Seven couples, marriage equality, and the fight for a more perfect and inclusive union

That ruling, and the marriages it allowed, represented progress few queer people expected to witness in our lifetimes. To commemorate that history, I talked with some of the key players, including most of the plaintiffs; Mary Bonauto, senior director of Civil Rights and Legal Strategies at GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders, who represented the plaintiffs; and Margaret Marshall, the now-retired SJC chief justice who wrote the groundbreaking majority opinion.

They looked back at the day when legal protections once barred to LGBTQ people were finally within our reach. But they also pondered a future with warning signs that even hard-won rights can still be eroded and snatched away.

Due to the late-game legal and political machinations of then-Republican Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who opposed gay marriage, the plaintiffs weren’t sure if they would be able to get married on May 17, 2004 — if at all.

“We didn’t know even a week earlier if it would go through, so we didn’t hire a caterer or anything like that,” Heidi Nortonsmith said. With so much uncertainty, planning ahead for a wedding “would have been too painful to do if the then-governor had been successful in his efforts to prevent it from happening,” Gina Nortonsmith, her wife, said.

When Romney failed to scuttle marriage equality before May 17, the weddings were on. Robert Compton and David Wilson, with the help of friends, found a hotel and made arrangements for a small reception. But the couple initially didn’t plan to get married on that long-awaited date.

“We’d had a commitment ceremony in Arlington Street Church in October 2000 and we didn’t want to have another anniversary, so we thought let’s do the same [day] as Oct. 8, then we’ll just have one anniversary,” Compton said. But someone “slapped me upside the head and said, ‘This isn’t about you, stupid. There’s a lot of people out there waiting to see you guys get married today.’ ”

From Boston to Worcester to Northampton, no matter where these couples wed statewide, there were a lot of people waiting to see them.

“It turned out to be a Newton-wide celebration in a certain sense,” said Ellen Wade, who married her longtime partner, Maureen Brodoff. “It was quite a crowd outside — whoever wanted to come showed up — so it all turned out to be very festive and exciting and we all just kept pinching ourselves because it was kind of hard to believe it was happening.”

Michael Horgan recalled that he and husband-to-be Edward Balmelli arrived at Boston City Hall in a car that had been sent by the city’s mayor, Tom Menino, who also greeted them. As with all of the plaintiffs, the required three-day waiting period for a marriage license was waived so they could marry without further delay.

For each couple, their desire to join GLAD’s lawsuit was deeply personal. Before Wilson met Compton, he’d been in a relationship with another man. When his partner suddenly collapsed in their driveway, Wilson learned that he did not have the same rights he had been automatically afforded when he was married to a woman.

When he arrived at the hospital, staff would not share information about his partner’s condition. Hours later Wilson “found out that he’d had a massive heart attack and he was dead on arrival. So after I had that experience, I knew I never wanted to go through that again and if I ever have a relationship with another man, I will make sure we have as many protections as possible.”

Like Wilson, Compton had also been married to a woman. After he came out, he moved to Massachusetts for its better workplace protections. But after he began his relationship with Wilson and experienced his own medical emergency, he knew that antidiscrimination laws would not be enough.

At the hospital, “They were asking me all these questions about my health insurance and I suddenly realized I’m there all by myself — what happened to David?” Compton said. “He could have answered all the questions, but they wouldn’t let him past the front desk because he was not a legal relative of mine.”

When Julie Goodridge gave birth to their daughter Annie by cesarean section, Hillary Goodridge was denied permission to see both Julie in recovery and Annie, who had been taken to the neonatal intensive care unit.

“We had health care proxies, powers of attorney, and all that other stuff, but you don’t really think about that,” Julie said. “At the time I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, let me go to the hospital with a half-inch thick binder with legal paperwork to prove I can hold the hand of my significant other after giving birth to our baby.”

Hillary was finally allowed to see Julie — by pretending to be her sister.

For couples with children, marriage equality was also about protecting the custodial rights of non-biological parents. A decade before the Goodridge decision, Wade and Brodoff were also part of a successful GLAD lawsuit — also argued before the SJC by Bonauto in 1993 — that allowed an unmarried partner to become a second parent through adoption without the biological parent relinquishing any rights.

But their success in that decision didn’t lead them to believe that a marriage equality case would be easily won.

“We were already a couple and she was going to be living with us no matter what. It was a case that was very easy to comprehend in terms of benefits to our daughter to both be legal parents,” Brodoff said. “The marriage case was worthwhile, but I wasn’t anticipating that it would end in us being able to marry. I thought it was a 10-, 20-, 30-year effort.”

Of course, that effort didn’t begin with the Goodridge lawsuit. The urgency for marriage equality spiked during the peak of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and early 1990s when hospitals routinely barred partners from visiting dying lovers and some families excluded partners when making medical decisions. Few had any legal recourse.

At the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, there was a mass wedding and protest in front of the Internal Revenue Service building. Though it was symbolic, hundreds of same-sex couples participated, making clear that marriage was a right intended for all, not a privilege available only to some.

Among the throngs, many evoked the name of Sharon Kowalski, a Minnesota woman who suffered catastrophic injuries in a 1983 car accident. Her family prohibited Karen Thompson, her longtime partner, from having any contact with Kowalski, which sparked a long court battle for legal guardianship. When a Minnesota court finally ruled in Thompson’s favor in 1991, her lawyer called it “the first guardianship case in the nation in which an appeals court recognized a homosexual partner’s rights as tantamount to those of a spouse.”

Two years later, Hawaii almost became the first state to allow same-sex marriages, but its state Supreme Court ruling was defeated by voters who approved a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to heterosexual couples. Vermont’s Legislature adopted civil unions in 2000, and while historic, it fell short of the full rights and protections of marriage.

After the filing of the lawsuit, the Goodridge plaintiffs became the public faces of the long fight for marriage equality. But with that distinction came enormous pressure to be the unblemished representatives of a community that was being vilified for wanting the same rights as straight couples.

“I think the strain was a lot of the need to be public and the need to be perfect,” Julie Goodridge said. With their name out front on the case, the couple arguably received the harshest scrutiny and blowback. Both Hillary and Julie Goodridge have said those pressures were one of the factors that led to their separation in 2006 and divorce in 2009, which also garnered headlines as if same-sex marriages, like every marriage, might not also end.

“We were really concerned about saying or doing something wrong,” Julie Goodridge said. “As people got more and more agitated about it, we started to be demonized on a bigger level. It was like they took their gloves off and were ready to fight and we had to put our white gloves on and be even more appropriate and good.”

Wilson said his mother stopped attending her longtime church because the pastor was both critical of marriage equality and her son’s role as a plaintiff. “We also had institutions like the [state] Senate, the House, the governor, President [George W.] Bush, the Pope [John Paul II], all coming out against us,” he said. “So there was internal pressure from friends and family but also external pressure.”

Eager to find cultural red meat to throw at Republicans for his reelection bid, Bush took aim at the Goodridge decision in his 2004 State of the Union address. He claimed, “Activist judges have begun redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives.” The nation, Bush said, “must defend the sanctity of marriage.”

After such vitriolic statements, the plaintiffs, who has been prepared by GLAD on how to answer questions and handle themselves with hostile opponents, often found sanctuary with each other.

“We were always there to support one another whether at a speaking engagement or dinner out,” Horgan said. “It was comforting to know there were others who we could talk to who knew just what we were experiencing.” Those couples, whom Horgan calls “extended family,” still keep in touch and occasionally get together, and attended each other’s weddings.

But hanging over this anniversary is the specter of a possible threat to the future of marriage equality. When the conservative-led Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas, in a concurring opinion that no one needed, suggested that the justices “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents,” including Obergefell v. Hodges. That’s the case that in 2015 legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Thomas seemed to signal that dismantling Roe was the floor, not the ceiling, for this court’s attempts to rescind dearly held rights.

And that has some of this nation’s first same-sex married couples concerned.

“We remember when Obergefell was decided in June 2015,” Balmelli said. “We had the feeling that we were done fighting now, we can rest easy. How wrong we were.”

In this nation’s history, no fight for equality is ever done or can be taken for granted. Such reminders persist within every civil rights victory. But according to a Gallup poll last year, 71 percent of Americans now support same-sex marriage — including nearly half of Republicans.

“Twenty years ago, opponents said, ‘If you accept same-sex marriage, you’re going to see the institution of marriage collapse, people will say ”Why am I getting married?” and God’s going to send a lightning bolt and strike the United States,’ ” Compton said. “There was a lot of fear of the unknown in the general public but, 20 years later, none of that happened.”

Whatever unfolds going forward, Gina Nortonsmith said the fact that same-sex marriage in Massachusetts “still stands 20 years later is an amazing thing.”

“We’ve got to celebrate the wins and in celebrating them, make it clear what they mean and not be quiet about it,” she said. “This win was important and meaningful to millions of people — and not just to people who can now get married but their families and coworkers and their communities. This was a win that touches many people.”

Conceived in other states but born in Massachusetts, marriage equality has survived through the ardent work of activists, lobbyists, lawyers, and ordinary people like the plaintiffs — who include Gary Chalmers and Richard Linnell and Gloria and Linda Bailey-Davies — whose determination nudged this nation closer to becoming a more perfect and inclusive union.

These past 20 years of marriage equality deserve recognition. But we must remain vigilant to ensure that our rights will remain secure and that there will be countless more celebrations — and same-sex weddings — to come.

Next: Margaret Marshall and the judicial decision that changed America

Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com. Follow her @reneeygraham.