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

The Freedom to Marry Oral History Project

Bill Smith

Bill Smith on Political Operations in the Fight to Win 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 Bill Smith dated September 14, 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:

Bill Smith. “Bill Smith on Political Operations in the Fight to Win 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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Bill Smith, 2014 Photo courtesy of Civitas

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Bill Smith, currently Founding Partner of Civitas Public Affairs Group, was Political Director for Gill Action during the multi-year fight for the freedom to marry. Smith was born and raised in Alabama and earned his undergraduate degree from Birmingham Southern College. Right out of college, Smith went to work for political campaigns, including a stint working for Karl Rove and Company. Smith political affiliations changed as a result of President Bush’s support of Federal Marriage Amendment, which would have written discrimination into the US Constitution. Smith worked with the Log Cabin Republicans and the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund before joining Gill Action, where he became National Political Director. In this interview, Smith discusses the political operations of the broad campaign to win the freedom to marry from the vantage point of a 501(c)(4) political organization. v

Table of Contents—Bill Smith

Freedom to Marry Project History by Martin Meeker vii

Freedom to Marry Oral History Project Interviews ix

Interview 1: December 8, 2015

Hour 1 1

Childhood in rural Eufaula, Alabama — Early interest in politics, college internship with Senator Richard Shelby’s 1996 campaign — Identifying as a Republican — Alabama politics in the late 1990s, power struggle between traditional rule-of-law conservatives and ultra-right wing Christians — Dismay as power shifted to religious fundamentalists — 2000 move to Washington, D.C. — Work producing campaign ads — Working around the country, learning the diversity of the Republican Party in different states — 2000-2001 coming out as gay — Support and worry from family — Impact of coming out on professional life — 2003 work for Alabama Supreme Court candidate and Log Cabin Republicans — George W. Bush’s support for the Federal Marriage Amendment ignited Smith’s activism: “It steeled me in the fact that I had to be in the game, and I had to be in the game with every bit of talent that I had.” — Reflections on early work and later contact with Karl Rove — 2004 meeting Patrick Guerriero, beginning to work for the Log Cabin Republicans — Preparing a campaign ad for the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York — 2004 work for the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund — 2005 hired as first consultant for Gill Foundation’s political OutGiving program — Identifying and vetting candidates to fund — Strategy and stealth — Fall 2006 formalizing Gill Action — Maintaining the (c)(3) and (c)(4) separation — Realizing the scale of funding disadvantage, upping the game in 2007 — State by state work, first encountering Freedom to Marry — Learning each state’s government and players — Forging alliances at the state level — Choosing states to focus on: evaluating need and opportunity — Engaging with Republicans by establishing a personal connection — Gill Action’s skeptical approach to state voter initiatives — Prop 8 as a wake-up call that the messaging wasn’t working — 2007-2009 focus on Iowa — Making a case to others in the movement of the necessity for research

Hour 2 18

Research coordinated by Thalia Zepatos results in a change of message: from rights and benefits to love and commitment — Civil union vs marriage: “Win all the rights you can, for all the people you can, all the times you can, and in all the places you can.” — Gill funds the (c)(4) side of Freedom to Marry with Marc Solomon as national campaign director — New York campaign for marriage starting in 2008, work with Empire State Pride Agenda — New York state government crisis — Marriage Equality Act goes to a vote and loses in spite of pledged support — Starting Fight Back New York: “It was just a take-no- vi prisoners approach, and everyone took notice.” — Work with Andrew Cuomo and victory vii

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 viii 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: December 8, 2015

01-00:00:02 Meeker: This is Martin Meeker interviewing Bill Smith. Today is the tenth of December, 2015. This is the Freedom to Marry Oral History Project, and we are here at the offices of Civitas Public Affairs Group in Washington, DC. The way in which we begin all of our interviews is ask you to say your name, date, and place of birth.

01-00:00:34 Smith: Hi. Bill Smith. May 23, 1974. Eufaula, Alabama.

01-00:00:41 Meeker: We don’t have a whole lot of time here today, but I do want to get a sense of where you came from and what your family background is, and then we’ll probably move pretty quickly into your work more specifically related to this project. Maybe tell me a little bit about the town in which you were raised, perhaps the kind of work that your father or your parents did.

01-00:01:02 Smith: Sure. I was born in rural Alabama, very small town called Eufaula, Alabama, on the Alabama/Georgia line. About 12,000 people. Went to a small high school with twenty people in my graduating class. My father was a small- town journalist who ran a twice-weekly newspaper. My mother was a history professor before she married, and then had three kids, and then, once we were in school, went to work at the paper. My parents were community journalists. And grew up there and went to school in Birmingham, Alabama, at Birmingham Southern College, small liberal arts school. And from there, went to work in Alabama politics.

01-00:01:49 Meeker: Tell me about your work in Alabama politics.

01-00:01:52 Smith: I started while I was in college as kind of an intern. One of my jobs was riding around Birmingham, picking up checks for then-Senator Richard Shelby with his fund-raising team. Then a big campaign was coming up in 1996, and I knew I wanted to work on campaigns and elections. I came to Washington, actually, that spring break of my senior year in college and talked to a lot of people about jobs. The best advice everyone seemed to have was, go get on a campaign if you really want to learn about politics. There was a campaign for an Alabama Supreme Court seat, which doesn’t sound that interesting now, but at the time, it was a multimillion-dollar fight between the business community and the plaintiffs’ trial bar. It was a huge race, and a really big campaign, and that’s kind of how I got my start and learned a ton, by being involved in this really high-profile race in Alabama.

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01-00:02:50 Meeker: Alabama has a probably deserved reputation for being a conservative bastion. What were your politics at the time?

01-00:02:57 Smith: Absolutely. I started out in the Republican Party. This campaign, there was no Republican primary, but it was sort of really a battle between the business community and the trial lawyers. The Democrats still had some staying power at that point in Alabama, but the ’90s and early 2000s in Alabama became all about the Ten Commandments being posted in the courthouse in one of the counties in the north, and then that judge moving onto the state supreme court and installing a huge monument there. My early politics was dominated with this huge cultural clash. It wasn’t about party at all. It was about religious conservatism more than anything.

01-00:03:47 Meeker: Where did you fall in that spectrum?

01-00:03:49 Smith: I was appalled by it. I was a rule-of-law person. It’s funny, because a lot of conservatives were making rule-of-law arguments over things like the McDonald’s hot coffee case or the scratched BMW case that were all about exorbitant punitive damages. The Supreme Court had said, basically, because of the rule of law and the Fourteenth Amendment and all these other things, those were outrageous judgments, and reined them back in. So it was very interesting to hear conservatives use that argument from a business perspective, while at the same time kind of ignoring the rule of law when the US Supreme Court says you can’t put the Ten Commandments in the middle of a building that’s a government building around justice. There were some judges that worked hard to comply with the federal court order, and then there is the demagogue, who was the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and I thought it was appalling.

01-00:04:52 Meeker: What you’re kind of pointing out to me is a distinction in Alabama politics, and perhaps Alabama culture between the Evangelical right and perhaps business-oriented, rule-of-law conservatives.

01-00:05:08 Smith: Yeah, and it’s interesting, because I came into politics as a business, Chamber-of-Commerce-type conservative. I remember my first job interview for the—that was in 1996, was my first full-time campaign, which feels like forever ago. I remember the person who hired me—the campaign manager who hired me is a friend to this day—and we talked about kind of the one interview question of, “Is there anybody you won’t work with?” I said the Christian Coalition and the fringe right. They were sort of more of a fringe group at that point. That was before the wholesale takeover of the Republican Party in the South by a lot of those folks. Alabama didn’t have a Tea Party wave later that swept the country as much as other places, because it already

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was sort of the Tea Party in a lot of respects. That was the one thing that I said I have a problem with, dealing with ultra-right religious conservatives. We talk about it to this day, because I still have a problem with those same folks.

01-00:06:21 Meeker: You then moved to DC, is that correct?

01-00:06:24 Smith: Moved to DC in 2000, after working on campaigns down there, several cycles. The first campaign, I came in as a field manager, which is kind of funny, because Republicans don’t really believe in field. I did all kind of stuff on the campaign, and then the next cycle, I ran one of the statewide campaigns as a campaign manager and won. I had set my sights, when I graduated college— my goal was to go run statewide campaigns, and I would go wherever. That was the thought, and it was, in retrospect, a dumb goal, because I hit it really quickly. To figure out, okay, well what do you really want to do? So I moved to Washington. An opportunity opened up at a media firm, and I really loved filming commercials, the whole process—it was the marriage of artistic work and political work that I really was drawn to.

01-00:07:22 Meeker: Had you been involved in that kind of creative work in the past?

01-00:07:25 Smith: Somewhat. Growing up in a journalism household, I was a theater minor in college, and so the production elements of it were always interesting to me. Certainly my first couple of campaigns, as it happened, it was something that was compelling to me and interesting to be a part of. How you frame and tell a story is a big deal. It also afforded me the chance to work on a lot of different campaigns at the same time, because I had a specific thing I was trying to do for them and produce ads, but you had to know the politics to be able to do that. So it was an interesting way for me to work on a lot of different stuff.

01-00:08:07 Meeker: Were there any particular campaigns that were instructive or influential to you?

01-00:08:13 Smith: In 2000, I spent, I think, five weeks total going back and forth to North Dakota, filming ads for the governor’s race there. I also worked in probably fifteen different states that I had not previously worked in, and so I had to learn a lot of new political geography, and I had to learn a lot of new people. The technology side of it, I was sort of clueless on. I was doing a film shoot in the middle of a giant factory in Chicago, and it’s like, “Well, you have the wrong head for the camera,” and the whole thing grinds to a halt because you screwed up. So I learned all these technical lessons and things, but really more than anything what stood out to me was learning the diversity of the politics of the country and what a gift that was. At the time, I was thinking, good God, how can I survive living on the road nonstop? You would literally Fed-Ex

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your rent check in, because you were never home. I learned a lot about the shades of the Republican Party in different parts of the country, and what moved people, and learned a lot of stories about candidates and how they engaged, and the business, really, of politics.

01-00:09:31 Meeker: Can you give me a sense of what those shades of the Republican Party were? I imagine that’s a whole interview in and of itself, but maybe some of the broad sketch of that.

01-00:09:45 Smith: I think, especially in the Midwest, the way people talk there is there’s certainly a religious underpinning to it, but it’s not as overtly religious as, say, a lot of the people that I worked with in the Deep South, who wore it on their sleeve a lot more. There’s much more of a can-do, kind of the Midwest pep, to the way they talked about business and getting things done, that had an energy to it. Then when you get up into the Scandinavians, it’s a whole other level of stuff beneath the surface, with Minnesota and the Dakotas, and “fine” is not always fine when it’s an answer. It’s interesting people. Probably not quite as harsh an edge to their politics as the way that certainly we’ve seen more recently, and in other parts of the country.

01-00:10:53 Meeker: You’re an out gay man now. Were you kind of in the process of coming out then? Where were you with that?

01-00:11:00 Smith: At that time, I wasn’t. Part of moving to DC, for me, in 2000 was that was in the back of my mind, not the front of it, of you don’t want to be in Alabama forever. I was figuring it out, but I wasn’t fully processing it, and certainly wasn’t talking about it. Two thousand was really the year that I realized, look, you’re gay; you need to deal with this and start talking to people about it. I did, in 2000, 2001, and then kind of went through the list very quickly with a lot of friends and family that year, in 2001. Work was very different from then on.

01-00:11:58 Meeker: What kind of response did you get among family and friends?

01-00:12:01 Smith: Great, actually, almost uniformly. I had friends that I told before family that were, everyone to the person, fantastic. Told my parents, and they were really worried. I actually did it in a letter, because we’re all writers, and I thought, if I try to say this, this could come out as a mess, and I’m personally not a mess right now, so I don’t want to convey that, because that will freak them out. So gave the letter to my mother, she read it. She was really upset. It was more from a place of concern. Are you going to be able to get a job? Are you going to be physically safe? She was worried whether or not I could have a career and be successful and be happy in life. I think, in her mind, very legitimately, worried about that. Because in Deep South rural Alabama, in 2001, that’s not

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an illegitimate concern. She showed it to my dad somewhat later. My dad was born in the twenties, and very reserved person, who’s fantastic. Loved me to his core, but sent me a letter that said, “You need not reveal your innermost secrets to everyone. There are some things that you can keep private.” Okay. But no, they were terrific. I was married about a year and a half ago. My father has since died, but my mother was here and gave a toast at the wedding. My family couldn’t be more supportive and wonderful.

01-00:13:45 Meeker: How did coming out then impact your professional trajectory?

01-00:12:51 Smith: Quite a bit. I was working on campaigns in Alabama and elsewhere. One of the things I’d learned in the 2000 cycle—I was working for a specific media firm, and I brought in clients, which was not my job. My job was to go produce ads around the country. But when I brought in clients, I realized, wait a minute, I can make more money than these folks are paying me, and I’m making them money when that wasn’t supposed to be what I was doing. So I went out on my own and started working with some other firms and kind of partnering here and there, but still doing some work in Alabama on some of these campaigns. This was when blogs really started becoming a thing. There were political blogs in Alabama, and—I’m trying to think exactly when Brokeback Mountain [2005] came out. Some political blogs started writing about Brokeback Bronco Bill, something like that. People started to try to use this against the candidates I was working for, in, I believe 2003, 2004. It impacted my work in the sense that also, in 2004, one of my clients was Log Cabin Republicans. I produced an ad campaign for them against the Federal Marriage Amendment that used Dick Cheney and his words from the vice presidential debate to say this is kind of the Republican position and all of that. It definitely wasn’t in the background. It was at the foreground. That became a question with some other clients of, “Wait a minute, can you do both of these things at the same time?” I said, “I don’t have a problem. You may have a problem.”

Then, it was interesting. The bigger thing for me was in 2003. I had one candidate that was a [state] Supreme Court candidate that was someone who had voted to remove the Ten Commandments that we talked about. To me, that’s showing, this is what a judge ought to be. If we’re going to elect judges—which is not really a good way to pick them—this is a good person. So even though my politics were changing, I was still wanting to see this person win versus someone further to the right that didn’t really believe in the rule of law. The people backing those candidates from the business community were on the other side of this other emerging fight in Alabama over massive overhaul of the state’s tax system that would have really turned it into a New South state, things like North Carolina did years before to get rid of its Jim Crow constitutional provisions. It was an opportunity for Alabama really to move forward, and I got engaged in that campaign. Some of the

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backers from the other client said, essentially, “You have to choose. You can’t do both.” I said, “No, I don’t, actually. I can work for both of these things. They’re not a conflict. I don’t trade any information, for one, because they’re different races.” It was a really kind of important professional moment for me, because it was my feet purely planted on the ground, saying, no, this is kind of a personal—it felt scary at the moment, but I could tell, no, this is me drawing a line on what I’m going to do. But that actually played a big role into me being able to do things like say, “No, I’m also going to do the Log Cabin Republicans’ national ad.” That ad was on Meet the Press. I didn’t just kind of come into the space. It came into the space in a big way, and I still had some of these other projects where you could see that could upset people. I learned a lot about that process and myself and what I would do and not do, and at the same layer, this is when George W. Bush came out for the Federal Marriage Amendment.

01-00:18:27 Meeker: In advance of the 2004 election cycle.

01-00:18:29 Smith: In February, I believe, of 2004. We had worked, because Patrick Guerriero at Log Cabin was a client, and so we had gone and hired a very prominent Republican pollster to poll the issue in swing states, and took that data and made sure it got to the right people at the White House, and they didn’t care. It was like, no, we figured out our politics; we’re going to do this anyway. Really good inside game was done to convince them of this, and they still went on and did it anyway, and that was just completely enraging, because you knew it didn’t have to be. That moment changed and radicalized my politics more than anything since or before.

01-00:19:27 Meeker: Can you explain what that means?

01-00:19:32 Smith: It made it really personal. I was so angry, I was crying from rage, not from anything else, when I watched him walk down that hallway—and I knew what he was about to do—of the East Room to give that speech on the amendment. Because I knew the back side of the politics, because I also had worked for Karl Rove for several years and knew how he engaged in work electorally, I knew what it meant, and I knew what it was going to do. It just pissed me off more than anything I can ever imagine. It sort of steeled in me the fact that I had to be in the game, and I had to be in the game with every bit of talent I had. No reservations, no strings attached. You’ve got to be all the way. Not kind of in; get totally in. A lot of people had a lot of different reactions to it. All of my friends were outraged or really upset, a lot of people really scared. I just remember I used to study politics before that, and you would study different protest movements or things, and you would say, wow, how did people get so angry that they personally turned into cause activists? Then it happened to me, and I was glad to be a cause activist. It absolutely fueled me

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for a while. My first several years of working in the movement were probably coming more out of rage than everything else. Which was healthy for some of the things I was tasked to do, but probably not so healthy for other reasons. For a long time, that was—because the gay community was under attack, and that was not a joke. That was a thing. We were on the ballot in state after state after state, and people were demagoguing and you were getting direct mail. If people remember all of the stuff that was happening, the RNC was sending out direct mail of one guy on one knee in front of the other, and it looked a lot more suggestive than a marriage proposal, and some things with a Bible on the other side of the same piece of mail. They were doing some really horrible things, and I knew, because of having worked closely with Karl and others in the space, I knew exactly what they were doing, and they knew exactly what they were doing, and nothing could be worse.

01-00:22:22 Meeker: Had you stayed in touch with Rove over the years?

01-00:22:25 Smith: I did. Also, in the 2004 cycle, I appeared on a panel with the Interfaith Alliance. The first one was in Atlanta, and it was a guy named Welton Gaddy who ran it. There was another guy, I believe Richard Land, from the Southern Baptist Convention was on it, me, and a couple of other people. I specifically talked about the way that the Bush campaign was using this issue to try to divide people based on religion, and said it was horrible and that they needed to stop. Just kind of took my text on it probably pretty angrily and more than I normally would have for a big public panel. This was back when email first started to be a thing you could get on your phone. I got off the panel and checked my phone, and I had an email that was a direct quote of something I had just said about twenty minutes earlier, from Karl Rove. This is 2004, now, not 2000. He said, “Is this you?” I replied, “Yes. It’s the same me that said, in 1996, that I couldn’t work with the Christian Coalition and other groups. Yeah, same me.” I didn’t get a reply, but I was told by someone else that he started to call through my clients and tell them they needed to get rid of me, and that I was on the bad list. I’ve since seen him several times over the years, and he’s certainly been cordial.

The other thing I always said, because I typically avoided reporters to talk about this—because when you work in progressive politics and you have Karl Rove on your resume, people can’t figure that out. I kind of say two things about it. One is that there became a point where I radically disagreed with his politics, and especially what they did around LGBT people. But at the same time, when I started in politics, he was a terrific boss and a great mentor, and he taught me a ton about politics and campaigns and how they’re run, and did that with integrity about what I was learning and all of that. It’s a mixed bag in my mind when I think back, because when you’re just out of college and someone is teaching you about politics and all of that—and the politics I was working on then was not about LGBT. It was the business community versus

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the trial lawyers. But there became a point where his politics and mine were wildly incompatible.

01-00:25:29 Meeker: After George W. Bush comes out in support of the amendment, and you jump into movement politics, how did you do that? What kind of work did you do?

01-00:25:41 Smith: It was two things. It was first with Log Cabin Republicans. Patrick Salmon was the communications director at the time, who was a friend, and he said, “I need to introduce you to Patrick Guerriero, who runs Log Cabin, because we’ve got to do something about this.” He introduced me to Patrick Guerriero, and we started talking about it, and we said, what are all the things that we need? We need polling, and need to take that to the White House. Just became a part of a kind of strategy team there. I said we need advertising, and we need it to be out there in some states, and on national cable, and all that sort of thing. Really got engaged at the national level of, how do we insert this in the conversation? I don’t know if you remember, but in 2004, a Republican organization going against the president and calling him out for something was a huge deal. We did that first ad, and then we did a second one during the convention, which was a lot of fun because we got footage from the Reagan Library—and it’s one of those thank God for the gay network; it’s everywhere. There was somebody that worked in the archives at the Reagan Library that got us permission to use this footage of Ronald Reagan in his final speech to the Republican Convention in 1998, where he says, “I hope I appealed to your greatest hope, not your greatest fear,” and all of these really great things that projected forward to the exact moment we were in. So we did this very cool ad where it looked like we were projecting the Reagan footage, and then we said, “The Republican Party has a choice to make. Will it be the party of choice or will it be the party of fear, which only leads to hate?” We used civil rights pictures, and then in the last images, we used the Fred Phelps, the Phelps gang, with the “God hates fags” signs, and then said, “The choice is clear,” and then it goes to black. It was a fairly dramatic ad.

We aired that during the [Republican National] convention. It was in New York, and Patrick and his communications people and I got passes—because anybody can get a pass, if you know the right people—to the convention. We did a press conference in the hall, but we would have to move around, because everyone wanted to interview Patrick, so we had a crush of media. Part of my job was to help manage that process. You had some closeted legislator from Virginia got caught calling a sex line or something, and that happened in the middle of the convention, so it was like, wow, the gay stuff is everywhere. We were doing thirty or forty interviews a day. It’s one of those, Patrick’s in the booth at CNN, and then they say, “In the next segment, Karl Rove,” and I would say, “Come on, we’ve got to go right now,” because I knew if he saw me, we’d get booted from the facility and wouldn’t be back in at all. The ad got huge press. People like Sean Hannity would stop Patrick in the Radio Row

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and say, “Why the hell are you here? Why are you doing this?” It was really contentious, but it was also a lot of fun. Our job was to be the fly in the ointment, and we felt like it was hugely important.

It’s one of the times, too, that I really learned a lot about Patrick as a colleague and a potential future business partner, because just the integrity that he—that was the hardest place in the world to be, because you had the entire LGBT movement saying, “George W. Bush is the devil. How can anybody be Republican?” et cetera. Patrick was still, at that point, a Republican, and speaking truth to power to the party. He wasn’t shying away from the places where the party was horrifically wrong on this, and did it with a lot of integrity and a lot of class. I thought that meant a lot for the moment, because it allowed him not to be dismissed. I thought that was some of the smartest sort of political positioning. He was on NBC. Campbell Brown did a long segment on NBC Nightly News during the convention on this. It was huge publicity, and elevated the issue in a very smart way that laid the groundwork for our next phase of work, where we made bringing Republicans into the conversation in a constructive way a huge part of being able to succeed.

01-00:30:43 Meeker: Did you remain identified with the Republican Party at this point?

01-00:30:47 Smith: In 2004, I was an independent. I still supported some Republicans, but I wrote a $250 or $500 check to John Kerry, and I thought that was the weirdest thing in the world, and also sad, because I knew he was running a horrible campaign. Everything became candidate-specific for me. By 2008, there weren’t really any Republicans that I wanted to support anymore.

01-00:31:25 Meeker: I’m curious, during this period of time, between 2004 and 2008, did you start to work with any of the mainstream LGBT organizations, like HRC [Human Rights Campaign]? Did you become aware of Freedom to Marry and the work that they were doing?

01-00:31:39 Smith: I did. In 2004, the other thing that I started working with is the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, which kind of fit my skill set, because they were all about training candidates for office. The previous eight years of my career had been all about electing individuals. So I had particular expertise, and I was hired as a consultant around helping some of their state groups set up state PACs [Political Action Committees], and kind of technical assistance around a lot of that work. I engaged in that for a couple of cycles. But 2005 is when, after Tim Gill had seen all of the Log Cabin advertising and campaign from the previous year, he decided at one of his philanthropic OutGiving conferences—the legend is, he stood up on the table and said, “We need to do one of these for politics. We’re going to have an OutGiving for politics, and it’s going to be next year, in 2006.” His team had no political team at that

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point. In the fall, I believe October, of 2005, I was hired as the first consultant for political OutGiving. In that capacity, I worked with another consultant to help develop the program, along with the Gill Foundation team. He had a team that was terrific at putting on the philanthropic events, but they didn’t have the political and electoral side, and legally couldn’t, so they had to hire other people to do that.

01-00:33:20 Meeker: So you’re talking about the difference between the (c)(3) that had existed and the (c)(4) that would eventually exist, the Gill Action Fund?

01-00:33:27 Smith: Yes. That conference was in, I believe, March or April of 2006. So 2006, they had the first political OutGiving Conference in Miami. It was about a hundred people. Probably about sixty of those were donors. It was fascinating, because we had two former governors—were the only elected officials we could get to come, and they were paid. One was Governor Mario Cuomo, and the other was Christie Todd Whitman. It was very important, and this was Patrick, who was already a consultant to Gill and had a close relationship there, saying no, you’ve got to be bipartisan about this. It was interesting, because that’s when all the movement groups started to realize this is a big donor convergence, so we want to be there, too. So people from all of the different national groups were there and were a part of it to different extents. What became very quickly evident is, as soon as the conference ended, the donors in the room said, “Okay, we get it; what do we do next?”

Then I was hired to run a program of vetting all of the candidates around the country, because they said, all right, we’re going to play in twelve number of states where we think, if we have a better state legislature, we can pass pro- LGBT laws, or block some of the bad stuff. So it was my job to go look at all of those states, vet all of those candidates. At the time, that was my sweet spot. That’s what I had been doing for the last ten years, so we could get a high degree of specificity around races, could they be won, all of that. We called it sort of like a secret gay version of Emily’s List, where we would do these mailers—this was not emailed out at all at the time—and you would get a mailing that had half-page descriptions of sixty candidates, and here’s where you write the checks. Then we would collect all these checks and get them into the campaigns. It was the first time anybody had done anything like this on LGBT issues. The Victory Fund did that for gay candidates, but not for straight candidates. It was a huge change in how elected officials engaged with and encountered the LGBT community.

01-00:36:09 Meeker: So the elected officials were aware of this whole process, and did they kind of apply or seek to get noticed based on their record or positions?

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01-00:36:20 Smith: Later in the program. At first, it was more of us going to them, and us saying—and usually, sometimes through an intermediary, a different politico or operative that we could say—some of them wanted to say that they had the support, some of them didn’t. There were a lot of different reactions there. There was one in particular. The nastiest, most virulently anti-gay guy in the state legislature in Iowa was running. There was a guy running against him who was just a really nice attorney. I remember his name was Eric Palmer. We looked, and we said the numbers say this guy can win, but he’s going to need a lot of money. So we loaded up, and we told the story to all these donors of how nasty and anti-gay this guy was. We also knew that they needed to flip these chambers to Democratic control, so we invested in a bunch of races, but we really loaded up in that one. But it was also fairly late in the cycle, so from the Republican’s perspective, all of a sudden this candidate has all this money from these people all over the country, and there’s no real reason why, and nobody can figure it out, until we did an Atlantic Monthly story that was timed to go out right after the election. The headline of it was “They won’t know what hit them.” Because our strategy was to come at this from a place of stealth, because at that point, if you said this guy is supported by liberal gay philanthropists and donors from San Francisco, New York, et cetera, and being led by this software billionaire, or millionaire, who lives in Colorado, it would have been huge problem. But what it said was we’ve actually gotten smart. We’ll come after you if you’re anti-gay. There are consequences to this.

It created this whole different ethos around how the community did its work. It was a really, really successful first iteration of a concept like that. So in the fall of that year, Tim decided to formalize Gill Action and build out a team. Patrick Guerriero was announced, and in the fall of ’06 became the executive director, hired a couple of staff. Then, in January—I was still a consultant at that point—but in January, Robin Brand, who at the time had been at the Victory Fund, and I were hired. She was hired as the COO, and I was hired as the national political director. It was then, the beginning of 2007, that Gill Action really became a team of people working all over the country, spending money, and that’s when interacting with all the national groups and working with Freedom to Marry, the task force, HRC, the Victory Fund, all of that, became my daily life.

01-00:39:41 Meeker: Up to this point in time, I believe that Freedom to Marry had been receiving some funds from the Gill Foundation, the (c)(3) side of it. I imagine there was probably a pretty serious firewall between you and the (c)(4) and them and the (c)(3), yes?

01-00:39:58 Smith: There was. They had staff that was on the (c)(3) side that could sometimes work on (c)(4) issues with us, but then they would have to charge their time and do all these things. They were incredibly careful and worried about

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compliance, number one, because they wanted to get it right, but number two, because they thought the other side would attack, and what better way to cripple the LGBT movement than to go cause trouble for the funders and the people paying for it? So they were really careful about all that, but there was a pretty big line. Frankly, Freedom to Marry, at that point, was not at all engaged in politics. It was a (c)(3) that was an idea of Evan’s [Wolfson], and they had collaborated with all of these litigation groups. Our job on the (c)(4) side at Gill Action was really simple. It was, in seventeen to twenty states, we have to pass some form of relationship recognition, and/or nondiscrimination legislation in the next several years, so that we’re teeing up things as part of this broader plan. You’ve probably talked to a lot of people already about the broader plan being the ten-ten-ten-twenty plan and all of that. Our job was, we are the political hit squad to go make this happen, and for us, that means electing the right people, replacing bad people with good people, so that you have a bit more pro-LGBT legislature in states. That means upping the game of our groups on the ground, some of whom were fantastic, some of whom were not. I say that not as a criticism of the people, but more of they never had any money. These groups were radically underfunded and had just no resources. When we started, we did a scan. We wanted to know what resources were being put towards advocacy on the (c)(4) side in states around the country, and so we worked with the Equality Federation and did a study in our first quarter of being Gill Action. It came back that 14.5 full-time equivalents were working on this around the country. We were like, well, no wonder. Right? In some states, the Catholic Church has five lobbyists, not to mention the family groups and all of those other things.

We immediately realized we couldn’t just do the electoral work; we had to change the way we showed up in state capitals. That’s where Patrick as a former state legislator—and I was someone who used to work with state legislators all the time, sometimes to pass laws that helped on the electoral stuff I was working on, sometimes against. We immediately saw that we needed to up our game dramatically. The way we used to say it to people in 2007 was, “So that state legislator that you’re going to meet with about this, he just had a meeting with the Car Dealers Association before you, and he’s got a meeting with the Medical Association after you. What was your meeting like? Was it as professional as those two meetings? Are you treating this with the same level of professionalism and drive towards exactly what you need that those groups are? Do we have the kind of lobbyists that we need?” There were a lot of really good, smart, well-intentioned people who, what we used to call, were white-hat lobbyists. They could tell you exactly what a bill did and what it meant, and they were academic, and they were very good at communicating about this does this, it doesn’t do this, and they were advocating, but we said, “I want the guy who can do a little bit of that, but who goes out and gets drunk with the speaker. Knows where the bodies are buried, and how the hell are we going to get through the judiciary committee,” and those kind of things.

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One of the things we did was a lot of funding around changing who was in those positions by giving those local groups more money to hire those people, sometimes hiring them ourselves. You realized, with our job being national in scope in the sense that we were working in a lot of places, it really wasn’t. It was really state-specific. When we were in seven to ten states at a time, we would be engaged working with the people we’d just helped elect, the groups on the ground to help them build out their capacity to win. That’s where we started to encounter Freedom to Marry more and more. Because Gill Action would participate in the national conversations, and often Gill Foundation had convened a lot of the national groups to meet and talk, so we would be in a lot of those convenings as appropriate, but we really had such a specific job to do that that conversation was interesting, but not related to our bottom line.

01-00:45:02 Meeker: It was contextual?

01-00:45:03 Smith: Yeah, exactly. But then Freedom to Marry started showing up in state after state.

01-00:45:10 Meeker: When you were engaged in this electoral activity and lobbying, you were primarily focused on state legislators, not in Congress?

01-00:45:20 Smith: Yeah, we thought Congress was hopeless, and the numbers were so far off. We also thought our federal game was really ill-equipped at that point. The federal movement had done a good job fending off the 2004 Marriage Amendment, but beyond that, wasn’t terribly effective. It was not really committed to being bipartisan, and doing a lot of other things at first that we thought were necessary to win at that moment in time. That’s changed, and it ebbs and flows, like any movement, any group. Our focus was really on the states.

01-00:46:01 Meeker: When you’re talking about states, these are thousands of individuals. I was just speaking with Tyler Deaton yesterday, and 424 legislators in New Hampshire alone—I think it’s the biggest of the states, even though it’s one of the smallest—that amounts to several thousand people across the country, several thousand races and positions. How do you actually manage that information operationally? How do you get the intelligence? How do you decide which places you’re going to be focusing on, what races?

01-00:46:39 Smith: That was my job at Gill, was to come up with the slate. It was the most time- intensive thing, because what happened is that you start at a very high level of needing to have full operational understanding of how a state’s politics works. If you know the governor’s office is controlled by this party, the house, this party, the senate, this party—and is a total numbers game of, what does it take

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for anybody else to get their bill passed? Who are the obstacles to getting our bill passed? You start with the kind of analysis of friends, enemies, people who are allies, but they aren’t doing the same thing we are, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That was one of my big things that we spent a ton of time on. We learned, very early on, that, number one, nobody had showed up with money in this kind of way before for the LGBT community, but they also hadn’t done a great job of connecting with other allies in the space to figure out, is there somebody in labor that thinks this horrible guy needs to go? Is there somebody in the choice community or the environmental world? Just understand this person as an elected official and their vulnerabilities, not just that they’re anti-gay.

01-00:47:59 Meeker: Were there particular organizations that you partnered with in this regard?

01-00:48:04 Smith: Yeah, it varied state to state. In Montana, it was the League of Conservation Voters. In New York, with labor quite a bit. There was a strong statewide group in New York. In Iowa, it was the Interfaith Alliance, it was labor partners. What we would do is go into a state—and you had to go. That’s the other piece, is you go and meet candidates and the party leadership, figure out what their plans are, ask them for a timeline, a plan. As somebody who used to run campaigns, I would say, “I need to see a timeline, a plan, and a budget. How are you going to win?” If somebody can’t explain to you their theory of their campaign and what it’s going to take to win, and you ask questions that—mine were like, “How many votes do you need to win?” Knowing I’ve done the research before I’ve walked in the room. I know how many votes you need to win. If they don’t get all of that, you think either they’re going to need a lot of babysitting, but they’re the only candidate we’ve got running against horrible person X, or what can we do to help and how do we engage? You do all of that on a candidate-by-candidate basis.

The one thing is, there are thousands of these people all over the country, but you winnow the list down to the states very quickly. It’s the bottom-up analysis of, race by race, can you flip a chamber that tells you that state is viable, that puts that up the list? But you also start, from the beginning, kind of a top-down analysis of what states—balancing need and opportunity. We need to get nondiscrimination, and safe schools, relationship recognition, and X done in this date. You start with fifty and move down based on what has already been accomplished, and then kind of figure out the balance of need and opportunity. The opportunity always depends on the politics, and the money, and the campaign finance rules, and all that. We would systematically go through all of those steps for each state, and then when you would get down to the list of seven to ten that we were saying we were going to focus on, we always would do that and then have what we would call the dirty dozen list. Because there was a randomness that was needed to continue to flip out

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the other side of, the gays can come for you any time, any place. You may not see us coming.

If you have particularly bad people, you would say, here are the five to seven states, and then here are these other ten races, that don’t fit the exact criteria of trying to flip the Iowa State Senate or whatever, that are going to lead to safe schools and nondiscrimination, but they’re bad people doing bad stuff. Tim Gill was really, I thought, very, very smart about understanding that dynamic of the volume of bad stuff coming out of these people. When you turn down the volume, it creates a space that the rest of the work can get done in. You do that by two things. One is defeating people, and the other is by working with Republicans. If you can work with Republicans and get them to say not necessarily exactly what you want, but not say hellfire brimstone and horrible things that incite violence and everything else, turn that down a little bit. Then they also know there’s a threat imperative out there that these people have gotten smart politically and know how to take you out. The combination of those two things makes the environment to do the work in a little bit easier.

01-00:51:48 Meeker: That’s interesting. When you were trying to influence Republicans in this way, were you engaging with them directly, or was it more kind of externally, “This is what’s happening in the context. You would be smart to tone down your rhetoric”?

01-00:52:08 Smith: A couple of different ways. A lot directly. Patrick Guerriero, as a former state legislator, had this rule that he said you have to go and talk to people and give them an opportunity to have a good conversation. One of the things that we found in the earliest phases of this is that when you sat down with a lot of Republicans, the first thing they would say when you shut the door is, “No one has ever come to talk to me about this before.” They’ve only been screamed at by people on the left, calling them bigots, or people on the right, who are just shrill about the issue. No one had stopped to have an engagement. It involved, usually, bringing a storyteller with you, someone from their district, who was either LGBT or a parent of an LGBT person. I give Patrick a ton of credit, because he did so many of these conversations that are really hard. What happened, and what I found to be fascinating—I didn’t do a lot of those directly until later years, like the New York marriage battle and all of that—was that when you’re in these conversations and you make it personal, and you make it about specific people, they would open up. Everybody has somebody in their life that is gay. This would be the first time many of them had ever talked about it.

You strangely would establish this very personal connection with someone, and help them talk through what they were thinking. But we would also be able to kind of turn that off and then talk about their politics and their district, and the way we had worked politically to have people’s back. You couldn’t

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ever do kind of a quid pro quo, but you could explain this is how we do politics, and this is our history, would usually be the way we would do that. They never, ever had anybody have those conversations with them, because if you think elected officials—and I do—first worry about remaining an elected official, and if you go in knowing that that’s their mindset, and then you have a conversation, those led to a lot of really interesting and fruitful things. Now, the other side about taking out bad people, you didn’t talk about that in that context. You hoped that they knew you were capable of that, but you don’t really want to put that on the table. You want it to be the silent thing behind your shoulder.

01-00:54:46 Meeker: Keeping or flipping state legislatures, electing allies, is one part of this overall thing, but at this point in time, most of the action—or a lot of it, at least—is happening on state propositions, or voters amending state constitutions, like happened in California with Prop 8 in 2008. What was Gill Action Fund’s approach to state initiatives? Voter initiatives.

01-00:55:25 Smith: Very, very skeptical. There was Ref I in Colorado that Gill had invested heavily in, and lost. He is an extremely logical person and analytical thinker, and he said, “Look, we didn’t win that, and until we learn and know how to win those, I don’t want to invest in those. I think going and passing laws through state legislatures is a smarter use of my time, energy, and money, and a lot of donors believe the same thing.” We did not know how to win those. There’s no one that can tell you that we had some great strategy before 2009, or ’10, that we knew how to win those at all, with sort of the exception of Kalamazoo, Michigan, where we won one by dramatically overfunding. I think Prop 8 was one that was kind of a special and different thing, because it really was thrust upon us, and the movement did engage and invest, and Tim was a huge leader in that. Patrick actually went and helped run the campaign in the last six weeks when it was very obvious that the people that were running it were not remotely equipped to run it, and engaged and brought a lot of people and money to the table. I think what they did was keep the margin from being worse than it was. But we didn’t know how to talk about this stuff in an electoral context correctly. So what we continued to focus on throughout that time was slowly, steadily make progress in states. New York was a four- year campaign before we got to a win, going through multiple legislative elections, and governors, and people going to prison and everything else. In other states, there was progress during that same time. It was maybe nine months after, if not shorter, after Prop 8 that we had marriage in Iowa. Then some New England states popped after that. Because we kept focusing on state organizing, but we weren’t the ballot initiative people.

01-00:57:49 Meeker: People do talk about Prop 8 as a turning point, though, in the sense that it was a wake-up called. It inspired people, funders, the movement, to really redouble efforts. Evan talks about it as a point that inspired the transformation

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of Freedom to Marry into this campaign that it became. Is that how you experienced it at Gill Action as well, or was it slightly different?

01-00:58:23 Smith: Yeah, it was, but at the same time, a lot of the other stuff we were doing was working. What was not working was the messaging. We didn’t know how to talk about this. We were still winning political fights. We were losing ballot initiatives because of the messaging. I have a lot of credit for the movement, for going to the mountain to figure that out, and specifically in Oregon. Gill Foundation funded a lot of this work. This is when Thalia Zepatos really became such a critical figure in going and doing real testing, where one side of the street will get this message, the other side of the street will get this message. Let’s test it before and after, and see what worked and what didn’t. Is a knock on the door better than people getting a piece of mail or a TV commercial, and what is the highest and best use of a dollar? Real, hard analytical work to figure this stuff out. The messaging stuff in the shift from a rights-based framing to a love, commitment framing happened over that period of time as well, which was a huge deal.

Freedom to Marry played a pretty big role, but it took them a while to play the lead role. Early on, in Iowa, in particular, between 2007 and 2009, I remember getting into Iowa, and I jumped backwards because it’s kind of important to understand the next wave of it, which was, in 2007, we got there and we started working on legislative elections, and the legislative goal first was safe schools, but we knew that Lambda Legal had filed a marriage case there, and it won at the trial court. So then it was, oh gosh, this is going to the state supreme court. You could see we’re not ready, legislatively, to defend this. We could be headed to another constitutional amendment, but Iowa has a very complicated process to amend their constitution, that takes multiple legislatures doing it. If you short-circuit that process early on—similar to the Massachusetts process, and we learned a lot from that lesson about how they did that—you can actually buy yourself a lot of time to delay this thing. That’s where we were doubling down, building the relationships with the legislators so that when this thing comes, they’re ready to say no.

We started with safe schools, and working with One Iowa and all of that there. Those were the early conversations where we felt like—or certainly I did— there were all these—I called them time bombs—all over the country, which were the marriage lawsuits. They were filed by people who had no clue about what was going to be required to protect them politically. They understood there’s going to be a process, but the blocking and tackling, and the work that you have to do to stop something like that in a legislature, those two were very disconnected. The legal people had great disdain for the political, and vice versa, on a lot of levels. We would be having these meetings and talking about these things, and Evan would show up at first, before his team really was built out, and was very much saying, “This is what we’re going to talk about.” We would say, “What does the research say?” He would say, “What research?

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We’re not doing research.” I came from a world where—not doing research? What we’re going to say is exactly what the poll tells us to say, was my answer.

So we kind of went round and around in some of these early states, because we were dealing with elected officials who they didn’t care what this pushy guy from New York was going to tell them to say. They wanted to know what their district thought and how they could talk about all these issues, and so we had to give them data, because that’s how these people got elected, was knowing what the lines were. What’s fantastic about places like Iowa, too, is you had people that sometimes knew the numbers, and were profiles in courage and went above and beyond where the public was anyway, and really were leaders, but they knew where the public was, and that had to be measured. That was kind of an early fight that we had quite a bit about research. Sometimes research would be more in the commitment range, and sometimes it would be more about rights and benefits.

01-01:03:07 Meeker: Did you feel like Evan was coming from sort of a moral authority or prophetic vision kind of direction? When you brought up the necessity of research, how was he responding to it?

01-01:03:20 Smith: In retrospect, I would say that’s what he was coming from. At the time, it was annoying, because it was this guy feels sort of messianic about this message and about the righteousness of doing it, and on a personal level, yeah, I agreed with him, but our job was to give these people actionable messages to win people over. And by the way, all of our campaigns on this messaging stuff, the movement, they were losing. It was very clear we didn’t have that fully figured out. We just insisted on it, insisted on it. The turning point to there being a more coherent conversation around research—because Evan moved from being fairly anti, or agnostic, and trying to figure out the most charitable way to say that he was not a research guy. But the turning point was when they started to build out the team, and Thalia Zepatos was brought in and understood that research had to be synthesized, that there were donors like us who were saying, no way, no how, are we doing this without any research. That was a complete non-starter. Those conversations and friendly family conflicts happened in places like Iowa, before you got to Prop 8, so that by the time the Prop 8 thing happened—and there was a lot of research in Prop 8, some of it good, some of it really bad—everybody, by the time we were after that terrible loss, but had still had some of these other political wins, figured out we’ve got to do research on this, and we’ve got to figure it out together. Then the funders were saying, yeah, and we’re not paying for ten different people to do the research, so let’s figure out how to do this collaboratively.

The Civil Marriage Collaborative and the Gill Foundation and a lot of others all worked together in places like Oregon to invest a lot of money in road

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testing these messages, and Thalia was one of the key people in working across all of the groups and bringing coherence to a strategy that both took in all of the research, used it, and she clearly had a directive from Evan, but people like me were a lot calmer, because we knew there was a process to it and research was being valued by smart people that knew a lot about research. It turns out Evan was right all along, so—

01-01:06:03 Meeker: Meaning?

01-01:06:04 Smith: On where the framing around love and commitment ended up. If you look at the way he talked about it in his thesis, thirty-plus years ago, and where we are now and how we talk about it, it’s not that different. At the time, though, there were these points where you can’t see the forest, and the data would show these things that that was not at all what we were supposed to be talking about, and the idea that you would just ignore research. We went and learned how to talk about it, and then his message track became a tenable one, and so everybody was on board, but it took a long time. Then losing Prop 8, and then winning ballot initiatives later. We lost Maine in ’09 as well. That same year, we won Washington State in a domestic partnership. It was an interesting period, because it wasn’t just, this is right, this is wrong. It was: there is a grey area. And we had civil union or domestic partnership fights, but not marriage fights, so you had other internal conflicts about what messaging are you going to use around domestic partnership, and make sure that that does what it takes to win there, but doesn’t damage marriage by saying, oh, we’re not talking about marriage, that’s a whole different thing.

01-01:07:35 Meeker: What was Gill’s policy on that, on civil union versus marriage? Evan’s policy was very clear, that if that’s what you’re going to give us, we’ll take it, but we’ll never ask for it.

01-01:07:51 Smith: That wasn’t our policy at all. I’m a Methodist. I used to say the Wesleyan thing: win all the rights you can, for all the people you can, all the times you can, and all the places you can. Who was I to say if we could win marriage, or we could win civil unions, in Chicago, or in Illinois, and there’s a poor lesbian couple on the South Side of Chicago that has more legal rights to protect their family than they did today, but we’re in some conference room somewhere trying to say that that’s less important than the strategic value of that being marriage, as a word, versus civil unions—that used to enrage me. Because our job was, yes, we’re all trying to get to the same place, but that’s further away if we don’t start winning some things where people recognize LGBT people as people. So we were absolutely in the camp of put more points on the board by winning states. In Wisconsin, it was a domestic partnership registry that was baked into the budget. But guess what? People started to see Wisconsin, LGBT couples in relationships recognized by the state. There’s probably no

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state that went civil union to marriage faster than Illinois in the end. I think we couldn’t have gotten marriage when we did without civil unions there. I think that was a vital stage. It was very contentious within the movement. I think Evan was right about the messaging. We were right about that piece of the strategy. The other thing is, you have to show momentum, you have to win, you have to have progress. We put a premium on winning. There was a concept talked about called losing forward. We were like, the number one word you just said is “losing.” Right? And we have to win, because after things like Prop 8, you have to show people that you can win and that people are behind you. You can’t overstate how important that was at that moment in time.

01-01:10:17 Meeker: Did you and your colleagues at Gill have conversations about what role you thought would be the most appropriate, effective role for an organization like Freedom to Marry?

01-01:10:28 Smith: Yeah, absolutely. Gill Action is funded by the generosity of Tim Gill, and he was smart enough to say, “I may not be here forever. This may not be here forever. This team that we built is here for a moment in time.” I had a lot of great colleagues. We knew that wasn’t going to exist forever, and so there needed to exist something like it that wasn’t currently in the national movement. Tim and a couple of others made really significant investments to start the (c)(4) side and say there needs to be a campaign piece to this.

01-01:11:11 Meeker: The (c)(4) side of Freedom to Marry?

01-01:11:12 Smith: Of Freedom to Marry. The number one reason was Marc Solomon. You had someone who had run state-level fights around what it takes to— Massachusetts, they tried to amend the constitution seven times. This is not a small ball battle. It was epic. He knew how to run that incredibly well. Very smart organizer, talent strategist that everyone trusted. The idea became, Evan was this visionary, and he was and is and always will be a prophetic leader who saw something that other people did not see, who knew how to work with the legal folks and build out this strategy, but the running of campaigns in a day-to-day political context was not something that anyone thought he was able to do. Marc was that person that knew how to do that really, really well. So building up that capacity there, knowing, too, at the moment in time, that as we started to win states, the campaign had to be more nationalized. That was always in the plan. That was probably the smartest place for it to live, and so donors really stepped up to do that, but a huge piece of it was personnel. It was Marc.

01-01:12:37 Meeker: So Gill played a role in getting Marc into Freedom to Marry?

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01-01:12:42 Smith: Yeah. I don’t know exactly who went to who when, but the big chunks of money that allowed the (c)(4) to be established came from that universe. We didn’t ever fund things with a wish and a prayer. We were hands-on, engaged funders.

01-01:13:08 Meeker: Do you think that we should spend that last twelve minutes talking about the New York campaign?

01-01:13:17 Smith: Sure.

01-01:13:19 Meeker: Rather than me peppering you with questions, I’m going to let you tell the story as you think is most appropriate. You can let us know some of the interesting, transformative moments, pivotal moments behind the scenes that perhaps have not already been published, because there has been some written about it.

01-01:13:59 Smith: New York is the most important thing that I’ve worked on in my life, and certainly at Gill, the entire story is about perseverance. There was a marriage case in New York that failed, and then in 2007, it became very clear that the path was legislative. The Empire State Pride Agenda was leading the effort there, a very strong statewide group with a leader with a very strong personality. We came in and started funding them. The state assembly was really there. We had Governor [Eliot] Spitzer at the time, who was a strong ally. It was a state where it was absolutely right for our model of come in and buttress the state group and what they’re doing, but also there needs to be a political transformation, particularly on the state senate side. So in 2008, we invested about a million bucks in elections there to help flip the state Senate. We had, then, Malcolm Smith, who the senate Democrats had. We’d worked with him and got very in the weeds with the Democratic conference there, and had them come to OutGiving and talk about, we can do this, we can win, but we have to do a lot of campaigns and run a lot of races with a lot of money. So we poured a huge amount of money into the elections that cycle, and then felt like we were in a position where we could do this when the legislature flipped. We hired the biggest name marquee lobbyist you could get in Albany after that election, but as you know, before that election, right after OutGiving, literally the day after OutGiving, we were basically recovering after the massive conference we produced. They said, oh, there’s a scandal with Governor Spitzer, and then, boom, Governor [David] Paterson is in office. Luckily, he was a huge ally of LGBT people. Unluckily, running the state was not his strongest talent.

New York was basically in chaos, and we didn’t know at the time there was a movement underfoot to pull people off of the Democratic conference—which

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these folks had never been in leadership. The Democratic senate leadership had never had power before, so they didn’t even know how to do it. Which sounds kind of dumb, but New York state government is massive. They didn’t know what that meant, to be in power. It was a fractious caucus, in part because a couple of its members were being wooed to join the Republican conference. We found this out at the time when we had both—because we knew from our previous battles, we had hired Democratic lobbyists, and we had hired Republican lobbyists. We had Pat Lynch, who was kind of the premiere lobbyist in Albany at the time, working with the Pride Agenda that we had funded. Then we also hired Mike Avella, who’s a Republican lobbyist, who is very close, and he had done the transition from the previous Republican senate leader to the then-current one, Dean Skelos. So we had the best talent on both sides of the aisle working the Senate.

We were in Mike Avella’s office when he said, “You’ve got to come in here and watch this.” We turned on the TV, showing the senate chamber, and a coup happened before our eyes. Literally, four days before, I had been in Manhattan having a breakfast meeting with the Senate leader and the governor’s chief, Governor Paterson’s guy, Charles O’Byrne, where we did what’s called the clipboard meeting, where you need thirty-two votes. We had thirty people on the clipboard as taking this vote, and then we had to get two from the Republicans, which, we knew from Mike’s meetings, that if they could kind of close the deal, that we had. You think you’ve got your deal, so then you’re just trying to get your two Republicans and figure out how to have them tell the leader that they have the votes and all of that. It turns out they were never going to do that, because they knew they were in the middle of taking the guy’s clipboard away, and taking the whole thing. The government fell apart. So it became, is it the Democrats’ fault? They clearly didn’t have the thirty. But the Republicans didn’t have their votes, either.

Then the wheel turns, politically, in New York, and the Democrats get control again, with a different leader. It’s still in 2009. It gets further and further into the year. The governor has been saying, we want a vote, we want a vote. We’re calling for a vote, because we’ve spent a ton of money on this. There had never been a bill brought up in the state senate that did not pass. It was just not done. Everybody knew it was all theater by the time you were actually voting on something. What happened in 2009, December, we said we want a vote, and the head of the Pride Agenda, Alan Van Capelle, it was really his call. He said, “We want a vote,” and there were people saying, “Alan, we’re going to lose. We know we don’t have the votes.”

01-01:19:36 Meeker: What did the clipboard look like at that time?

01-01:19:39 Smith: What people told us, we thought the clipboard was in good shape. But what turns out is there were Democrats that were lying, that were never there in the

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first place. There were Republicans who had said, “I’m probably going to be there,” so on both sides, you had people not being truthful.

01-01:19:57 Meeker: Did you get a sense about the Democrats lying? Is that typical? Why were they doing that?

01-01:20:05 Smith: One question that will always be a mystery is how much the lobbyists really knew. We were told we had the votes. But there are other people that said no way, we never had those votes. I had people that said to my face that I’m with you, and then voted the other way, so flat-out lied, which is one of the only times that’s ever happened to me, because even in politics, a rough-and- tumble business, face-to-face, people usually will tell you the truth, even when you don’t want to hear it. So the vote happens, and one of the things that they said they would do on the vote was what’s called a slow roll. Normally, they will open the voting and then people vote really fast and you can’t—but this was we’re going to call, name by name. One of the first names was [Joseph] Addabbo. He was one of the ones that we helped elect. Would not have been there without our money. And he voted no. Then the next guy was [James] Alesi, the first Republican possible yes, who totally was going to be a yes if the Ds were there, and he votes no. So then it’s going down. A ton of Ds pulled off, and no Republican [voted for it]. It didn’t just fall apart and we lose by a vote or two. We got, like, twenty-four votes. It went horribly wrong. That was the worst moment ever. The story I have told several times is, that night, we’re literally all sitting around the bar of the hotel, where everyone stayed throughout months and months in Albany, and everyone is kind of crying in their cocktail. My thing buzzes, and it’s a message from Tim Gill, and he says, “That’s sad. What’s next?” Like, he’s ready to go.

01-01:22:00 Meeker: So there were no recriminations coming from above?

01-01:22:03 Smith: Oh, no. Not happy, but what are we doing about it was the implication. People in New York were out in the streets. There were rallies. They were angry. That’s when we decided to set up a PAC, called Fight Back New York, and said, “We’re going to go get these bastards. People lied to us. They lied to my face.” With Tim’s money and a lot of other people’s anger, we started this PAC. The sole purpose of it was we’re going to go after people who double- crossed us. We started with Hiram Monserrate, who’s one of the people who lied to us, who was already being kicked out of the senate for a felony assault of his girlfriend. It was this race out in Queens. We went in and spent more money in that race than the guy who won it, and became a force. We did brutal ads. We showed the images from the security cam footage of him attacking his girlfriend, and just inundated his district in English and in Spanish. It was just a take-no-prisoners approach, and everyone took notice.

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Then the next race we went into was a Democratic primary in Buffalo, where—

01-01:23:22 Meeker: The Monserrate election: was that a general election or a primary?

01-01:23:25 Smith: It was a special election. So it allowed us to focus a lot of money in a primary that other people were like, well, either way on the primary; it doesn’t matter for control of the chamber. Other people didn’t have an incentive to play big. We had an incentive to say, we’re going to teach a lesson here, and we’re going to show you what—it’s like Medieval England. This is the guy whose head got chopped off. That was our job, right? We did it, did it really well. Then we went to this district in Buffalo where the leadership called us during the closing days of the previous election and had moved money to save this guy, saying he’ll be there for us versus another race. Because we’d funded at such a level that we were at the table for a lot of these conversations. Well, that guy screwed us and lied to us. There was a primary challenger, and we beat him in the primary. He was the leadership guy, and they were mad as hell with us for doing that, but it sent a signal that we’re not stopping until we get this.

Then in the fall, we moved and we took out a Republican who had been there for thirty-something years, and that people weren’t expecting to lose, but we were relentless. We didn’t campaign on whether or not he voted on marriage. We had polled the ten issues that matter most, and we beat the hell out of you on what really enraged people in that district. The greatest thing ever was, right after the election, Politico did a story and they called him, and he gave a quote that’s like, “I would have won except for those insidious gays.” It was kind of like the end of a Scooby Doo episode, where they say, “I would have done it except for you kids.” What that did was finally establish political power and we would say things like, “We will not stop. We’ll go through your backyard, we’ll go through your backyard. We don’t care until we get to the votes.”

At the same time, Andrew Cuomo was running for governor. We had, during the course of the election, really terrific meetings with him. He immediately got it. His vocabulary was perfect. There was kind of a cold affect about it. He wasn’t passionate about it. It was, this is how we’re going to do it, da, da, da, da, da. After we get past the election cycle, we already have all these relationships with Republicans, because we kept that door open. We kept the lobbyist in place. We heard Skelos say during the election cycle, “I would let this come to a vote,” which was a huge deal. We made sure that he knew we heard that. We had people who were supporting Republican campaigns.

01-01:25:58 Meeker: Did you have to get him to that point?

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01-01:26:01 Smith: Jeff Cook was working with him. Jeff was a consultant of ours at Gill, and he continued outreach. He would go to these Republican picnics all fall and give $500 to somebody’s state campaign committee so that we had constant relationships there. He did that at a Log Cabin event that Jeff orchestrated. The whole thing was very well-coordinated, and we made sure that Skelos knew we were watching, and we thanked him. When we went after our Republican in the fall, we were like, this is not a surprise. This guy is pretty anti-gay. But we kept lines of communication open with both, which is a big difference. We were probably too far in the Democratic camp the first time. The obvious huge difference was having a governor who came in saying he was going to do this, with the power to get it done, and—

01-01:27:04 Meeker: The political skills as well.

01-01:27:05 Smith: Absolutely. There’s a little bit of a story that is kind of Andrew Cuomo was our white knight, and I don’t want to take away anything from him, because he was phenomenal, and I worked very closely with him and his team, and they were amazing. Wasn’t just him. He had Steve Cohen, he had Katherine Grainger. He had a whole group of people that were super smart. Betsey Ball. All these folks that did this work incredibly well. But we also had a lot that we brought to the table. The movement had come together. HRC was doing field work in New York. The Pride Agenda had changed leadership and was in a really strong position. Freedom to Marry was bringing technical expertise and helping bring, then keep, the coalition together. We had this whole Republican operation with polling and focus groups and things going on. So we had parallel tracks to work with the governor, that previously we didn’t have, and just a lot bigger, better game than we did two years earlier, because we learned from our mistakes. When you combine all of that with a leader like Andrew Cuomo, that was the magic that got us to a win. But it was the most complicated campaign, I think, the movement has ever done. It had so many different elements to it. Ballot campaigns are, of course, incredibly complicated, but legislative ones in an environment like Albany are pretty complex, too. It was, I think, one of the movement’s finest hours.

01-01:28:38 Meeker: Well, we’re over. We should probably wrap up there. I really appreciate your time today.

[End of Interview]