Out In CT - Anne Stanback

Anne Stanback has spent 25 years working for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights.  She served as the statewide Co-Director of the Connecticut Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights during the passage of the state’s “gay rights law” in 1991, which prohibited discrimination in employment, housing, credit and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation.

Most recently, Anne was the founding Executive Director of Love Makes a Family (LMF), a statewide grassroots, organization created to achieve marriage equality in Connecticut.  Prior to her involvement with LMF, Anne was the Executive Director of the Connecticut Women’s Education and Legal Fund (CWEALF).  She has also served as the Executive Director of the Connecticut affiliate of the National Abortion Rights Action League (CT NARAL) and as the Assistant Director of INFOLINE of South Central Connecticut where she worked on child care and maternal and child health issues. After nine years and the realization of the organization’s mission, Anne Stanback stepped down in June 2009 Executive Director of LMF.

Anne is a graduate of Davidson College in North Carolina and Yale Divinity School.  She lives in Avon, Connecticut with her partner—now wife—of 26 years, Charlotte Kinlock. 

TRANSCRIPT

When you start with my history, listening to me talk, you know that I'm not from Connecticut originally.  I am originally from North Carolina and I came to Connecticut to go to graduate school at Yale Divinity School in New Haven.  I never expected to stay here but a couple things happened;  I fell in love with the state of Connecticut and I also fell in love with my now wife Charlotte.

It was through my work at the Divinity School with the Women’s Center and the Gay & Lesbian group at the time that I first began to get involved in LGBT activism.  Especially in the early years, I mean, the loudest voice, and I think this continued, the loudest organized voice against the issue of marriage equality and LGBT rights generally has been some the more conservative religious voices and we learned during the fight for the gay rights bill that there had to be more than one religious voice speaking up about this issue.  And so we did a lot of work in Love Makes a Family with clergy groups, with lay groups, trying to organize people of faith who saw this as a justice issue and an issue of inclusion and equality to be vocal, to be a part of our organization and I, to this day, believe that was one of the keys to the success that we had in Connecticut.

As a lesbian, there's no other state that I would want to be in.  I think it's tremendously supportive and it's hard when you’ve lived in a state where your family and your rights are so acknowledged to even consider going to a state where you would not be recognized.

I think that it made perfect sense for our movement to start with the issue of passing anti-discrimination laws with regard to employment and housing and things like that.  A year before the gay rights bill passed in ’91, we  passed a hate crimes bill that included sexual orientation and I think we were the first in the country, first or second, to do that.  You know we in Connecticut got rid of our sodomy law back in the late sixties, so there has been a long history of making legal and legislative changes to improve the lives of gay people.

I always felt like I had a lot of advantages and support that allowed me to come out and that there were people who ---- it was much more difficult and for that reason I had a responsibility to be out, but what we were fighting for with the gay rights bill was rights as individuals.  I think that what made to work of Love Makes a Family and the family issues that we worked on ---- you know, adoption, marriage ---- it was about us as couples and as families and as parents and that impacted people, I think, in a qualitatively different way than just, you know, “yes, you won’t get fired from your job,” in part because it was happy.  It was about love, it was about commitment.

 In truth, our opponents weren’t our biggest challenge at all.  There are no good arguments against marriage equality for same sex couples.  You have religion, which should not be what we’re using to decide laws for a multi-faith (society) and for people who aren’t part of a religious community.  You have a tradition, and that's not a good reason, as we know from our own country's history, to deny civil rights to a minority group.  And then you have just the ridiculous prejudicial responses that you would hear from some people who testified against us, so it's not as if the arguments from the other side where ever anything that we felt like we had to work against.

People don't believe this, but I was never in doubt that we were going to win.  There was just no way that we couldn't win, in the same way that I am absolutely convinced that we will win this battle on the national level.  It’s going to take a little while, but it will be sooner than most people think.