Provincetown Town Hall, Provincetown, MA. Taken on Tuesday, March 23, 2024 by Lisa Williams Provincetown Town Hall, Provincetown, MA. Lisa Williams, Mar. 23, 2024

In February, I went to an event to celebrate the success of “What Is Owed?”. I was utterly transported listening to my treasured colleague, podcast host and journalist Saraya Wintersmith address a rapt audience.

On the way home, I couldn’t stop thinking: What other Boston stories from history are newly relevant now, and need to be told today?

Driving home in the rain on The Pike, I flipped through my mental catalogue of the big Boston stories. And then, as I saw the sign for the Allston exit, it came to me:

Oh. It’s same sex marriage.

Like the telephone, the telegraph, the chocolate chip cookie (you’re welcome, by the way), the microwave oven, medical anesthesia, the radical notion that girls and not just boys should be taught to read, birth control pills, universal healthcare, same sex marriage is just one more entry in Boston’s centuries-spanning list of innovations.2 Boston changes the world, again and again.

Just like we did on May 17, 2004.

On that day, attorney Mary Bonauto shepherded three of the same-sex couples who were plaintiffs in the Goodridge v. Department of Public Health1 lawsuit to Boston City Hall to get marriage certificates — with a police escort and while sharpshooters were stationed on the roofs of adjoining buildings.

This year is the 20th anniversary of marriage equality in Massachusetts, and next year is the 10th anniversary of marriage equality in the United States.3

What happened?

What happened is a truly extroardinary story.

It is a story that is especially relevant now, as attacks on LGBTQ+ people spike,4 reporting intimidation online and violence and threats offline. The threats are not only against individuals but also against companies and public institutions: Here in Boston, libraries and childrens’ hospitals have been the targets of bomb threats.5,6 And it’s not just on the internet or on the streets: it’s in the legislatures. A record number of anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced across the country in 2023.7

It seems like a good time to return to the history, to understand why marriage was important then, why it’s important now.

(And: is there ever a time when we do not need to reflect on the enduring and central importance of love? How it changes us, individually and as a society?)

I started to think about a podcast and gather material (I want to clarify that although I work for GBH News, we have such a massive pipeline of amazing projects that I wouldn’t consider trying to wedge another one in right at the moment. So what you are reading here is “Lisa Williams is thinking,” not “GBH News is doing” (although that would be great too of course)).

So I have been tinkering with the idea on vacations and on weekends. Last month, I took a four day weekend in Provincetown, Massachusetts with my partner Rebecca. March 19th, 2024 dawned sunny and brisk, and I was smiling as I got a cup of coffee at Joe’s and walked down an empty Commercial Street to Town Hall, where I asked to see marriage records from 2004.8

Town Clerk Elizabeth Paine showed me a slender, leather bound volume, about an inch thick, first. “This is for years and years.”

Then she brought out three volumes, two three inch thick leather binders, and another one an inch and a half.

“And these are 2004.”

Most of the coverage at the time focused on Cambridge, which opened at midnight on May 17, 2004, and had a big lawn where couples gathered and celebrated. (It made great TV).

But it happened in Provincetown too. Flipping through the records, it felt like the first thing that happened was that every inkeeper in town got married. A lot of the same sex couples that filled out a marriage license on that first day lived right in Provincetown.

But as I flip forward I see New York. New Jersey. Then further.

They come from Tennessee. They come from Florida. They come from Alabama.

I would have fallen off my chair when I spotted the one from Alaska. Fortunately I was standing at a counter, near the Clerk’s friendly office dog, a yellow lab named Maverick.

And perhaps for many observers, May 17, 2004 is the end of the story.

But that’s not true.

It is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of the backlash.

Marriage equality supporters had to fight in the legislature, in the the courts, and in the court of public opinion to keep the rights that the state’s Supreme Judicial Court had granted in Goodridge.

That backlash is one we are still living in today, and how we respond to it will make history.

Again.




  1. “Goodridge vs. Department of Public Health,” Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Nov. 18, 2003.
  2. “Boston’s Innovation Trail showcases innovations,” GBH News, Aug. 7, 2023. Documenting every item in the list would create more footnotes than would benefit the reader but if you are interested, it is an entertaining Google rabbit hole. I use “Boston” here lyrically througout, the way one might wave their hand in the general direction of the city while standing on the ferry dock in Provincetown.
  3. “Obergefell v. Hodges,” Supreme Court of The United States, Jun. 26, 2015.
  4. Hate crime statistics, The Marshall Project, March, 2023. It is worth noting that I experienced anti-gay harassment and death threats after the death of my own partner in 2017. Some in journalism still don’t believe that queer people can cover their own objectively (it interests me that I have never heard this ‘can’t cover your own’ brought up when, for example, white men cover other white men). Objectivity is important, but vapid objectivity is the nugget of truth that makes the joke about a headline that says “Shape of Earth: Views Differ” funny.
  5. Bomb threat at Reading public library targets LGBTQ event attendees. March 23, 2024, NBC Boston
  6. FBI arrests Mass. woman charged with bomb threat against Boston’s Children’s Hospital, GBH News, Sep. 2022
  7. Record number of anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in 2022, CNN
  8. My partner says I do not know how to vacation, and any reasonable observer would have to admit she has a point.