At the No on 8 field office in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake neighborhood on the eve of Election Day, it was hard to imagine defeat. The two large, brightly lit rooms reserved for training volunteers were packed; the hallways were almost impassible. A crowd of supporters had gathered outside, unable to squeeze through the door. “That’s not a problem,” said field manager Heather Gibson, grinning. And she was right. Before the smile had left her face, a coworker came in to announce that MJ’s, the gay bar across the street, would take in the overflow.
Even in the context of California’s big-money ballot initiatives, the fight over Proposition 8, which sought to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage, was a battle of epic proportions. According to Ron Buckmire, who heads the Barbara Jordan/Bayard Rustin Coalition, an African-American gay rights group, “It was the largest LGBT field operation in history.” Los Angeles County expected to turn out 7,500 volunteers on Election Day. Statewide, nearly 50,000 volunteers had lent the campaign their time and sweat for months. Thousands opened their wallets too. Gay rights leaders said they expected to need about $20 million to defeat Prop. 8 back when it qualified for the ballot in June; six months later both sides together had raised more than $70 million. By November 4 the No on 8 campaign had raised $38 million, outpacing the Yes on 8 camp, which received some $20 million from members of the Mormon Church. “It’s nothing short of miraculous,” said West Hollywood city council member John Duran four days before Election Day.
Yet the Yes side still won -- 52.3% to 47.7% -- leaving gay Californians and their allies both surprised and crestfallen. A Field Poll released on September 18 showed Prop. 8 trailing by double-digit margins. And while that had narrowed to just five percentage points by Halloween, marriage equality proponents hadn’t expected to lose Los Angeles County, necessary to offset the votes for Prop. 8 in conservative parts of the state. Even worse, in an election marked by record turnout, less than two thirds of registered voters in San Francisco and Los Angeles went to the polls. What had gone wrong?
The official narrative of defeat -- at least its early version -- is fairly simple and at least partially true: Despite a heroic effort on the part of the No on 8 campaign, homophobia and fear outweighed tolerance and respect for gay people’s right to marry (again). But considering that in 2000, 61% of Californians voted for a statutory ban on same-sex marriage -- the one that was invalidated by the state supreme court in May -- support had grown considerably. It was impossible to foresee the ferocity of Yes on 8’s largely Mormon-sponsored fund-raising effort. It took too long for LGBT citizens to shake off their complacency after winning the right to marry. The other side told too many lies and sowed too much fear. Bigotry was still too powerful. As the No on 8 campaign’s Sky Johnson glumly puts it, “There’s a lot of people that don’t like gay people.”
In the days after Prop. 8 won, protests would spring up all over California. More than 1,000 rallied in front of the Los Angeles Mormon Temple in the Westwood district on November 6, taking to the streets and snagging traffic in parts of west L.A. for hours. On Friday as many as 10,000 gathered in San Diego’s Balboa Park, and 2,000 marched through downtown San Francisco. The next day 10,000 more marched through San Diego’s Hillcrest neighborhood and more than 12,000 protesters shut down Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake.