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1972 - Reverend Troy Perry - Same-sex marriage was one of his fights from the beginning, long before it was a major political issue:
1media/Screen Shot 2023-03-17 at 1.59.39 PM_thumb.png2023-03-17T21:01:16+00:00Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a4911Same-sex marriage was one of his fights from the beginning, long before it was a major political issue: In December 1968, just two months after MCC’s first meeting in his living room, Perry performed what Time magazine declared the first public same-sex wedding in the U.S. “I always believed in marriage. I was one of those strange gay men who talked about marriage,” Perry told me through laughter. “And marriage was just very, very important to me, and so all my life, I fought for that.” Marriage was just one theater of operations for Perry and MCC. “I used to say, years ago,” Perry said, “the one thing I had to fight for, if I was not going to fight for anything else—of course, I fought for everything—was the rights of my members to have a job. People have to work, and that includes my community, too.” That fight took different forms: picketing in 1969 in front of States Steamship Co. offices when it fired a man for coming out, and in 1977, when Perry told reporters from the steps of downtown LA’s Federal Building that he intended to fast there publicly “until death if necessary,” in order to raise $100,000 to fight the Briggs Initiative, a proposed amendment to the state’s education code that would ban gay and lesbian California teachers from working in the state’s public schools.plain2023-03-17T21:01:16+00:001972Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a49