The Road to Equality

 

Mary Bonauto, GLAD’s Civil Rights Project Director, was the lead counsel in Hillary Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, in which the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that same-sex couples had the right to marry and gave the state Legislature 180 days to “take any steps necessary,” says Bonauto. It’s a result that no other lawyer in the country has been able to replicate — not for lack of trying.

 

“Just the other day, someone asked me, ‘Haven’t you people learned that you shouldn’t be litigating this anymore?’” Bonauto says in GLAD’s eighth-floor conference room, one week after the Washington state high court refused to recognize same-sex marriage. “No, we haven’t learned that. We have never advocated full-scale litigation –– on this issue or anything else. But I think you can never give up on the courts as articulating and bringing to life those basic principles of fairness.”

 

 

Bonauto, a comparative literature major in college, believes in the power of people’s stories. Her own starts in Newburgh, N.Y., 60 miles north of Manhattan. A child of Italian immigrants who believed in the transformative power of education, she knew she wanted to be a lawyer by the time she attended Hamilton, a small liberal arts college in upstate New York.

 

“There is just something about me –– and I don’t know where it comes from, but it has always been true –– that I’m always rooting for the little guy,” Bonauto says. “I’m always thinking about how to make the world more fair and help people in their lives.”

 

As a law student at Northeastern, Bonauto served as a court advocate at a battered women’s shelter, providing legal support for people seeking orders of protection. She also did legal research for the law firm Ward & Lund. The Ward was John Ward, who founded GLAD in 1978 in response to a sting operation at the Boston Public Library. There, she handled her first gay-related case, involving the separation of a couple who spent years restoring properties in the South End. “One of them had provided all the capital and the other had provided all the sweat equity,” Bonauto says. “And there was no law to equitably divide their assets. The question was: Was it possible to provide any kind of equity to the person who had provided all the labor? And the answer eventually was yes, but I had to think about what legal theories one might use.”

 

After graduation, she took a position at a firm in Portland, Maine, with a general civil litigation practice. “It turned out to be a terrific launching pad for me –– I’m still grateful to those folks,” says Bonauto, who still lives in Portland. The firm had a generous volunteer policy, so she signed up with the Volunteer Lawyers Project and contacted the Maine Civil Liberties Union. It was the late 1980s, and Bonauto was soon handling HIV discrimination cases. “I represented some of the first people with HIV in Maine,” she says. “And it was fairly rank discrimination, like a ‘you have this disease, you’re fired’ type of thing.”

 

At work, Bonauto was open about her sexual orientation. “When I started, some of the secretaries were trying to set me up with a male date, so I realized I had to say something,” she says. “The [office manager] was giving me a ride to work one day, and I told her.” The woman was shocked. “She nearly drove off the road. But it was okay,” Bonauto says. “We did survive.” Shortly after moving to Portland, Bonauto met Jennifer Wriggins, the woman she has been with for nearly two decades and with whom she now is a parent to twin 4-year-old girls.

 

As one of the few openly gay attorneys in Maine, Bonauto was sought out by the GLBT community for business cases and other civil or transactional issues. She also became the go-to person for emergencies. “At that time, with AIDS, you could suddenly develop an opportunistic infection and be on your deathbed,” Bonauto says. “So I would get calls that someone was in Maine Medical Center and they didn’t have a will. And I would rush over there and try to figure out, is this person even competent to do a will?”

 

During her time in Maine, Bonauto became convinced of the need for legal protections for partners and families. “I received a fair number of calls from people whose partners had just died, and they were calling me from a pay phone. I can remember more than one situation where people were sobbing on the phone because they were not even allowed to go back into the home they had shared with the deceased, or somebody was moving furniture out of the place. And the family, of course, had all the legal rights. I found that searing.”