Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans

Rachel Tiven

271 Rachel Tiven No raw fish for me,” a very pregnant Rachel Tiven says as we survey our menus. We are in a sushi restaurant near Exchange Place, the street address of Immigration Equality, where Tiven is executive director . She and her partner of ten years, Sally Gottesman, are expecting their second child in less than two months. After we both order soba noodles and vegetables, Tiven lays out the cold, hard reality that her clients face. According to the 2000 census, an estimated forty thousand samesex binational couples are living in the United States. Their relationships , whether legalized by marriage or not, do not qualify the noncitizen for immigration benefits. These couples face antigay laws that effectively say, You may not be a couple at all. “The only way for such couples to stay together in the United States,” Tiven says, “is almost exclusively through employer sponsorship . People call our office crying. They say, ‘Men in black came to our house at five a.m. and took my boyfriend away. What do I do?’ These are things that would not happen if they were a straight couple.” Tiven lays down her chopsticks. “There are lots of privations that gay couples suffer. But many of them have workarounds, however unfair or expensive or cumbersome they may be. My partner and I just completed a second-parent adoption for our daughter. Should we have had to spend a year’s worth of paperwork and four thousand dollars so that I could adopt my own kid? No! But it was available to us. For a binational same-sex couple that is facing permanent physical separation, there may be no country in the world where they can live together.” And that’s what Immigration Equality does: find legal solutions— in some cases, precedent-setting judgments—for the most hopeless of situations. Tiven, who was born in Atlanta, says what is most significant about her early years was that she grew up in a family of very committed Jews. “We were not Orthodox, but we were very connected to a liberal Jewish community in every place we lived. The idea that you have an obligation that grows out of your communal identity was very clear.” She says that message—“the obligation to participate in the communal welfare of your identity group”—became a lens through which she looked at the rest of the world. Tiven entered Harvard in 1992, thinking she would do a lot of journalism, but aside from a few reviews she published in the Crimson , Harvard’s student daily, and some pieces for the student gay and lesbian magazine HQ, she was far more involved in the lively student theater scene in Cambridge. She also helped to start Harvard Hillel’s queer Jewish group, BAGELS. Tiven is almost gleeful as she recalls working on a “terrific protest” against Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard who, in October 1993, testified as a paid expert witness on a constitutional amendment in Colorado that sought to prohibit cities in that state from enacting gay rights laws. The gay and lesbian students on campus, appalled by Mansfield’s remarks about gay sex being “shameful” and homosexuals contributing to the downfall of civilization, met to consider their response. “We printed posters on neon-pink paper. They said, ‘Harvey Mansfield thinks’—and then there was the name of a famous LGBT person, like James Baldwin or Eleanor Roosevelt—‘undermines civilization .’ We must have had thirty names. We delivered a full set of the posters to his office. I remember some sweet, nerdy-looking kid came up to me and said how much it meant to him that we had included Alan Turing. Quite a few years later, Boston Magazine did a profile of Mansfield, and the whole lead was the story of our protest.” 272 Rachel Tiven 273 Rachel Tiven After her sophomore year, Tiven took a year off in order to be a full-time theater techie. When that work didn’t satisfy her, she interned at Bloomberg News. Evenings and weekends, she continued to do theater work in Manhattan. During the summer of 1995, on assignment in Israel, she took a dog with her. She now quips that it’s easier for an American to bring a dog in and out of a country than it is to bring one’s same-sex partner. Back at Harvard, Tiven volunteered for the...