difference between marriage and civil union — Joining Friends of LGBT Youth in Boston — Working with Students for Barack Obama — “Transformative digital campaign and power of self-organizing” — Passage of Prop 8 — Attending Columbia Law in 2009 — Defeat of freedom to marry legislation in New York in 2009 — Joining Freedom to Marry — Working with Evan Wolfson — Importance of a single-issue LGBT campaign — “The goal is to win marriage” — Passage of freedom to marry in New York in 2011 — Coordinating with other LGBT advocacy groups — Support from Governor Andrew Cuomo — Fundraising — Need for transparency in campaign finance

Hour 2 19

Working with individual donors Tim Gill and Jon Stryker — Significance of winning in a cultural capital like New York — Garnering President Obama’s support — Strategizing with the White House to repeal DOMA — Appreciating the President “evolution” on the issue — Starting Hudson River Ventures — Building a political network with philanthropic and media leaders — Obergefell decision — Ending the campaign — Marriage to husband Chris — Value of “incremental gains in actualizing political change” — Being part of the “national conservation” — Power of perseverance

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Freedom to Marry Oral History Project

In the historically swift span of roughly twenty years, support for the freedom to marry for same- sex couples went from an idea a small portion of Americans agreed with to a cause supported by virtually all segments of the population. In 1996, when Gallup conducted its first poll on the question, a seemingly insurmountable 68% of Americans opposed the freedom to marry. In a historic reversal, fewer than twenty years later several polls found that over 60% of Americans had come to support the freedom to marry nationwide. The rapid increase in support mirrored the progress in securing the right to marry coast to coast. Before 2004, no state issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples. By spring 2015, thirty-seven states affirmed the freedom to marry for same-sex couples. The discriminatory federal Defense of Marriage Act, passed in 1996, denied legally married same-sex couples the federal protections and responsibilities afforded married different-sex couples—a double-standard cured when a core portion of the act was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013. Full victory came in June 2015 when, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution’s guarantee of the fundamental right to marry applies equally to same-sex couples.

At the very center of the effort to change hearts and minds, prevail in the courts and legislatures, win at the ballot, and triumph at the Supreme Court was Freedom to Marry, the “sustained and affirmative” national campaign launched by Evan Wolfson in 2003. Freedom to Marry’s national strategy focused from the beginning on setting the stage for a nationwide victory at the Supreme Court. Working with national and state organizations and allied individuals and organizations, Freedom to Marry succeeded in building a critical mass of states where same-sex couples could marry and a critical mass of public support in favor of the freedom to marry.

This oral history project focuses on the pivotal role played by Freedom to Marry and their closest state and national organizational partners, as they drove the winning strategy and inspired, grew, and leveraged the work of a multitudinous movement.

The Oral History Center (OHC) of The Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley first engaged in conversations with Freedom to Marry in early 2015, anticipating the possible victory in the Supreme Court by June. Conversations with Freedom to Marry, represented by founder and president Evan Wolfson and chief operating officer Scott Davenport, resulted in a proposal by OHC to conduct a major oral history project documenting the work performed by, and the institutional history of, Freedom to Marry. From the beginning, all parties agreed the Freedom to Marry Oral History Project should document the specific history of Freedom to Marry placed within the larger, decades-long marriage movement. Some interviews delve back as far as the 1970s, when a few gay activists first went to court seeking the freedom to marry, and the 1980s, when Evan Wolfson wrote a path-breaking thesis on the freedom to marry, and “domestic partner” legislation first was introduced in a handful of American cities. Many interviews trace the beginnings of the modern freedom to marry movement to the 1990s. In 1993, the Supreme Court of Hawaii responded seriously to an ad hoc marriage lawsuit for the first time ever and suggested the potential validity of the lawsuit, arguing that the denial of marriage to same-sex couples might be sex discrimination. The world’s first-ever trial on the freedom to marry followed in 1996, with Wolfson as co-counsel, and culminated in the first-ever victory affirming same-sex couples’ freedom to marry. While Wolfson rallied the movement to work for vii the freedom to marry, anti-gay forces in Washington, D.C. successfully enacted the so-called Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. The vast majority of the interviews, however, focus on the post-2003 era and the work specific to Freedom to Marry. Moreover, OHC and Freedom to Marry agreed that the essential work undertaken by individual and institutional partners of Freedom to Marry (such as the ACLU, GLAD, Lambda Legal, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the Haas, Jr. Fund, and the Gill Foundation) should also be covered in the project. Once the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell in June 2015, the proposal was accepted and work began on the project.

After an initial period of further planning and discussions regarding who should be interviewed and for roughly how long, an initial list of interviewees was drafted and agreed upon. By December 2016, 23 interviews had been completed, totaling roughly 95 hours of recordings. Interviews lasted from two hours up to fourteen hours each. All interviews were recorded on video (except for one, which was audio-only) and all were transcribed in their entirety. Draft transcripts were reviewed first by OHC staff and then given to the interviewees for their review and approval. Most interviewees made only minimal edits to their transcripts and just a few seals or deletions of sensitive information were requested. Interviewee-approved transcripts were then reviewed by former Freedom to Marry staff to ensure that no sensitive information (about personnel matters or anonymous donors, for example) was revealed inadvertently. OHC next prepared final transcripts. Approved interview transcripts along with audio/video files have been cataloged and placed on deposit with The Bancroft Library. In addition, raw audio-files and completed transcripts have been placed on deposit with the Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, the official repository for the Freedom to Marry organizational records.

The collected interviews tell a remarkable story of social change, the rate of which was rapid (although spanning more than four decades), and the reach profound. Historians of social justice and social movements, politics and policy, and law and jurisprudence will surely pore over the freedom to marry movement and Freedom to Marry’s role in that for explanations of how and why this change occurred, and how it could happen so rapidly and completely. Future generations will ask: What explains such a profound transformation of public opinion and law, particularly in an era where opinions seem more calcified than malleable? What strategies and mechanisms, people and organizations played the most important roles in changing the minds of so many people so profoundly in the span of less than a generation? Having witnessed and participated in this change, we—our generation—had an obligation to record the thoughts, ideas, debates, actions, strategies, setbacks, and successes of this movement in the most complete, thoughtful, and serious manner possible. Alongside the archived written documents and the media of the freedom to marry movement, this oral history project preserves those personal accounts so that future generations might gain insight into the true nature of change.

Martin Meeker Charles B. Faulhaber Director Oral History Center The Bancroft Library

December 2016

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Freedom to Marry Oral History Project Interviews

Richard Carlbom, “Richard Carlbom on the Minnesota Campaign and Field Organizing at Freedom to Marry.”

Barbara Cox, “Barbara Cox on Marriage Law and the Governance of Freedom to Marry.”

Michael Crawford, “Michael Crawford on the Digital Campaign at Freedom to Marry.”

Scott Davenport, “Scott Davenport on Administration and Operations at Freedom to Marry.”

Tyler Deaton, “Tyler Deaton on the New Hampshire Campaign and Securing Republican Support for the Freedom to Marry.”

Jo Deutsch, “Jo Deutsch and the Federal Campaign.”

Sean Eldridge, “Sean Eldridge on Politics, Communications, and the Freedom to Marry.”

James Esseks, “James Esseks on the Legal Strategy, the ACLU, and LGBT Legal Organizations.”

Kate Kendell, “Kate Kendell on the Legal Strategy, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and LGBT Legal Organizations.”

Harry Knox, “Harry Knox on the Early Years of Freedom to Marry.”

Amanda McLain-Snipes, “Amanda McLain-Snipes on Bringing the Freedom to Marry to Oklahoma, Texas, and the Deep South.”

Matt McTighe, “Matt McTighe on the Marriage Campaigns in Massachusetts and Maine.”

Amy Mello, “Amy Mello and Field Organizing in Freedom to Marry.”

John Newsome, “John Newsome on And Marriage for All.”

Kevin Nix, “Kevin Nix on Media and Public Relations in the Freedom to Marry Movement.”

Bill Smith, “Bill Smith on Political Operations in the Fight to Win the Freedom to Marry.”

Marc Solomon, “Marc Solomon on Politics and Political Organizing in the Freedom to Marry Movement.”

Anne Stanback, “Anne Stanback on the Connecticut Campaign and Freedom to Marry’s Board of Directors.”

Tim Sweeney, “Tim Sweeney on Foundations and the Freedom to Marry Movement.”

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Cameron Tolle, “Cameron Tolle on the Digital Campaign at Freedom to Marry.”

Thomas Wheatley, “Thomas Wheatley on Field Organizing with Freedom to Marry.”

Evan Wolfson, “Evan Wolfson on the Leadership of the Freedom to Marry Movement.”

Thalia Zepatos, “Thalia Zepatos on Research and Messaging in Freedom to Marry.”

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Interview 1: November 10, 2015

01-00:00:04 Meeker: Today is Tuesday, the tenth of November, 2015. This is Martin Meeker interviewing Sean Eldridge for the Freedom to Marry Oral History Project. We are here at his home in New York City. All these interviews begin the exact same way. You just tell me your name, when and where you were born.

01-00:00:26 Eldridge: Sean Eldridge. I was born July 31, 1986, in Montreal, Canada.

01-00:00:31 Meeker: Canadian. I did not know that. Also, tell me a little bit about the family that you were born into. Maybe the kind of work that your parents did, if your mom worked outside of the home?

01-00:00:44 Eldridge: My parents are both doctors. I was born in Montreal, but we moved to Ohio at a young age, because they both got jobs there as physicians. My father was Canadian, but my mother was born in Israel. Her parents were both Holocaust survivors, so she came from a family of survivors. We ended up landing in Toledo, Ohio, so grew up there, and lived in a sort of small suburban neighborhood just outside of Toledo.

01-00:01:11 Meeker: What kind of medicine do your parents practice?

01-00:01:13 Eldridge: Dad is a radiologist and mom was a family physician in a sort of small, rural community.

01-00:01:19 Meeker: You said that your mom’s family were Holocaust survivors. Can you tell me a little bit about how this was taught to you and what kind of impact it had on your upbringing?

01-00:01:29 Eldridge: Sure. My grandfather is still alive. He’s in his nineties, and he’s a survivor. Still lives in Montreal. I think when you have your family come from that background, and you have your grandparents having had that experience and lost most of their family, it kind of ingrains a family with a sense of social justice. I’d say my mother talked pretty openly from a young age about the Holocaust, about what had happened to her family, about sort of the best and the worst of what humans are capable of. So I think without articulating it as social justice, I think she, with me and my siblings, definitely ingrained in us a sense of how fortunate we were to be alive and to be from a family of survivors. Her view of Judaism was very much about the Jewish obligation of healing the world, of Tikkun Olam, and so she spoke about that a lot. I think I thank her, or blame her, for a lot of that sense of social responsibility that she talked about a lot.

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01-00:02:30 Meeker: Was your father Jewish as well?

01-00:02:32 Eldridge: He converted for my mother. My mother came from an orthodox family. He was raised Christian, but it certainly smoothed his marriage and his entrance into her family to convert. He converted before they were married.

01-00:02:45 Meeker: Were you raised in an observant household?

01-00:02:46 Eldridge: Yeah. We were raised conservative Jewish. So I was Bar Mitzvahed. It was definitely part of our lives, but I think for my mother, it was very wrapped up in spending time with family and making sure we understood the history of Judaism and the history of what it meant to our family and to the country of Israel, where she had come from.

01-00:03:09 Meeker: You had mentioned a sense of social justice as part of your upbringing. Were your parents politically active? Did they talk about politics and who they were voting for in presidential elections and so forth?

01-00:03:20 Eldridge: Yeah, it’s funny. They were a bit political, and we certainly talked about world issues, but I think it was always more personal. It was more teaching us to think about, as I said, the phrase “Tikkun Olam,” what our responsibility was. We were a bit political, but I think it wasn’t really much about parties for them, especially not being born Americans. They were excited to get involved in the system, but it was much more about an obligation to speak up and get involved, but that didn’t necessarily mean politics. I’ve become very political in my life, and I ran for office myself. I joked with my mother that I blamed her for making me such a political beast. I don’t think she really saw it as necessarily related to party politics, but really just what one’s responsibility is to the community, and then to the greater world. I think, for her, the cultural blends with the political, which blends with the personal, and she very much articulated charity begins at home. How you conduct yourself with your family is just as important as how you conduct your engagement with the world.

01-00:04:30 Meeker: I imagine their participation in the medical field also related to that.

01-00:04:34 Eldridge: Yeah, it’s a pretty noble profession to get to save lives every day. I think that’s exactly right. I think when you choose to be a medical doctor, your career is probably not separated from your impact. They’re both together. In that sense, they taught me that your career is certainly more than just making money. It’s about the kind of impact you want to have on the world, and

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hopefully finding a profession that matches your values and is something you can be more passionate about than just making a living.

01-00:05:05 Meeker: Were there any local service organizations that they were particularly involved with?

01-00:05:10 Eldridge: Later in life, she got involved more with Planned Parenthood. My mother is the opposite of shy when it came to talking about family planning, and teaching me and my sisters to care about issues that pertain to Planned Parenthood, and to be sort of vocal about family planning. So she was involved with that, and certainly with Israeli causes. They supported some of the international Jewish and Israeli organizations that were out there. But ironically, not as much at the local level. My mother, I think, really valued her impact in the community as a doctor, but then was not the PTA mom.

01-00:05:58 Meeker: You said siblings. Can you tell me who your siblings are and where you fit in the order?

01-00:06:06 Eldridge: I’m the youngest, so I was the baby. I had two older sisters. So, as the baby, probably got spoiled a little by being the youngest. We were all two years apart. My middle sister was two years older, and my oldest sister was two years older than that.

01-00:06:27 Meeker: What about school? Did you go to public schools, private schools?

01-00:06:31 Eldridge: Yeah, went to public school. My parents very much picked the small suburban community I grew up in, called Ottawa Hills, because it had the best school system. You could walk to school. It was a public school, but certainly better funded than a lot of public schools are today. Went to the same school from first grade through twelfth grade. Pretty small school. My graduating class was about seventy students, so everybody knew everybody. A small, tight-knit community. Then, after I graduated from high school, I went to a very alternative college, called Deep Springs College, which is out in California. It is a small school with 26 students, all male at the time, and still is for now all- male. A school very much oriented around service. It’s a Great Books program, but really founded and geared toward people who wanted to get involved in service, whatever that meant for them. Then transferred—all Deep Springs students transfer somewhere—transferred to Brown eventually, and ended up finishing my degree in political philosophy at Brown.

01-00:07:40 Meeker: Tell me a little bit more about high school. I’m interested in the path that set you on to this alternative college. What were you interested in? What kind of

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subjects were you studying, and extracurricular interests that you had that sent you on that path?

01-00:08:01 Eldridge: I was always interested in politics from a young age, and I had some great history and government teachers who really were exciting, and I think their excitement about the issues was contagious. I was part of Model UN. We didn’t exactly have a debate club or anything like that, but we had a speech class, and I always really enjoyed that side of things. I was a runner. I did theater, I did musical theater. I guess you could say I was a performer from a young age. I really chose to go to this alternative school because I think I had a taste of the normal college experience. I would say my parents were pretty flexible and lenient as far as parents go, so I was not so excited about going to college just to get away from them, or party, or experience that freedom. I think they gave me a longer leash than a lot of high school students. So I really chose Deep Springs, which is a school with no alcohol, no substances, and really just pretty incredible peers in an environment that’s really about learning and really kind of a shared seriousness of what college can be if you really want to engage yourself fully. Ended up there, as much as I was excited about Deep Springs, as a reaction to what I thought a normal freshman year of college might look like.

01-00:09:24 Meeker: So this was just a one-year program?

01-00:09:26 Eldridge: It’s a two-year program, but historically, students have gone anywhere between one year and three years, and I was there for one year. Then I took two and a half years off to work, and then finished at Brown later. A lot of Deep Springs students take some time off to work, or sometimes take their time to finish their undergrad.

01-00:09:45 Meeker: Where did you work?

01-00:09:46 Eldridge: I moved to Boston. I worked at a moving company called Gentle Giant Moving Company, and I worked in customer service, and did that for about a year. While I was doing that, met my now-husband, Chris. He was a senior at Harvard. Then when he graduated from Harvard, he was already involved with Facebook at the time and decided to move out to Palo Alto, where it was headquartered, to work there full-time. So I moved with him. I moved to Palo Alto, and then also worked at a small start-up company called [Scalant?] Systems, and worked there pretty much up to when I went to Brown to finish my undergrad.

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01-00:10:28 Meeker: At this point in time, do you have a career path in mind about what you would like to accomplish, what kind of area of work you were interested in participating in?

01-00:10:36 Eldridge: When I was at that age?

01-00:10:37 Meeker: Yeah, sure.

01-00:10:39 Eldridge: At that age, I was very excited about studying philosophy at Deep Springs, and particularly political philosophy. I had some great professors who taught seminars with really a focus on ancient philosophies, so reading Aristotle and Plato and Seneca, and a lot of thinkers who I’d never heard of and thought of in high school. To me, living in that world of ideas and kind of broad questions about political philosophy and community was very exciting. I think at that stage, even when I wasn’t in school, was reading a lot. As much as I was following contemporary politics, was also really enjoying what I knew was going to be a short-lived liberal arts experience and a chance to kind of immerse myself in those books and ideas.

I would say that being out in Palo Alto, and with Chris at Facebook, in 2006 in particular, was really kind of interesting and exciting to see the internet be used in politics at a really early stage. I remember 2006 was one of the first campaign cycles where a lot of groups and candidates were thinking about how to use it. That eventually ended up sparking my husband, Chris, to go work for President Obama, who really wanted to invest in technology and organizing. So I think as much as I was living in the world of ideas, it was exciting to see the intersection of technology, which I had a front-row seat to what was happening at places like Facebook, and also see its involvement not just in party politics, but in issues. I remember in 2006, I started a Facebook group called “Legalize Same-Sex Marriage,” phrasing that Evan Wolfson would not like very much. I was not on message at that point. I think for a little while, it became one of the top ten largest groups on Facebook, and over 100,000 liked it. I remember thinking, wow, this is organic, I didn’t spend any money, I wasn’t affiliated with any organization, but people were using social media to like this group and identify their support for a cause in a way that just wasn’t possible before social media. I remember, not being a political practitioner at the time, but thinking, wow, there’s something powerful here that you can get 100,000 people to associate themselves with something without doing much work at all. I think I had one foot in the world of ideas and one foot in the world of practical politics, and enjoyed doing a bit of both.

01-00:13:13 Meeker: At what point did you realize you were gay?

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01-00:13:17 Eldridge: I came out when I was a freshman, so when I was at Deep Springs. I think once I left Ohio—where I grew up, there were no openly gay people. Now, in retrospect, I know that there were gay people, but no teachers, no politicians, no parents, no role models. Frankly, I think it took leaving Ohio and leaving that small community to really even force the question and think about the vocabulary of coming out and being gay. There was nobody out in our high school. It wasn’t an overtly aggressive or oppressive place. It just wasn’t visible. It didn’t exist. I think when I left Ohio, really thought for the first time about what kind of family do I maybe want to have, or what might this look like, and came out when I was eighteen. I was lucky to have parents who were supportive and the community of Deep Springs that was supportive. Both my parents were very good about it, but I remember that conversation with them, and I remember the sense of fear. I think my mother was supportive, but I remember her saying, “You’re going to have to live in a big city. Life is going to be hard.” “We love you, but we’re worried” was sort of the tone. At the time, she was probably right, but in retrospect, we’ve been fortunate to live in very supportive communities. It’s amazing. That was 2004 when I came out, and it’s amazing how much has changed in a decade.

01-00:15:02 Meeker: It’s interesting talking about growing up outside of Toledo. This is in high school, roughly 2000 to 2004. You didn’t know of anyone around, immediately, who was gay, but certainly, by this point in time, the internet has been invented and reasonably well-distributed. There’s starting to be a lot more content online as well. Not surprisingly, I think gay and lesbian people really cultivate, or put their mark on the web very early on, because the question of the circulation of information is so essential to the reproduction of gay identity, if you will. You didn’t come across any of this? You didn’t do much searching about this?

01-00:15:54 Eldridge: I think I was right on the sort of cusp of that age where it was incredibly easy to find a lot of information. I’m sure that I searched and I looked, but I think a lot of it had to do with vocabulary. I think when you grow up in a community where LGBT role models don’t exist, I think you’re not even sure what you’re searching for, in a sense. I remember, growing up, one of my extracurricular activities is I was on the Toledo Board of Community Relations. A friend of ours worked for the mayor. It was mainly older citizens of Toledo who were on the board, but I was one of the youth representatives that got put on. I remember a couple of the meetings where I spoke up and got impassioned about how the city needed to include LGBT as part of their community relations, and we needed to think about it and consider it. But there was definitely sort of an externality to it. It was talking about something that I think I had begun to look at and consider, but I think that lack of role model just, to me, it didn’t force the question in the same way. I think if you grow up in a community where you have out people, you can perhaps ask yourself, am I more like this person or that person? But because it was relatively uniform in

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the community, I don’t think I spent a lot of time dwelling on the vocabulary of it. Especially because my parents were not conservative or pushy about us having to lead our life in any particular way, sexuality or otherwise, perhaps I was less worried about it, because I didn’t have the sense that I was either hiding something or identifying with something because it was so nonexistent.

01-00:17:54 Meeker: So, 2004, when you graduate high school and you enroll in this college, you come out—I think many regard that year of the nadir of the marriage movement, with the passage of anti-marriage amendments or legislation in ultimately thirteen states. Was this something that you were aware of at the time?

01-00:18:17 Eldridge: Yeah. When you’re a student at Deep Springs, you get the newspaper one or two days late, and the internet was not used too much. It was used a little bit when I was there. When I was at Deep Springs, it was very physically isolated, but also internally focused. So not as much when I was there. When I left Deep Springs and moved to Boston, I was certainly much more aware and much more plugged into current events and what was happening in the world. I definitely remember, early on, when Chris and I started dating—we started dating quickly after I had moved to Boston. I certainly remember a lot of the conversations around marriage and civil union happening, and I definitely remember not knowing what side of the debate that I fell on. We were in New England, so Massachusetts had obviously led the charge, and Connecticut was part of the conversation then. I certainly remember being uncertain of whether I thought marriage or civil union was the right goal. I think it was so early in the conversation that nobody was—I didn’t feel like anyone was sort of lobbying for one side or the other. Marriage was really a new—to me, it was a new idea that that could be an option for the community. I think it took a while to really think about what marriage was from a legal and a civil perspective. I think I was coming of age in a moment where the movement was really thinking about whether this was going to be our goal or not. After a while, certainly supported marriage, and as I said, started this early Facebook group, so I think pretty quickly fell on the side of the freedom to marry. But especially at a young age and not, at that moment, ready to get married myself, not necessarily personalizing it and thinking, oh, I definitely want a marriage rather than a civil union.

01-00:20:13 Meeker: Do you recall any of the arguments on behalf of civil union at that point that were somewhat convincing?

01-00:20:20 Eldridge: I imagine that what I was thinking about at the time was whether marriage was winnable nationwide. It certainly seemed, in places like Ohio, where the anti-marriage laws were passing, that that was not feasible. I think part of what gave me pause was the feasibility of it. I think I had to be educated about

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why civil union wasn’t enough, in multiple ways. I think the sense that some states and some places were creating domestic partnerships that were not actually fully equal. But I imagine that understanding the federal law, and DOMA, and how that fit in, I think that probably pushed me over the edge. The idea that marriage is very much part of federalism, and having that federal recognition mattered for such an enormous part of the laws, and so if we were going to use that vocabulary of marriage for all of tax law and all of the federal lair of equality, then it didn’t really make sense to have something separate and different. I do remember thinking, well, if we go for civil union and that’s what we end up with, we’re going to have to recreate some federal civil union. That seems like we’re going to be creating our own hoops and jumping through hoops to try to have full legal equality if we’re going to call it something different, but we already have marriage, and it already exists at the federal level. To me, that was kind of a no-brainer, that if we were going to have this conversation and this fight as a country, we might as well go for marriage, because the idea of Congress passing some federal civil union system seemed as difficult as winning marriage, so why not go for the full thing?

01-00:22:08 Meeker: In addition to creating this Facebook group supporting marriage—gay marriage as you would have called it at the time—did you get involved in the organized gay movement at any point? Did you participate in any sort of public protests or any public events along the lines of the gay movement?

01-00:22:28 Eldridge: Yeah. My first foray into LGBT activism was when I moved to Boston. I ended up joining the board of a group called the Friends of LGBT Youth in Massachusetts. It was a nonprofit that was affiliated with the Massachusetts LGBT Youth Commission. Massachusetts was more progressive on these issues. The nonprofit helped support GSAs throughout the state, and also organized the Youth Pride in Massachusetts and Boston, which was one of the first, and only, and one of the biggest, I think, at the time. So I got involved. I honestly don’t remember exactly how I got pulled in and got involved, but I think I remember going to one event, a brunch, and definitely being interested in the activism and finding a community around that nonprofit. That was my first engagement.

01-00:23:25 Meeker: Let’s talk a little bit about Brown. After spending some time in California, it sounds like Chris left California in order to participate in the Obama campaign?

01-00:23:34 Eldridge: Yeah, so in 2007, President Obama announced that he was running in February. Shortly after that, Chris left Facebook to move to Chicago to run a good chunk of the online organizing, the my.barackobama.com side of things. That was right around when I ended up going to Brown. My involvement with the campaign was not at Chris’s level, but I had gotten involved with the

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Students for Barack Obama. Ended up meeting with a couple of the students who had created a group even before Barack Obama had announced that he was running, and then ended up teaming up with them when the campaign decided to make it an official part of the campaign. So I managed to stay involved in a volunteer capacity, but a pretty hands-on volunteer capacity, when I was at Brown, and helped them set up what was a fifty-state student organization with chapter leaders at colleges and in states throughout the country. It was actually quite a bit of work. The campaign empowered students to organize with this official blessing in a way that other campaigns hadn’t done before. Once again, I had one foot in the world of political philosophy and ideas, and was taking seminars in, primarily, ancient philosophy, and then the other foot, I was spending my free hours as a volunteer for the campaign, and then flying to Chicago to see Chris, but also to be part of this youth organizing. It was an exciting time.

01-00:25:12 Meeker: What was it that attracted you and Chris to Obama as opposed to Hillary Clinton?

01-00:25:17 Eldridge: I remember us thinking about it a lot at the time, and I think there was a period where we were very open between Edwards and Clinton and Barack Obama, and we didn’t know a lot about Barack Obama or John Edwards at that point, and Hillary Clinton it was hard not to know a good bit about. I can only speak for me. I’m sure Chris would say something similar. I think that Barack Obama, at that time, had shown that he was willing to take tough stances without knowing the outcome on things like the Iraq War, that I think made us feel like he didn’t have his finger to the air in the same way as some politicians had had, and that he’d be willing to fight for the right things, and be a viable candidate and could potentially win. But certainly when he spoke out against the Iraq War, there was no guarantee that that’s where public opinion was going to land. I saw that as a sign that he was willing to lose over something like that and go against where public opinion was at the time for something he thought was right. To me, that was an important sign. On LGBT issues, they were all pretty equal. None of them supported marriage at the time, which certainly was something I thought about and considered, but I think the state of the Republican Party on LGBT issues made us very clear that we were Democrats, and it was hard to even give that a second thought when the Republican Party was pushing such negative anti-marriage, anti- equality initiatives across the country. So that was an easy choice.

01-00:27:06 Meeker: So, November 2008, Obama wins the presidency pretty decisively, and clearly the digital campaign was, in many ways, transformative. Many people credit that with ensuring the win, I think. I know that you were involved, as you mentioned, around student organizing, but through your relationship with Chris, knew much more the broader campaign. Were there kind of lessons learned that you and Chris, or you and your friends, would have talked about

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at that point in time about what came out of the digital part of the Obama for President campaign that could then be perhaps utilized for other campaigns?

01-00:27:53 Eldridge: I think the power of self-organizing that came out of the campaign was pretty important and pretty unique. Now, it’s easy to say that it was unique, because we were young and it was one of the first campaigns of our adult lifetime, and so to us, it was hard to compare to other campaigns, because we were pretty young. I think that the risk that the campaign took in empowering people to self-organize and create these chapters, not only at colleges, but within communities, and not rely just on the full-time staff to put an event together, to do a phone bank, to knock on doors, but really to create these tools where you could do your own call center, or you could do your own house party, or you could do your own event. That, I think, was definitely a risk, because when you empower people to do their own thing, you don’t get to control the message, always. You don’t get to make sure it’s the kind of event that you would want it to be as a campaign. But you also, I think, unleash this incredible political power, where people get to take it into their own hands and channel their excitement into something that’s substantive to them.

It’s funny. When you look back, I think a lot of folks would say that the power of the internet in Barack Obama’s campaign was a lot about fundraising. It’s certainly true that the small-dollar contributions were historic and that it added up to a lot of money, and I think mattered a lot in terms of competitiveness. But I look back with a little nostalgia, because I think that the campaign managed to make it about a lot more than money. Even though those small contributions added up to a lot, I also know that the phone calls and the door knocking and the student organizing and the community organizing made a big difference, in the primary and in the general election. I say nostalgia, because I think if you look at contemporary politics in 2015 today, a lot of the power of the internet is seen in the lens of fundraising, but not as much in terms of self-organizing and other activities. I think that that loses a lot, and people get tired of being asked for the same thing. I think one of the powers of the Barack Obama campaign was the fundraising was there, but there were also a handful of other things that you could do that were substantive to be helpful. I think people want that. There’s a hunger for that.

01-00:30:24 Meeker: At the same time that Obama was elected president, Prop 8 passes in California, followed by a lot of soul-searching and some in-fighting in the gay movement about what went wrong, what can be done next. How did you feel about the loss in California? Did it sting you here out in the East Coast in the same way that it did a lot of people in California?

01-00:30:50 Eldridge: I was in Providence, I was at Brown, on election night, and it was very bittersweet. I was extremely excited that Barack Obama had won. Although I would say that the polling was looking good, so I wasn’t shocked, but I was

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very excited, and it was certainly a historic campaign. But I felt a little isolated, because even at a place like Brown, people were, for the most part, excited about Obama’s victory, but it kind of felt like you couldn’t share in that in the same way, because you were mourning this loss of Prop 8. It’s funny, because at that point, I was not incredibly involved, so it wasn’t a personal loss in the sense of being involved in the campaign, but it was definitely a personal loss in the sense of knowing that that was going to make the marriage movement and equality more difficult. I think President Obama really won on a wave of optimism, and I think that the Prop 8 loss was, in many ways, kind of the abrupt reality check within a few hours of his victory. You could step back and say there were a lot more reality checks that were to come after he did win. That despite the fact that our country was willing to elect someone named Barack Hussein Obama, and aside from the fact that someone like him could win the Iowa caucus and then win the election, that we still weren’t there on something like marriage equality. And, you know, he wasn’t there at that point. There was definitely work to be done.

01-00:32:25 Meeker: So you graduate Brown. What year?

01-00:32:28 Eldridge: Two thousand nine.

01-00:32:31 Meeker: May of 2009?

01-00:32:32 Eldridge: Yup, and had, at that point, been accepted to Columbia Law School, and then enrolled there in the fall.

01-00:32:40 Meeker: Tell me about your decision to go to Columbia Law.

01-00:32:43 Eldridge: I had applied to many law schools, and Chris had been excited about living in New York, and I, being a little bit older than most law school students at that point, was more interested in starting to build a community. I had thought about going to Stanford Law and was admitted there. Did not want to return to Palo Alto. Really liked the idea of building a life on the East Coast, and I think went to law school knowing that I wanted to be involved in advocacy and politics. It was certainly an exciting moment not too long after Barack Obama’s victory, but I didn’t know exactly what kind of role that would be, and I think law school was a safe way to start a career, but also hopefully equip myself with a skill set that I could use for a lot of different things. I always imagined, and I still think it’s true, that having a law degree can equip you to not just be a lawyer, but to advocate to change the law, to work in advocacy, to work in politics, to work in a lot of different fields. I did not know exactly what I was going to do with the degree, but it felt like a good next step.

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01-00:33:59 Meeker: But then, I understand, life intervenes, right? I guess it was, what, December of 2009, so just three or four months into your education, the New York State legislature—perhaps unexpectedly, perhaps expectedly—votes down the law that was proposed to legalize same-sex marriage in the state.

01-00:34:25 Eldridge: In the fall of 2009, when I enrolled at Columbia Law, although most 1L students have no free time and you have to spend a lot of time studying, I knew that Chris and I wanted to be more involved in the community in New York, and that if I had any extra bandwidth, that I did want to be involved in LGBT advocacy and marriage advocacy and see how we could be helpful. I know that Chris was certainly interested in the lessons after the Obama campaign of where he could be helpful and supportive, and for me, it was an exciting time, and a bit of a disappointing time after Prop 8, where I knew there was a lot of work to be done. So what I envisioned at the time was I’d be a law school student, but maybe I could join a board or a committee and be involved part-time and supportive of the movement. So I spent a lot of the fall, in my limited free time, going to some events and trying to meet one-on-one with organizational leaders and see where I, and Chris and I, could plug in and get involved and be helpful. I met with the head of Pride Agenda. I met with some of the other local organizations, and met with Evan Wolfson at Freedom to Marry, and really was just envisioning finding a part-time role to be supportive and be helpful. And at the same time, started to follow much more closely the New York campaign that was leading up to the vote in December.

In December of 2009, when that vote was happening, I was half studying for my final law school exams in my first semester, and half watching on my laptop as the vote was live streaming in the senate. I was reading very mixed news reports about how optimistic or pessimistic we should be. There certainly was, in some of the media, optimism and arguments that we could be successful. Then I watched the vote unfold. I watched us lose. It stung. It stung more than I think I thought it would. I wasn’t really sure why we had lost. I knew that New York was a more progressive place. I knew that so many of the different organizational leaders and activists and donors were in New York. So I was both disappointed and a little bit confused about what had happened. Because I had already started to develop some of those relationships, spoke with people like Evan, spoke with a couple of the other leaders, and quickly understood that we had to do better as a movement. That we hadn’t put together a campaign that was successful. You can blame any number of the politicians, which would probably be fair, but that we weren’t there yet.

And so I decided a couple of days after the vote to join Freedom to Marry. It actually probably took a week or two to figure out the details, but spoke with Evan Wolfson right at this moment where he had decided to grow Freedom to Marry. I think it was a bit of a back and forth about what my role could be,

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how I could be helpful, and he offered me the job of communications director. I went to Columbia Law School and I said, “Can I take some time off?” I finished my final exams, and they said, “Take a leave of absence. You can come back if you want.” I think I had up to two years. I made the decision to leave, but certainly in that supportive environment where I could return. I remember speaking with Chris at the time, and this was exactly the kind of job that I thought I was going to law school in the first place to get, some sort of communications director or some sort of staff role that I could be helpful to an issue that I cared about, like marriage. So I sort of felt like I was getting the job that I had wanted to go to law school for. It was exciting to say yes and leave and get my hands dirty. Part of it was the disappointment of losing the vote, but I think part of it was just not wanting to sit on the sidelines as a student for years while this kind of important moment happened, and wanting to be more hands-on.

01-00:38:34 Meeker: Law school is also—you learn something there, but it’s also a career trajectory. Part of it, of course, is you probably had some more freedom. You didn’t have to think about that same kind of career trajectory.

01-00:38:46 Eldridge: I think that’s right. I think Chris and I—this was before Facebook IPO had happened, but I think we knew that we had more financial security than we could have hoped for at that age, and that things were looking pretty good. I think that certainly gave me the flexibility and the freedom to go and take a job like this. It certainly made me think about, is there something more that I can do than just get a corporate legal job and make money? Because it seemed like we were going to be very fortunate, more than we could have imagined. I think that was very freeing. I think it was also being in law school and thinking about the reality that it’s not just three years, typically, but you do the clerkship, you really invest in the credentials that it means to be a lawyer. I think I realized if I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a lawyer, that it was more than a three-year investment. It was probably a five-year investment. And that there were a lot of great lawyers out there. That there were not only good private lawyers, but there were great groups like Lambda Legal, GLAD, and there were really brilliant lawyers, and feeling like my strengths and my contributions perhaps were not just about legal theory and litigation, but were about organizing, or about communications, or about the other parts of a campaign. I think realizing, hey, if I wanted to do the full five-year commitment to starting a strong law career, that I needed to be more confident about that than I was.

01-00:40:21 Meeker: What was your job description?

01-00:40:25 Eldridge: Freedom to Marry was very small. I remember being in the office for the first time, and it was a shared office space, and we had a few very small offices. So

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I knew I was joining a small team and a small organization. My job description was communications director in a relatively traditional sense of working with Evan to craft the message of being responsible for PR, of working with him on op-eds, and many of the different responsibilities you would imagine a communications director would have. I was definitely learning on the job in some ways. Evan took a risk on me. We had a lot of back and forth as I started to understand his voice and the voice of the organization, and really enjoyed that work. But when I joined, there was also the understanding that he was trying to grow the organization and that this was an exciting moment to grow the team, grow the impact. In some ways, it was like joining a small think tank that wanted to become a campaign, because it really was Evan, with a few support staff members, who were churning out the ideas and the rationale and the arguments for why marriage equality was the right thing, but it wasn’t, at that point, a lobbying group. It wasn’t a national campaign. I remember talking to Evan. I think he had come to the realization that nobody else was building this national campaign. I think he sort of built it out of that necessity. So I was joining at a really exciting moment, where I knew the communications support was part of it, and I was excited to go be a soldier with him in that effort, but after some time there, it quickly became, how can we raise more resources, how can we build team, and what does it mean to be a national campaign? Over time, the job description definitely grew and changed and evolved. Very much like working at a start-up. You had your job and your title, and then you had to deal with the reality of having a small team.

01-00:42:46 Meeker: During these initial conversations, perhaps being before hired and thereafter, when you’re learning about Freedom to Marry, was there anything about the message, the vision, the overall argument that was being made that you found to be particularly interesting or surprising?

01-00:43:07 Eldridge: I think Evan was inspiring. He had literally written the book on the issue [Why Marriage Matters, 2004], and I remember before joining the team, reading his book and really getting to know him and like him in that early stage before I’d even decided to leave law school. I knew that I was joining Evan as much as I was joining Freedom to Marry. I think that one aspect of the work that I found inspiring, and where I saw a lot of need, was there were a bunch of national and state organizations that existed on equality, but that were not single-issue, and not just focused on marriage. So whether it was HRC or Pride Agenda or the Task Force, there were a lot of activists out there and groups, but they had multiple issues that they cared about. And so I think I understood that they would have to make compromises, they would have to prioritize and choose which issue to fight for on any given day, and that there was something unique about having one group that said, we’re going to wake up every day and think about marriage and think about how we’re going to get that, and not only not compromise for something like civil union, but not have to worry

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about where non-discrimination fits in at that moment, because we are the single-issue campaign and focus. Obviously, you can’t build an entire LGBT movement in that way, because you need people who are thinking about gender identity, you need people who are thinking about non-discrimination, and you need people who are thinking about bullying. But to have that focus and that singular objective I think was very unique, was exciting, and really made you not doubt what your job was when you came in every morning.

I was with Evan, and I think collaborating with him, when he was thinking about what was the roadmap for Freedom to Marry, what did that look like and how did we literally put together the prospectus of what we were going to be as a campaign. What did that mean? But then also putting pen to paper to articulate Evan’s roadmap, which was, “How are we going to win this?” I think he was brilliant in understanding that it wasn’t enough to say, “The goal is win marriage.” That you had to create incremental steps along the way that people could plug into. That, whether you were an activist or you were a funder, that no one was going to buy into a ten-year strategy, but people could understand the different pieces of it. I think it engaged people in the work, but it was also entirely right, that we had to win states, that we had to build momentum, that the best way to get a national resolution was to build the number of states that we had. Evan was on top of it. Evan knew which states were coming next. Even though we were not a litigation organization, he understood the litigation landscape and what was happening and where we would fit in. In the early days, a lot of it was about, what are the next states and what does public education look like? Because it wasn’t a litigation organization—that was one piece of it. We didn’t have to worry about it. Even though President Obama was there, because a lot of the federal conversation was about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and other issues, there wasn’t a whole lot of investment there at the early days, and that came a bit later.

01-00:46:32 Meeker: Back to New York in particular. It didn’t end in 2009. Eventually, New York wins, I think it was June 2011, again, through a legislative effort. Did you get involved in that effort, and if so, what was your role?

01-00:46:50 Eldridge: Absolutely. I think one of the questions was when to try again, and what would that look like. I think there were a lot of competing ideas of how long one would have to wait and what we would have to do differently. I think I quickly realized that one of the issues in our movement was an issue of territorialism. One of the challenges in New York was how do you deal with the reality that there are multiple groups with membership that want to be involved, that want to be supportive, but you really have to work as a coalition to win it. This was my first full-time nonprofit job, and I understood and came to realize people need to fundraise, people need to build their organizations, and so I think folks were only territorial in the sense that they were trying to do a good job for their group and their organization. I ended up being pretty

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involved in New York. One of the things that I think was most important, and one of the things I was most proud of, was that even though Evan has strong opinions and can be stubborn in his opinions, he definitely understood how important it was to work together, and he definitely understood that, if we win, not only New York, but any victory is big enough that it can be shared. The culture of Freedom to Marry was not to worry about the credit—the credit will come, we will be able to tell the stories of what happened—but to think about how we’re going to win.

I think one of the most important things that started to come about particularly in 2011 were weekly meetings. This was when I was political director of Freedom to Marry. Pulling together Pride Agenda, HRC, the team at Gill Action, folks who were involved, and meeting once a week, and at bare minimum, understanding what one another were doing and coordinating. But ideally, and what it grew into, was really much more of a coordinated New Yorkers United for Marriage campaign. In retrospect, to me, it’s a powerful lesson around the need to coordinate, but we really ended up building out the next campaign, where people in groups took the lead on different parts. HRC did a lot on field. Freedom to Marry was helping with a lot of the fundraising and with the messaging, and working closely with Gill Action as they were helping to shape a lot of the lobbying.

It was incredibly important that we were coordinated, especially when we had a governor who wanted to help get it done, but who he, as governor, was not going to deal with the politics of the movement. We had to deal with the politics of the movement, and we had to be able to be a partner with him. I think having the governor, having these organizations more aligned, having the Fight Back New York campaign that Gill Action had put together and won, where they actually took out some senators who were anti-marriage and showed that there was a political cost to being against marriage, but also that we were not just going to play nice. We were going to hold people politically accountable. It really set the stage for victory in 2011. Even leading up to that victory, a lot of people had a lot of different opinions about when we should go again and what that was going to look like. I give the governor [Andrew Cuomo] a lot of credit for signaling that we should go for it and he was going to be a partner. I think a lot of us were pretty hungry to have New York take a leadership role and win.

01-00:50:24 Meeker: You had mentioned in passing that you became political director of Freedom to Marry. Can you tell me how that role was envisioned to be different than the communications director?

01-00:50:31 Eldridge: Once I had been at Freedom to Marry for a while—certainly, initially, communications director was my first position, but as I got to know Evan better, as we got to trust and understand each other better, and as the

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organization was growing, he empowered me and trusted me to help build out other pieces. The title change, I think, came as my responsibilities shifted. For a while, I was political director with a very unusual portfolio, where I was interfacing with a lot of the state organizations that we would work with in different states. I was working with Evan to set up our federal office and hire our first person in D.C. I was continuing to oversee communications, but hired another person to help with that. And I was overseeing development and fundraising, more on the individual donor side. There were others at the organization who had really laid the groundwork with foundations, and I didn’t do grant writing. It was very much a start-up kind of role to be a political director, but to be overseeing communications and fundraising and some of the political work.

The fundraising was important to take an organization that, when I joined, was a little over a million dollars a year, and by the end was well over ten million dollars a year. I had not done a lot of fundraising, but I think Evan and I were a good team. He was sort of tireless and aggressive, in a good way, about growing the network, and I think Chris and I, being in New York and being involved in politics in New York, and getting involved pretty quickly, had a network of folks who were interested and who could be helpful. Evan had the passion and the vision and the roadmap and his own many, many connections. I think we were a good team in really growing Freedom to Marry’s reach, and really creating an individual donor program that hadn’t existed at all before. We were successful in that.

01-00:52:38 Meeker: You started to touch on this, but the real question here is, from your vantage point, then, how does Freedom to Marry grow from the million-dollar to a ten- million-dollar annual organization? You were talking about cultivating individual donors, but thinking about other organizations, perhaps reading these materials in the future from a lessons-learned kind of perspective, what was it that you think is worth recounting that might be useful for future activists and scholars to know?

01-00:53:14 Eldridge: Well, it took time. It didn’t happen totally overnight. I think Evan being able to start the organization with the trust of a few major foundations and folks who really created that groundwork, that was critical, because it’s hard to completely start a new organization with individual funding. That early foundation funding that was already there when I had arrived was very important.

01-00:53:35 Meeker: Haas and Gill?

01-00:53:36 Eldridge: Exactly. I think one of the important incremental fundraising lessons was to articulate the national strategy of what the organization was going to do and

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what it meant to build a central campaign around marriage, but also to really sell the urgency of the particular opportunities in states, the particular opportunities around public education. In any fundraising, it’s always easy for donors to put off a decision and wait, or wait and see how things are going. But I think Evan did a really good job of articulating that there was going to be the next fight in Maryland, or the next ballot initiative in Maine, and that it was urgent and timely and important that people decide and get involved. And also had the confidence in the organization and built the trust with donors to say, we are following everything in the country in a way that you probably won’t be able to every day, so trust us, empower us, not only to build an organization, but to actually fund and help our partners and states and within different ballot initiatives. Being a (c)(3) and a (c)(4), Freedom to Marry was able to do that.

I think you could see, year after year, in Freedom to Marry’s budget where it didn’t go from one to eleven. It went incrementally around certain wins, around certain opportunities. I think that Evan and the team built that trust through wins, through transparency, through, in a year-in, year-out basis, playing a consistent role, not just in putting all the resources to build the organization, but getting the resources out in the field where they were really needed. Although Evan is strong-willed, and although he would certainly sell how important Freedom to Marry was, he very much—I remember having a lot of meetings with him. He would never tell donors and others not to fund our partners. He would certainly say what he thought about the strategy, but if somebody asked if GLAD or Lambda were important to the litigation strategy, he would answer, rightfully, yes. He would frame and talk about why it was important. He was not territorial in that way, and I think that really helped to develop trust and help people see that he was a team player. The ACLU played a role in a lot of states, and he would talk about their importance. I think the generosity of the spirit of that—and I think this goes back to not worrying about the credit, but worrying about winning—I think that really helped with the foundations and the individuals for people to say, “Okay, Evan is a trustworthy person and wasn’t dissuading support for other people.” Because Freedom to Marry was not the only part. It wasn’t doing the litigation, it wasn’t the only organization that mattered, and Evan wasn’t shy about that.

01-00:56:39 Meeker: To what extent did the individual donors in particular want to have a pretty clear accounting of what the donations were actually getting them? There’s a sense that organizations, and campaigns in particular, just need to rake in as much dough as possible, and that will then automatically translate to votes, whether it’s in the electorate or the state legislature. Those dollars are actually going to be spent on various specific pieces of the agenda. To what extent was there a detailed communication, if you will, between the organization and campaign and the donors?

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01-00:57:16 Eldridge: I think, as with all things, it depends on the donor. I remember one of our first individual donor events we did here in this apartment. I think people donate to causes and campaigns for many different reasons. I think about this event because it was certainly one of our first forays into the kind of mid-level donor, those who were not a foundation and weren’t giving hundreds of thousands of dollars, but could give hundreds of dollars, or give thousands of dollars. This was a great event that we did where Cory Booker came, and Ivanka Trump was there, and I believe Eric Schneiderman was there. Part of it was building the enthusiasm and the credentials and the community of people saying, “Freedom to Marry is part of this. You may not have heard of them before,” but there’s excitement, and there’s validation from people like Cory Booker. So that was helpful early on. I think that there were some donors, like Tim Gill and his foundation, where he was both the foundation and an individual, because he was doing (c)(3) and (c)(4), and he was very sophisticated, and his team was very hands-on in the states and in the details, and created a deep collaboration with the team. He certainly was not giving because it was a fun party. He was giving because he wanted to win and wanted to understand why the resources were needed where. I think he and his team were not only incredibly generous over the years, but made us a better organization, because they asked the hard questions and wanted to win really badly. He hired Bill Smith and Patrick Guerriero, who were just very smart political operatives, and I think had different strengths and different backgrounds than Evan or myself or other people on the team. They were very hands-on donors.

Then you had people like Jon Stryker, who developed a relationship and a rapport with Evan, and who’s a friend of mine, who didn’t have as large of a political team, but was incredibly generous. Once some of these donors went out on a limb and were giving almost a million, or a million, or, by the end, more than a million a year, to one organization and one cause, it was a huge investment. It made a big difference in Freedom to Marry’s leadership, the team we were able to put together, and then Evan’s ability to implement the roadmap. To have the resources and the empowerment to work with the ballot initiatives, with the states, with the legal groups to get it done. There were a few very large donors who I think were a shot in the arm and really helped the organization take it to the next level. I think if it wasn’t for Jon Stryker and Tim Gill in particular, I think the movement certainly would have taken longer if it got to where it was, ever, at all. To me, now playing more of a funder role in a way that, in those early days, Chris and I were just putting our toe in the water as early philanthropists, their doubling down on the issue and their thoughtfulness and the way that they engaged, to me, it’s very inspiring. Most people in the world don’t know who Tim Gill and Jon Stryker are, but I think they had a big impact.

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01-01:00:34 Meeker: Jumping around a little bit, I’d like to go back to New York and June of 2011, when it was won legislatively. It’s been written about. It’s been written about in journalistic accounts. Marc wrote a very good account of it in his book, Winning Marriage, I think he calls it. Is there anything that is, you think, pivotal in that fight that maybe hasn’t really appeared in written accounts that you think is worthwhile to know?

01-01:01:08 Eldridge: I think the collaboration of the groups that made it happen—I think I had mentioned HRC had worked on the field. The Gill Action team had very much been involved in navigating Albany, which is not an easy thing to do. The Freedom to Marry team, I think, had brought a leadership and a fundraising and a communications and a messaging capacity that made a big difference. The governor was very important. But I think something that struck me, the day after we won, I was doing some of the news shows and talk shows. I was walking from doing one local New York news show, going to do CNN International. I remember in particular the CNN International interview, and there were questions being tweeted at myself and the interviewer from North Africa about New York. It really only struck me then, afterward, that New York was different. That winning in New York not only helped so many millions of people who lived in New York state and was a clear marker of progress for the domestic movement, but that people from around the world were watching. Why was I on CNN International for winning one state? I think that struck me in retrospect how unique and important these cultural capitals are, and the fact that we were in a place like New York, and how much that mattered.

I think, on the flip side of things, a few weeks before we won, President Obama did a fundraising dinner in New York, in early June, before the vote had happened, and I had actually been in Chicago a little bit earlier in the year with his manager and some of the team. I had said to them, “I really hope you’re aware that we will probably have a marriage vote right around this time.” At that point, he was not out in support of marriage and had not said anything about New York. Who was I to give them advice? But I knew it was going to be sort of an uncomfortable room in a moment with a lot of work and anticipation and hope in New York. And I was right.

So he came to do this event, and Chris and I got to talk to him briefly backstage. At that point, we were engaged. I said, “Mr. President, we’re engaged. We’re going to get married.” Trying to be very polite, but sort of forcing him to hear from another person about the issue. When he went out and gave the speech at the dinner, he was heckled by a couple of people, and it was just a little bit uncomfortable, because I think, for the most part, it was a supportive group. It was a group that was grateful for all of his work on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and for his leadership on the issue, but I think patience had worn thin at that point for not coming out in support of marriage. I say all of

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that because I think that also frames the importance of New York, not only coming to an uncomfortable room of donors in Manhattan, but I think for him, for people like him, for world leaders, but also our own president, to see that we could win in a place like New York, that we won with some Republican votes, I think and I hope that that created a space for him to be able to articulate support for the issue in a way that I do think kind of forced the question and was pretty significant. Fortunately, he came out in support after Vice President Biden did.

01-01:04:39 Meeker: When you told him that you and Chris were engaged, how did he respond?

01-01:04:43 Eldridge: He was very friendly. He knew Chris better than me at that point, because Chris had been on the team and more hands-on. He put on his great, big Barack Obama smile and I think he said, “That’s great,” smiled, but didn’t say anything negative, but all signs were very positive and supportive, but obviously didn’t take the bait for a political debate or anything like that. I just thought it was important for him to hear from another person. At that point, I know he was hearing from a lot of different people. Then it was pretty interesting to flash forward—and actually, it’s not flash forwarding. Already at that time, Evan and I had met with Valerie Jarrett, were working with the White House on DOMA, because it was this very unusual period where the president had come out against DOMA, against federal discrimination, but had not come out for marriage. Freedom to Marry and Evan and myself had developed a working relationship with the White House to strategize with them about what it was going to look like and how they could be helpful on DOMA. It was a very unusual middle ground to be very grateful for his support on things like repealing DOMA and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, but again, to not have him there on marriage. There are a lot of people in New York who I think looked up to the president, and at that moment, I wanted his leadership, I wanted his help, I wanted his validation in the campaign, and I think it would have been helpful. But we got it later.

01-01:06:24 Meeker: This meeting, or this series of meetings, that you had with the White House, in particular Valerie Jarrett, I think they were covered in Marc’s book, maybe somewhere else. I’ve been reading a lot. It’s interesting, because the account that I read—I don’t know if it’s in it explicitly, but certainly reading between the lines, there’s this delicate balance that happens. You and Evan clearly don’t want to upset or offend the White House, but you also need to make your point clearly and unequivocally that now is the time for the president to do this. How did you and Evan prepare for this? How did you get on message? Did you decide what was going to be communicated? Did you talk about things that maybe were going to be out of bounds in the conversation?

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01-01:07:25 Eldridge: I think it was a bit of a balancing act. I think a lot of it was starting to build a relationship. By the end, I think Evan and Valerie Jarrett had built a good working relationship. I think I was there as a bit of a youthful voice, but also as someone, as Chris’s partner, who had been supportive of the campaign, and as a friendly face, but as a face who certainly cared about the issue and marriage, and wanted them to get in a better place. I think, frankly, nobody at that point believed that President Obama was opposed to marriage. Nobody could read his mind. Nobody could know what he thought. I think, certainly at Freedom to Marry, we weren’t wasting any time trying to read his mind, but I do think we entered that conversation and conversations like that assuming they were friendly, and from a very pragmatic perspective, trying to figure out how we could make the most compelling case that they should be supportive. I think part of that is always going to be telling stories and talking about why marriage is important, and I think DOMA and that collaboration with DOMA offered very specific examples about the harm that was done to couples and families because of discrimination.

But I also think it was at a moment where we were becoming more sophisticated as a movement and making the political argument about how the course of history was running in our direction, how we were winning in places like New York, how there were going to be these ballot initiatives where we made the case, we were optimistic we would win, and where his voice could be helpful. But I think it was as much about policy and substance and stories as it was sort of pragmatic, political pressure. I don’t think we went in kicking and screaming. I think we went in with very particular asks around things like DOMA that they, in their cases and in having the United States government stand and be on our side, was important and we hoped would make our case stronger in front of the Supreme Court. But I also think trying to convince them that we were winning and that he should get on board, and he should get on board more quickly, and that he could really be an important leader in it, and I think Valerie played an important role by listening, and I think in those early conversations, Evan and Valerie managed to build that relationship and some trust. I think if you’re sitting in her seat and you’re the White House, you get a lot of people asking you for a lot of different things.

I would say, as an advocacy strategy, one of the takeaways for me is to make it about more than one meeting. Evan is certainly not somebody who is going to roll over and accept their lack of support. I think developing the trust, being firm in our positions, but also being helpful and pragmatic was important, and I think that that led to future conversations and more of a trust. I don’t think it was at all conciliatory, but I think it was—as we saw later, Freedom to Marry decided to have Republican and Democratic pollsters talk about where people were on the issue to really try to give tangible, specific examples of why it was not only the right thing to do, but the politically right thing to do. Frankly, when you’re dealing with any politician, it is important to do both. It is not enough, in many cases, to just tell the heart-wrenching or the heart-warming

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stories. It is important to be pragmatic and think about elections and think about their perspective. I think the power of the movement was to be sophisticated enough at that moment, to have the messages that we knew were moving people, to have the support of the American people, but have those resources and that ability to do these Republican/Democratic polls and come in armed with that information. That was a definitely sophisticated moment in the movement to be able to come at it from so many different angles at once.

01-01:11:16 Meeker: When people look back at Obama’s coming to support the freedom to marry, it’s often cast in the terms of his “evolution” on the issue. I think that he, at some point, came out and says, “My ideas have been evolving,” before expressing his support for it. As a historian, I know that historians down the road are going to be very interested in where this narrative of evolution comes from. I’ve heard different stories about it, to the extent that it was something that was sui generis from him and the White House, or that it was perhaps even a narrative that was presented to him by Freedom to Marry or people in the movement. Do you have an understanding of where this narrative of his evolution was going to come from? Or where it came from, I should say.

01-01:12:07 Eldridge: I don’t think that any one person or group that I knew of gave him the idea that he should live in this evolution space for as long as he did. I do think that people, like Evan and other leaders, had recognized that there was no benefit to calling people flip-floppers or saying anything negative about those who had evolved, because, frankly, it was an issue that we started off without the support of the American people, and we ended up with the support of the American people. So again, I think in a very pragmatic way, realizing that you have to create the space for people to change their mind on such a personal thing, and I think Evan realized that the president was a human being, and just as parents were evolving and other people were evolving, that he was a human, and whether he was evolving from a policy perspective or a political perspective or a personal perspective, that it was better to create that space while also creating that pressure. I think the vice president coming out in that interview on that Sunday morning and basically articulating his support was a big deal. We know in retrospect that he sort of forced the question. But I was part of that immediate reaction with the Freedom to Marry team where we decided quickly to pounce on that, to send out a release to claim that as support, in which he had basically articulated his support for marriage. I think that was the right thing to do, to jump on it and put the president in that position.

I don’t know that publicly evolving for a long time on an issue like that was going to last very long, or was necessarily the right thing to do. But I do think that the vocabulary of evolving was important not just because of the president’s views himself—and one could certainly quibble, well, did he already believe it and was he being genuine or not, and I can’t read his mind,

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so I can’t say. But I think it was the right vocabulary, more importantly, for Americans out there who truly were evolving and wanted to feel okay with changing their mind, or wanted to feel okay with living in the middle for a while and not being sure. I think that was true for a lot of Americans.

01-01:14:24 Meeker: The Biden moment on the Sunday morning talk show, if you read it, there could have been an out, right? There could have been an out for Biden, or a more cautious Freedom to Marry or Evan might not have pounced on it in the way that they did. Was there a conversation that you were involved in that there was a decision made that, we’re actually going to take this and quote it as it was said, but place it in a much more affirmative context than perhaps it was?

01-01:15:01 Eldridge: I was eager to pounce. I think the team was eager to pounce. We quickly formulated the release. I think Evan was traveling somewhere that morning, but we kind of quickly made the reaction and the decision we did. His words and his phrasing certainly articulated a support for the issue, but I think we recognized at that point that there was no downside to forcing the question. I think we were confident enough that the president was with us, that this was a helpful moment to force the question, and it did. When those moments like that happen, you’re taking a bit of a risk by jumping in, because I guess in some scenario it could have backfired. But it was Biden being Biden, and it is so unusual for a vice president to get out ahead on any policy for the president. Given the nature of that, I think it was clearly a window and an opportunity for us. You don’t often see that on anything where the vice president will say, on such an important issue, a position that’s different from the president’s.

01-01:16:05 Meeker: You eventually moved from a staff role to an advisory role. When did that happen?

01-01:16:10 Eldridge: After we won marriage in New York, I decided to go from being the political director to this senior advisor role. It was for a few different reasons. I was getting more involved in the Hudson Valley, and I had decided at that point to start an investment fund, Hudson River Ventures, and was spending more time outside of the city, and Freedom to Marry was based in the city. The organization was at a pretty strong point at that point. We had brought Marc Solomon in a bit before the New York victory, and it was a different team. I think at that moment, I knew that I wanted to be involved and stay involved. New York was kind of this full-circle moment for my getting involved in the movement to winning, and it felt like a meaningful moment to stay involved, but to want to get involved with other issues at the same time. I’ve never seen myself as a single-issue person, and at that point I wasn’t sure how long the marriage movement was going to last—it wasn’t clear that it actually was going to happen as quickly as it all was going to happen—and decided to take

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on this sort of part-time role and get involved with other issues at the same time. So I started this investment fund, but also got involved with some environmental policy, and then eventually a lot with campaign finance reform, and wanted to create the space for multiple-issue involvement. I think part of that was looking at somebody like Evan, who had dedicated so many years and so much energy and so many decades to one issue, and realizing for myself that I wanted to get involved with multiple issues, and had incredible respect for the patience and the perseverance that that took, but also feeling like a bit more of a generalist and wanting to take the lessons and the work and what I had learned from helping to build an organization like that and apply it to other things.

01-01:17:56 Meeker: You’re very young still. In essence, shortly after getting involved and assuming some sort of public role, and role in a public engagement, you become fairly well-connected. You were there at the White House with Evan, and I know that you were able to get Cory Booker and others here in your apartment. I guess he was probably still Mayor of Newark at the time. But also engagement with Nancy Pelosi and others. How is it that a young person is able to do this in such a short period of time? What was your method for engaging these leaders?

01-01:18:38 Eldridge: I think Chris and I, when we moved to New York, quickly realized that we were in a unique position to, at a young age, be able to help convene, to be able to help support different organizations and candidates and causes. Even though it was before the Facebook IPO, we started to realize that that financial capacity was there, was going to be there over time. I think we really wanted, in a very pragmatic way, to think about how we could utilize that. There was certainly interest in Facebook and who Chris was and who we are, and I think for us, we always sort of thought of that in the lens of, well, how can we use this to be helpful? I think when I had joined Freedom to Marry’s team, I saw my responsibility to really invest in the organization and help it as much as possible. So at the same time, we were starting to support different political candidates, and we did events for Governor Cuomo around times where building that relationship was important. I think I understood the interplay of what it means to start to build that political network, a fundraising network, and how that could really be helpful and supportive to a group like Freedom to Marry, and how often you have to do a bit of both. That Freedom to Marry is a (c)(3), certainly could not get involved in electoral politics and could not write political checks, but that Chris and I could support politicians, and could work with people like Tim Gill, who were putting together a political operation. And then even that someone like Chris, who, because of Facebook or the Obama campaign, had more of a voice and an ability to speak out on the issues and be heard, we thought, well, let’s use it. Let’s get involved. Even though we were young, I think that there was a way of doing it where we were learning along the way, and I hope having the humility to know that we were

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following in the footsteps of other people, and that folks like Tim Gill at that point had a much more sophisticated political operation, but that just being young, it didn’t mean we couldn’t be helpful and didn’t mean we couldn’t take advantage of those opportunities. Certainly, I’m glad that we did. I think a lot of it speaks to how political change on different issues happens. You do have to develop relationships with media leaders, with philanthropic leaders, with political leaders. We found ourselves in the middle of kind of all of those worlds, and I think tried to cultivate, on all of those different fronts, the relationships so that they could be helpful.

01-01:21:21 Meeker: When you’re engaging with leaders in these different sectors, whether it’s elected officials or people in the media, to what extent do you feel like you’re being a conduit, connecting them with issues that you suspect they already care about, and thus maybe advocating that they spend some of their very precious time on this issue that they already agree with? Or to what extent do you feel like you’re advocating on behalf of that issue to convince them, whether it’s changing their mind or enlarging their opinion, to actually care about something that maybe hadn’t really crossed their agenda before?

01-01:22:09 Eldridge: I think it was a little bit of both. Evan definitely empowered me early and at a young age to go out there and make the case. And not just make the case. Evan couldn’t be everywhere and couldn’t do every interview and couldn’t do every show, and I think also wanted to empower other voices in the mix. The fact that, relatively soon after joining the Freedom to Marry team, that I was debating Brian Brown and NOM and Maggie [Gallagher] on television was exciting and a little bit daunting for me at a young age to take that on, and literally had to have Evan train me and learn from him and his messaging of what are the most helpful pivots, and how do we cater to that moveable middle that’s out there, but not just score points that our base might like. It was an incredible learning experience for me, and I think when you’re doing that television style of debate, it’s often so easy to try to look for those easy points you can score versus thinking about, wait, who is that mother in Ohio who’s watching this and really may not know where she stands? How can we speak to her and not just speak to the far right or the far left? I learned a lot through that.

I think that there was a good bit of education that needed to be done, particularly around DOMA. Unless you were gay or very up to speed on the issues, most people didn’t know that DOMA existed. They didn’t know what it was, even in the media world, and most citizens didn’t understand, wait, you could be married in New York and now you’re not federally recognized? People didn’t know that. I wrote an op-ed for The Nation shortly after we won in New York, just about DOMA, because I was actually shocked that people didn’t realize that federal layer of discrimination existed. That seemed pretty important to me. Regardless of whether people in the media were with us or

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not, they were surprised by DOMA, and that surprise was helpful and important for them to be aware of.

You had asked more about media, but I would also say what’s interesting about the fundraising, nobody loves fundraising, but I think that what was really exciting about building Freedom to Marry and fundraising for this, it was very much about putting the opportunity in front of people for folks who did care about it, but who didn’t necessarily know how we were going to win or what that roadmap was going to look like. I actually thought it was both for fundraising and for getting activists involved. It was very organic and very easy when it was being framed as, here is an opportunity to be helpful, here’s what it looks like, rather than some sort of pressure that you were putting on people. It was much more inspiring through the opportunity and through the roadmap, and helping people understand that. Which I think is sometimes a little bit different from other nonprofit fundraising.

01-01:25:06 Meeker: Why don’t you tell me about where you were when the Obergefell decision comes down just this past June 2015.

01-01:25:42 Eldridge: Chris and I were hiking in Canada. I believe on that day, we were at Banff in Alberta. We thought the decision might come down right on our anniversary, because we were married on June 30. That was the Monday, and it came out the Friday. Either way, it was a very good anniversary present. We were thrilled. With the DOMA decision, I actually got to be there at the Supreme Court and hear the arguments and be part of that, and so I think that was very much in my mind, because I had seen that through the DOMA victory, and obviously this was different. I think we were optimistic going in, but it was different for it to be real. I think it took a while for it to sink in. It’s so rare that you get this sweeping clarity and sweeping win on an issue that it was done. That yes, we had to defend it to some extent and be worried about any backlash, but that we had really won. It was pretty incredible. But I would also say that the DOMA victory was as exciting for us, because both personally we felt like our marriage was more full and more real, and we knew that it was such an incremental win at the Supreme Court to have [Justice Anthony] Kennedy on our side and know that we were heading in the right direction. And then to watch Evan follow through on his promise of beginning to shut down the organization. There was definitely some nostalgia in that, but exciting to see it go out of business, and I have to say that one of the reasons he was able to get the funders and the activists and the buy-in and the support was because he always promised that this was not about organization building for the sake of organization building. This was about winning on an issue and a campaign. To watch him follow through, having heard him say that in hundreds of different meetings and conversations, was very cool.

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01-01:27:42 Meeker: Tell me about your wedding to Chris. When did you guys get married?

01-01:27:46 Eldridge: We got married—I guess it was a year after the New York marriage decision, so in June of 2012. It’s pretty cool. If we have kids one day, I’ll be able to say to them that when we were engaged, when Chris proposed to me and we were engaged, we couldn’t get married in New York, and DOMA was still there, and then by the time that we got married, we could get married in New York and DOMA was gone. I think it very much speaks to the fact that we were coming of age and really wanted to get married right at that cusp of history, which is pretty cool. We weren’t one of those couples that had been waiting for twenty years. It had happened right when we needed it to happen for us. Our backup plan, originally, when we got engaged, was we thought we might have to go somewhere like Massachusetts. We had met in Boston, and so we thought that that would be meaningful to get married there. But it was doubly meaningful to be able to get married in New York and not have to go anywhere else.

We chose to do a pretty small ceremony in our backyard in the Hudson Valley, at our home in Garrison. We did a larger party that night in the city, and I think we wanted the ceremony to be intimate and personal and emotional, but we also wanted to have a big party and be inclusive and invite lots of people. So it was a fun balance. We did the ceremony in the morning, and we did a big party in the evening. Of course, Evan and a lot of the team were at both. At our party, it was great to have a lot of different not just friends and family, but leaders who were there, who understood, I think, why our marriage was exciting to us and important to us, but even just by being there, were expressing their support for us and for the movement. It was exciting to have people like [Minority] Leader [Nancy] Pelosi, and I think both of the senators were there. It meant a lot to us personally, but I think it also was a symbol that the issue was settled in New York and that there was really widespread support.

01-01:30:04 Meeker: It’s interesting. I went through this myself, so as you’re talking about your marriage, I’m flashing back to my own experience. This kind of dualism of it still being a political statement, but when it comes down to it, it’s not that at all.

01-01:30:23 Eldridge: I think that’s why we had two events. I think we felt that tugging. On the one hand, we wanted to be inclusive and include many of our colleagues and our friends and people who we may not have had as intimate relationships with, but it still felt fresh and political in that sense. In retrospect, I think I’m very happy with the decision, because we wanted the actual ceremony, the actual marriage, to be about us, to be about family, to be about our marriage and our relationship and our commitment, but then to have the party and the

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celebration perhaps be a broader celebration of—as I think many of the marriages were that year in New York and elsewhere—of our victory and of our community having progress. There was certainly that duality.

01-01:31:05 Meeker: So now the lessons learned. Now that you’re moving into these other issues that you had mentioned, are there any particular elements out of your involvement with Freedom to Marry that keep coming back to you?

01-01:31:21 Eldridge: There are many. I think one of the most important ones is that the incremental gains and the victories that matter are not necessarily the ones that are the sexiest or that get talked about the most. Working with Evan in the early days to craft a strategy to pick up more states and win ballot initiatives, and be working in states that weren’t near us and maybe weren’t important to people who were outside of that state, it was just looking at the marriage movement as a whole and realizing we wouldn’t have had that national resolution without the state victories, without the local wins, without the incremental progress that was necessary. To me, that’s a huge lesson, because if you take one of the issues I’m very passionate about working on a lot now, campaign finance reform, I think there are a lot of parallels in that, in the issue of money and politics, a lot of the talk is at the federal level. It’s about the presidency, it’s about Citizens United, which is important, but it’s about the national and the federal issues. In reality, you could spend a lot of time and energy and resources trying to get a national resolution and get Congress to act, but what I think is actually really needed is to win in the states, to get those incremental gains, to really build a movement that takes time and takes those victories along the way in the way that we had with marriage, and to be okay with the fact that the work that you’re doing in that day may not be in the headline, may not be what most people are talking about, but I kind of smile when I see people talk about campaign finance reform just at the federal level, because I know that the not-so-sexy work at the state level is really going to be needed to win.

If you step back and you look at marriage, the fact that Congress played almost no role in the victory, is pretty startling when you think about how much, when we talk about policy and issues and change, is focused at Congress and the White House and the federal government. DOMA obviously mattered in the negative sense, but other than that, Congress did not do a lot to help. So you have this huge social-political shift and change we had in this country on something as big as marriage, and it wasn’t Congress. It was winning the states, changing hearts and minds, and winning in the courts, and sort of side-stepping Congress. It’s important to think about for other issues. We’re certainly using that playbook, and I hope we will be as successful in something like money and politics, but I think you’re definitely seeing more of an awareness of that strategy in drug policy reform, in environmental change, in gun safety. I can barely go to a strategy session or a meeting,

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particularly with progressives, without people using marriage as an example now of what’s needed. It’s funny, because it’s not rocket science. It’s not rocket science that you look at history—and I would talk to Evan from the early, early days about Loving v. Virginia, and what it meant to get to those critical states, and at that point, we weren’t anywhere close. But he understood the playbook. He understood that courts would act, or somebody at a federal level would be much more likely to act, once you have a majority of states and once you have done that work in public opinion.

When you step back and you think about it, it seems kind of obvious, and yet I hear now the incredible strategy of marriage and how people want to duplicate it. What’s very hard to duplicate is it’s such a personal issue, and people have, I think, a passion around it that is hard to emulate on other issues. But Evan’s leadership, I think, really learning from history—someone like him gets excited about history, thinks about social change, and I think to him it wasn’t rocket science, that these are the kind of gains and this is the kind of progress that we have to make to win, and that such a simple strategy and plan was so powerful, and I think people continue to see it as being so powerful, when, if you look at history, it’s kind of obvious that Congress does not usually rush to lead on things, and the White House doesn’t usually rush to lead on things. You look at civil rights, and you look at the environment, and you look at women’s suffrage, and you look at so much change. A lot of work gets done before you get that national resolution. I’m very glad to have learned that lesson at a young age and been part of that, and hopefully to be able to apply it to other issues. I think some of it is it can be very distracting to just focus on what the national conversation is about at any given moment, but I think once you’re part of that national conversation, to some extent you’re already winning. You’ve got to do the work that it takes to get there, which, for Evan, took a long time.

01-01:36:13 Meeker: It’s interesting. I’m just kind of thinking about this as a historian, and I’ve been wrestling with, what does this all mean? What are some of the broader issues? What sort of major change is represented here? I’m beginning to think that, while it may seem that Evan did something that was plainly obvious, I think that he and people, as part of his zeitgeist—and I think that he’s, in many ways, leading that—kind of invented a new path of social change, because, say from the 1960s, or even 1950s, through the 2000s, there was a very different model of social change. There was nonviolent civil disobedience. There were massive numbers of getting people out into the streets. There was actually change through Congress and national legislative change. That was, I think in many ways, the model that all of these movements were really wedded to, in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties. I think with the roadmap and what was happening with civil marriage, there is a new model in town, if you will.

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01-01:37:32 Eldridge: My guess is, if you look at a lot of those other historic struggles and movements, I do think if you dig in, you will see a lot of work that led up to Congress or the White House considering action, and you’ll see a lot of those incremental gains in the work that needs to be done. I think a lot of it was not inevitable. Evan had this great line that he would often repeat, that people went from it’s impossible to it’s inevitable, and he had a difficult time trying to get people to focus on what was in between. It’s totally true. When I first started working there, it seemed very difficult to win everywhere. It looked like it might be an abortion-style issue that we would fight about for a long, long, long time. It definitely did not feel inevitable. But clearly, in the last couple years, it started to feel more inevitable. I think if you step back and you look at the issue, even outside of just Freedom to Marry and Evan, I actually really don’t believe that it was inevitable in some deterministic sense that this was just going to happen. It’s so tempting, I think, to look for individual leaders who made it happen and who can be credited with it, and I think in history we tell a lot of stories. We tell a lot of narratives about change being about iconic individuals, and we teach young people, in a sense, that it’s about those iconic individuals. While there have absolutely been iconic civil rights leaders in our country, we don’t talk a lot about the people around them. We don’t talk a lot about how change happens in difficult, slow ways, and that it is always more than once person, and it’s always more than one organization. I think Evan played a huge role, but there was clear sort of legal policy decision making, even in our own movement, that made marriage the goal. I think there could have been other ways in which it played out.

To me, the lesson for people who want to be part of social change and social movements, to me, it’s a really humbling one, because it’s, no matter what, you’re going to be one of many people if you’re successful. I really wish we told the stories and those narratives in ways that were less about the iconic individuals and more about the teams, and more about the—it sounds corny, but the mother in Iowa who loves her kid and decided that she was—never had thought about this before, was going to change her mind and come out for marriage. That matters. It really made a difference. Those are harder stories to tell. They’re more complicated. They’re more messy. We talked a little bit about President Obama. You look at how much hope there was, and then now, there’s a lot of frustration when all the promises didn’t come true. I think one of the reasons that it’s important to talk about how many people are involved in these movements and how all these different elements come together and matter—I think it’s all the important when change is happening more slowly and it’s more frustrating, because it’s not iconic leader or bust. It’s doing the work and being relentless, and even after you lose, and even after the Prop 8s, just continuing to push.

01-01:40:55 Meeker: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

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01-01:40:59 Eldridge: I don’t think so. I would really just say that I think Freedom to Marry and Evan played an incredibly important role, but I am very grateful to those who will never get written about or spoken about, and who did get involved in the issue. Every Massachusetts lawmaker who Marc Solomon managed to persuade to vote the right way when we were protecting the court case then, and every judge in the decisions that led up to the Supreme Court, there are so many different people and players who made a difference, and it is so easy and tempting to simplify these stories, but I think we lose the lesson of that appellate judge mattered, that plaintiff mattered, that family mattered. I hope, as the story is told, that it’s about how many different people it takes to create that kind of massive change.

01-01:42:02 Meeker: Thank you very much.

01-01:42:04 Eldridge: Thank you.

[End of Interview]