The Essen Haus decision: Two UW-Madison students spark a gay marriage revolution

Linda Brozyna
Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:04:40 +0000
Encounter, People, Politics, Brozyna, encounter, love, Madison, profile

By Linda Brozyna

A German bar in Madison is an unlikely crucible for a civil rights revolution. In a din of animated conversations and incessant polka music, Essen Haus patrons chug from boots of beer and dip giant pretzels into horseradish mustard. But in the 1990s, the dizzying swirl of waiters in lederhosen didn’t distract a pair of passionately inquisitive UW-Madison graduate students from a debate that consumed them. Two best friends — one gay, one straight — wrestled with the logic behind denying homosexual couples the right to marry and after much discussion, found no constitutional basis for it.

For many, the definition of 'marriage' isn't always black and white. Photo by Linda Brozyna.

Those Essen Haus conversations gave rise to the very arguments the Connecticut Supreme Court used in striking down its gay marriage ban. It put Madison on the map of a movement at the precise moment Wisconsin was enacting strident anti-gay marriage measures.

In short, two best friends were the catalyst that sparked a new theory on gay rights. Rising from the Essen Haus, a straight UW graduate student wrote the book on gay marriage while his gay friend was denied the right to it.

Robert Schwoch met Evan Gerstmann in a constitutional law seminar taught by Political Science Professor Donald Downs. It was in this intellectual community that their friendship, and ideas regarding same-sex marriage and the courts, flourished. Schwoch and his partner, Hal Koenig, showed Gerstmann the normalcy of a committed gay relationship.

The friendship fed the research, which culminated in a book later used by the Connecticut Supreme Court in a widely watched decision overturning anti-gay marriage measures.

“[The book] gave the court a framework that it probably might not have thought of on its own,” Schwoch said. “It takes smart minds to make changes like this and [Evan is] really applying a smart mind to these issues. And an honest one.”

“I think Bob influenced [Evan] a bit because he had such respect for Bob and he learned a lot from him about [same-sex marriage] issues,” Downs said. “Bob’s a perfect source on it because he’s affected by it, but he’s also very objective.”

Schwoch and Koenig have been together for 25 years, something most people do not expect, Schwoch said.

But when they met after a 1986 softball fundraiser, he knew it was the beginning of something real, potentially the beginning of “it.” Sitting in his office chair 25 years later in front of a canvas portrait Koenig painted of him, he still describes his partner, the artist, with respect and pride.

“I saw a study a while ago that said that partners know 70 percent of what they need to know to make a decision on a long-term relationship in the first 10 minutes,” Schwoch said. “And here we are 25 years later.”

Because Koenig and Schwoch do not have a legal marriage anniversary permitted by the state of Wisconsin, they choose to celebrate the day they met. “The only thing that keeps us together is our feelings for one another,” Schwoch said.

Gerstmann, Schwoch’s classmate, was inspired not only by Schwoch’s independent thinking, but also the relationship he saw between Schwoch and Koenig.

“[Evan is] the straightest guy on Earth,” Schwoch said. “And in fact, I think, we each served for each other as a little bit of the window in the other person’s world. But he was really, I think, intrigued by … [the fact that] we were the first long-term gay couple that he knew.”

Gerstmann, Schwoch and Downs would go to the Essen Haus to socialize and bounce ideas off one another. This community is exactly what Gerstmann had in mind when he chose to pursue his graduate degree.

“It was the kind of intellectual community you dream of having when you go to graduate school because we agreed on some things, disagreed on a lot of things, but even over two or three beers it never got unpleasant,” Gerstmann said.

And thus, over pitchers of beer, the UW students hashed out the logic behind issues that mattered and affected them most. As a New York native, Gerstmann felt that there were two groups who were not treated equally: gay Americans and immigrants.

“I was raised to believe in social justice … and [what intrigued me was that gay Americans] could be thrown in jail for having sex, have their children taken away, they can’t serve in the military, they can’t get married,” Gerstmann said. “They’re this underclass and nobody seems to care.”

Gerstmann, who has been interested in gay rights since he was a child, was so passionate about the topic of same-sex marriage and equality that he chose to write his dissertation on the subject under Downs’ supervision. His arguments came to life when he published his first book, titled, “The Constitutional Underclass: Gays, Lesbians, and the Failure of Class-Based Equal Protection.”