The hottest ticket in town is not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. By noon Saturday, nearly four dozen people were waiting in line outside the Supreme Court for Tuesday’s arguments over states’ same-sex marriage bans.
Frank Colasonti Jr., left, and James Barclay Ryder were one of about 300 couples who married in the brief window last spring when same-sex couples could marry in Michigan.
Chris Geidner/BuzzFeed
"We were the first couple in Oakland County," Colasonti told BuzzFeed News on Saturday afternoon. "We were in line at 6 a.m. on that date — and that was freezing."
Today, they are in another line: #17 and #18 in the line of people that began forming in front of the Supreme Court at 6 a.m. Friday, April 24. That was 100 hours before the justices will hear arguments over the constitutionality of bans on same-sex couples' marriages from four states, including Michigan.
"We were together 26 years, a 26-year engagement, and we got married last year — on March 22, 2014 — and we just celebrated our first anniversary," Colosanti said.
Following a district court ruling on March 21, 2014 that struck down Michigan's marriage ban, the county clerk where Colosanti and Ryder live announced that same-sex couples would be able to marry. The couple was smart to get in line: The marriages only continued for a few hours, before an appeals court quickly put the ruling on hold during appeal. The appeals court later upheld the ban on marriages, prompting the Supreme Court case.
And though Colasonti and Ryder were able to marry, they are still front and center awaiting this week's arguments.
"The rest of the people can't get married in Michigan. So, we feel an obligation, a duty, until everyone can get married, that we need to fight for everybody else still," Ryder said. "We just got lucky, that's all."
"I've slept on the sidewalks of courts across this country," said Kathleen Perrin, 15th in line. "I've attended all but one of the courts of appeals hearings, I was at the Michigan trial — I watched that trial."
Chris Geidner/BuzzFeed
Perrin has herself become part of the story of marriage equality in recent years. What began as a simple effort to provide easy, online access to legal documents in the handful of marriage cases around the country in 2010, her Equality Case Files have become an essential clearinghouse for the daily developments in dozens of cases that have percolated up across the country since 2013.
"That's what I do," she said, laughing. She said it's an effort "to support both journalists and people who have no background in media or law with a way to gain access to and an understanding of how the courts work, the significance of it, why people make arguments in court that seem absurd to people in their lives."
Perrin had attempted to get into the arguments through the Public Information Office in a press seat — as she had done in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals arguments in January over the marriage bans in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas — but she was denied.
"I'm sitting out here, unfortunately," she said. "I did apply for a media pass, as a legal correspondent for an LGBT media organization [Frontiers magazine], but we were from California and we got turned down. So, I'm out here instead."
Nonetheless, Perrin is in line with the same group of people she had met when waiting in line to hear the arguments over California's Proposition 8 in 2013 — including Colasonti and Ryder, as well as Jason Hewett, who came up from outside Atlanta to be #16 in line for the arguments.
"This is old hat for us, so we're as ready as can be," Hewett said. "Just aside from the historical significance of it, being a gay man myself, it's just — this is the place to be."
