Love Stories: Tony Kushner and Mark Harris

Married: August 15, 2008
Together: 10 years

If there’s one man who is essential to the gay brain trust, it’s Tony Kushner. His towering, Pulitzer Prize–winning drama Angels in America galvanized Americans to make a deeper political and emotional commitment to the value of a gay life. Kushner found that same commitment with author and columnist Mark Harris. In 2003, five years after they met and fell in love, the couple held what Kushner describes as a “big fancy wedding” for friends and family in New York City.

This summer they planned to marry legally in California, but the presence of antigay Proposition 8 on the California ballot gave them pause. “It’s kind of a scary situation,” Kushner says. “I’m assuming that marriages will remain legal in California, but they could, of course, be taken away.”

Just then -- in what could be called perfect theatrical timing -- Massachusetts decided to recognize same-sex marriages for out-of-state couples. “They hadn’t even created new paperwork to accommodate that by the time we went there and got married,” Harris says. Kushner and Harris made it legal in Provincetown on August 15 -- just the two of them. “We were married by a nice lady cop in the town hall,” Kushner says.

The importance of their marriage took a bit of time to sink in. “The ceremony itself was just this nice person reading these vows and filling out the marriage license form,” Kushner says. “But when we went back a week later and actually picked up the certificate itself, it was really moving because it’s legal recognition of our status as a married couple, and it’s one step closer to actual citizenship, to actually being a recognized person in our own country. It was something that I never really imagined would happen.”

Harris adds, “The great thing about this is, it’s not something that was accomplished by artists or accomplished by visionaries. It was accomplished by decent citizens electing decent state officials who did the decent thing. It doesn’t take a giant leap into the stratosphere, it just takes good citizenship to recognize that this is something that gay people deserve and should be able to participate in.”

There are still a few details of being married that haven’t become second nature just yet. “It’s so much easier to say ‘partner,’ ” Kushner says, “but I want to try to force myself to say ‘my husband, Mark,’ because those words matter.” And monogamy? “For us, it’s monogamy,” Kushner says, “but we’re not Republicans -- we’re not in the business of prescribing what [marriage] should be.”

“It’s hard to believe that a lot of straight couples are actually monogamous,” Harris adds. Kushner laughs, saying, “There’d be no literature or drama or movies if they were.”