Equal: A Memoir of Gay Rights

In 1971, Daniel Pinello came out as a gay man in the most public forum then conceivable for a 21-year-old: the front­ page feature article of a Williams College student newspaper. He was the first queer person there unequivocally to disclose a homosexual orientation. Then, after law school, Pinello ran a free weekly walk-in legal-counseling service for lesbians and gay men at the Mattachine Society, a foundational homophile organization near the famous Stonewall Inn.

A professor at the City University of New York, Pinello con­ducted pioneering research on gay and lesbian issues in three pivotal books: Gay Rights and American Law, America’s Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage, and America’s War on Same-Sex Couples and Their Families. The empirical foundation for the last two was more than 250 videotaped interviews he carried out between 2004 and 2012 with same­ sex couples in California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, and Wisconsin.

In 2008, Pinello and his partner committed civil disobedience to lobby the New York Legislature on behalf of marriage equal­ity. They applied for a marriage license from a Long Island town clerk. When their request was denied, the two refused to leave the office until the police issued them summonses for trespass.

All of these heartfelt events and more (including moving love stories with two men) are evocatively chronicled in Equal: A Memoir of Gay Rights.