By Mark Arsenault
Journal staff writer

Rewind history to before David Cicilline was elected the first openly gay mayor of a state capital, before rainbow flags adorned the streets of Downcity in June and gay travel magazines proclaimed Providence one of America's most underrated gay vacation spots. Back to the very beginning of Rhode Island's gay rights movement, to a time of war, counterculture and upheaval -- December 1967, inside a rented house in Huntington Park, Calif., where a Pentecostal pastor has just slit his wrists with a razor.

• Have you seen a change in attitudes toward gays and lesbians over the years? • What, if any, recognition should there be of same-sex relationships in Rhode Island law? • How welcome are gays and lesbians in your place of worship? • Video: Watch a clip from Call me Troy, a movie about the Rev. Troy Perry, and visit a Web site about the movie • Marriage Equality Rhode Island (registration required) • YouthPrideRI • The Web site gaychurch.org lists more than 20 gay-friendly Christian churches in Rhode Island. • Rhode Island Pride • Options, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community magazine published in Rhode Island • GLSEN: the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network

For admitting he was homosexual, the Rev. Troy Perry had been fired and excommunicated. He had lost his family. He had broken up with God. If You can't love me and if the Scriptures say I'm going to die and go to hell, that's the way it's going to be.

The first man Perry ever loved had just walked out on him. The preacher, devastated, cut himself and climbed into a warm bathtub.

"I am eternally grateful to God," Perry now says, "that my roommate came home, heard the water running and broke down the door."

At the hospital, Perry had a revelation that inspired him to found the first nationwide church primarily for gay people -- the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches. The spread of the MCC to Greater Providence in the early 1970s helped organize and embolden local gay rights pioneers, and kicked off in Rhode Island what opponents -- and Providence Bishop Thomas J. Tobin -- now call "the relentless gay agenda."

"Anything a heterosexual can do, I'm determined to be able to do, too," says Perry, now 67, a national gay rights activist. "That's my gay agenda."

The Rhode Island gay rights movement was born in inhospitable times. "It was like we didn't exist," says the Rev. Marge Ragona, a lesbian who ran the local MCC in 1978. "When we were visible, people didn't like us."

Over the next three decades, the city changed dramatically for gays and lesbians. Vincent A. Cianci Jr., who was Providence's mayor from 1975 to 1984 and from 1991 to 2002, says, "Back in '74 when I first ran, the gay community was totally repressed. People were afraid. Not anymore."

Now, gay publications rave about Providence's nightlife, tolerant atmosphere and the only two gay bathhouses in New England. The travel Web site gay.com calls Providence "the gayest city you've driven right past." In a profile of local gay clubs, Boston's The Guide magazine praises the variety and energy of the city's nightlife: "Providence is closer to the sexy, laissez-faire atmosphere of a European-style city."

For 40 years, the movement's strategy has been to bring gay life out of the closet, to show gay people living ordinary lives, until America shrugs.

THE CELEBRANTS raise their voices over the summer rain pounding on a plastic tarp an inch overhead. The wedding of John Fazzino and Mark Corsi is witnessed by a handful of close, damp friends.

"Will you love and honor each other as husbands for the rest of your lives?"

"We will," they promise.

The grooms clutch small bouquets. Mark rests his head on John's chest. More than 15 years after they began dating, these two 50-something Cranston men are married at a friend's home in Seekonk, Mass., near enough to the state line that you could throw a rock into Rhode Island, where their wedding would not be legal.

The Rev. Cheryl Cavalconte offers a blessing: "May these rings symbolize the fullness of your commitment to each other; may they be the journey you take that always leads you back to each other. And we bless them in Jesus' name. Amen."

Their vows read like a poem:

From this day on I choose you to be my spouse.

I promise to live with you,

To stand by your side, to sleep in your arms, to bring joy to your heart, and life to your soul.

I promise to struggle with you in bad times, and laugh with you in the good,

To comfort you when you are down heartened,

To encourage you to be all that you are,

To wipe your tears with my hands,

To hold you near my body,

And to be your best friend,

I love you.

"We all pronounce with great joy that they are married," shouts Ms. Cavalconte. "You may kiss each other."

They leave with a signed Massachusetts marriage license; its value has not yet been determined by Rhode Island courts.

Same-sex marriage is the reigning flashpoint issue for the Ocean State's gay advocates and their opponents. Rhode Island is the only New England state with no recognition of same-sex relationships in the law. An estimated 300 gay Rhode Island couples have married across the Massachusetts border since September 2006.

Around December 1968, Rev. Perry held what is believed to be America's first public -- if unrecognized -- same-sex wedding, in California. Twenty-five years later, in Washington, D.C., Perry led a "mass-wedding" political protest for 1,500 gay couples, including Fazzino and Corsi. "I absolutely wanted America to start seeing people having these ceremonies," Perry says.

Over time, resistance to gay issues has eroded. Thirty years ago, according to a Gallup survey, 56 percent of Americans believed homosexuals deserved equal rights in employment, a dominant issue of the 1970s and 1980s. Last year, the number was 89 percent.

The gay rights movement has come a long way from a standing start: Gay America was virtually invisible until a 1919 Newport scandal mostly forgotten in history.

IN THE SPRING of 1919, the U.S. Navy sent sailors undercover to investigate allegations of "perverts" at the Newport Navy base engaging in gay sex. To gather proof, the undercover men seduced other male sailors and participated in numerous sex acts. The exposure of the Navy's investigative techniques flamed a national scandal.

Fifty years later, the modern gay rights movement began with the 1969 New York City riots at a Greenwich Village gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. What began as a routine police raid on June 28 escalated into several nights of riots involving hundreds of cops and thousands of drag queens and other gays and lesbians. The gay rights movement is so linked to the 1969 uprising, gay history prior to the riots is often called "pre-Stonewall."

"The whole concept of being proud of who you are started with Stonewall," says Belle Pellegrino, who marched in Providence's first Pride parade, seven years after Stonewall. "Unfortunately, with too many kids today, you say ‘Stonewall' and they don't know what you're talking about."

Fewer still probably can place Troy Perry in Rhode Island gay history.

In the 1970s, while there were many gay people in Providence, there was very little gay community. Perry's church helped change that.

Perry was licensed as a Baptist minister at 15. While still a teen, he confessed his homosexual feelings to his pastor, who advised him: "All you need is a good woman." So Perry married his pastor's daughter. He fathered two children, and became pastor of the Church of God of Prophecy in Santa Ana, Calif.

In 1963, at 23, Perry visited a bookstore to buy Life magazine to research a sermon. His eye fell to Physique, a beefcake magazine.

"And finally I got up enough nerve to ask the woman in the place, ‘Do you have any books on homosexuality?' "

The storekeeper sold him two gay publications.

"I read those books that night, got up the next morning and while I was shaving at the parsonage in my church, I looked into the mirror and for the first time in my life, said out loud, ‘Troy Perry, you're a homosexual.' And I broke down crying. It was really my second born-again experience."

He was excommunicated for being gay. He and his wife split. Perry quit preaching. "I told God, ‘Don't bother me and I won't bother you.… I can't change who I am.' " After serving in the Army, Perry fell "madly in love" with a man for the first time. "After six months he told me, ‘You're the most domineering man I ever met.' And he walked out of my life."

That's when Perry went for the razor.

At the hospital, he prayed. "I felt the calmness we Christians do when we talk about the joy of our salvation, which I had felt when I was younger and pastoring the church. I said, ‘Whoa, God -- this can't be You. You can't love me; the church has told me that.'

"God said to me, ‘Troy, don't tell me what I can and can't do. I love you. You're my child.' I understood that this feeling was my salvation again -- that I was a Christian. I didn't have to not be a gay person."

He decided to found a church primarily for homosexuals, but open to anyone. With an ad in a gay newsletter, he invited the faithful to his home in Huntington Park, for worship. His housemate "had a heart attack," Perry jokes. His housemate ranted: " ‘Oh my god, you've taken out an ad in a gay newspaper? You gave our home address? Troy, you are stupid! The police are going to be here.' "

On that first day, Oct. 6, 1968, one dozen people showed up for the service.

When Troy Perry's MCC expanded eastward into Providence five years later, it changed the city's gay history forever.

ONE RECENT Sunday, beneath the tremendous stone arches of one of the oldest Roman Catholic parishes in Providence, a dozen men fill two rows in what could be called, as shorthand, the gay section. They sing the preparatory hymn, "In Christ There Is a Table Set for All."

Their singing is fabulous. The choice of music, no accident. This is the Church of St. Mary on Broadway. Since 2006, the parish has been administered by the Franciscan Friars, who maintained a downtown chapel for 50 years. Their motto is: "All are welcome."

The Rev. Frank Sevola's homily is about making people feel they belong to the Christian community. "Married, single, gays and lesbians, young and old -- we all belong here," says Father Sevola, his words echoing against the stone. "If we do not stand up to racism, sexism and homophobia, then we make ourselves outsiders."

There's something remarkable about hearing a Catholic priest so matter-of-factly stick up for homosexuals from the pulpit.

"That's why we like this church," says Arthur Snow, of Warwick, who attends St. Mary with his partner, Tom Casserly. "They don't pretend we're not here."

As head of the Catholic diocese, Bishop Tobin is probably the most visible opponent of gay marriage in the state, and has used newspapers, talk radio and the courts to teach that homosexual acts are "gravely immoral."

The Web site gaychurch.org lists more than 20 gay-friendly Christian churches in Rhode Island, including Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Congregational and Methodist communities. Unitarian Universalist churches are open to gays.

But some gay Catholics don't want to leave the church they were raised in. "The Catholic Church is a faith I am comfortable with," Casserly says. "I am certainly not in perfect accord, but value many of its traditions. The Catholic Church has that tradition of sacraments not shared as strongly by other churches. I believe in transubstantiation. I believe in the gift of communion."

Gay people serve on St. Mary committees. The church provides ministries for gays and lesbians. In an interview, Father Sevola says, "Gay men and women come here because many have been told by their local pastor, ‘It might not work for you here at Saint So-and-So, but try Saint Mary.' … My experience with alienated Catholics is that most want a reason to come back." The bishop, he says, "has been very supportive."

According to Catholic teachings, having "a homosexual inclination" is not itself immoral. Gay people "can be active and faithful members of the church, and we welcome that," Bishop Tobin says. What's immoral, says the bishop, is gay sex. The church, he says, distinguishes between individuals and their behavior -- it's fine to be gay, just don't have sex. "Homosexual persons have to control their instincts and desires, the way I do, the way married people do," he says. Gay people in sexual relationships, "might be filled with love, joy and peace, but we think what they're doing is wrong."

How does Casserly reconcile his relationship and church teachings? "I haven't been able to reconcile them," he says. "It's that simple. I can only say who I am; I can only try to live my life by the best lights I can see."

A GREAT IRONY is that religion has inspired opposition to the gay movement, yet the movement in Providence drew early momentum from a church. In 1973, Troy Perry's primarily gay Metropolitan Community Church expanded into Rhode Island. "At that time," says the Rev. Ragona, "nobody else was saying what we were saying -- that it was possible to be a good upright, decent human being who happened to be Christian and gay."

This was Providence before its renaissance -- a faded former boomtown of shuttered factories and a dwindling population that was leaving as fast as the jobs.

At first, the MCC met in private homes. A rock smashed a window during one service; firecrackers disrupted another. The church's telephone hot line received a bomb threat. Belle Pellegrino, 63, of Providence, remembers volunteering on the hot line. A heavy breather called frequently. "We didn't hang up on people," she says. "I'd just say, ‘Hi Breather! How are you? I'm reading Plato; you can help me study.' And I'd read Plato to him until he got bored and hung up."

The MCC in Providence helped organize and focus gay advocates in the mid-1970s and provided a social outlet outside of gay bars. "It was the stepping stone for the other organizations to come," says Pellegrino.

In March 1974, the Rhode Island State Council of Churches granted the MCC "affiliated status" with the council, over harsh objections. In protest, Line Baptist Church in Foster withdrew from the American Baptist Churches of Rhode Island.

Rhode Island Baptist Churches responded with a task force to study whether homosexuals could lead Christian lives. At the head of the task force was the Rev. Robert Drechsler, pastor of Shawomet Baptist Church in Warwick. After a year of study, the group could agree only that "homosexuals are persons for whom Christ died" and therefore "have access to His grace."

At the time, Drechsler was wrestling with a secret. Now retired in California, Drechsler recalled the Sunday in 1977 when he told his congregation he was gay. "It was a matter of getting honest, finally, and a matter of coming to terms with who I am," says Drechsler. He resigned as pastor immediately. "It was understood by my church -- and I believed the same thing at the time -- there was no choice except for me to leave."

While the Baptists were studying homosexuality, the MCC welcomed a new pastor to Providence, the Rev. Joseph Gilbert, a stout, bearded, shaggy-haired native of Philadelphia. "He lived humility" -- even taking a job cleaning toilets at the Y, the lowest job he could find, says Rev. Ragona. Gilbert, who died in 2006, took over the Providence MCC in late 1974 or early 1975.

"Joe was the beginner of the gay rights movement in Providence," says Ms. Ragona, who ran the local MCC in 1977 and '78.

On June 29, 1975, Gilbert led a midnight prayer session on the steps of the federal building in Providence. A news report called it the first public gay demonstration in Rhode Island history.

The pastor's next step was much more public: taking the gay rights movement out of the closet and into the courts.

NO EVENT puts gay life before the public eye more dramatically than the annual Providence Pride-Week parade in June that draws thousands of spectators. The Illuminated Night-Time Pride Parade through downtown streets is a rolling rainbow of lights, floats and drag queens in formal gowns. The celebration is almost unrecognizable from its beginnings, in 1976.

That year, as America's 200th birthday approached, a group led by the MCC's Rev. Gilbert applied for permission to use the Old State House on Benefit Street for a symposium on gay issues and to hold a gay pride march in Providence.

The Rhode Island Bicentennial Commission denied use of the State House. Providence Police Col. Walter McQueeney recommended against allowing the parade, saying "homosexuality is against the law in Rhode Island and these people are admitted homosexuals." He warned that such a parade could provoke violence.

The MCC did not hesitate to sue for what it wanted. Lawsuits could be intimidating for gay people because litigants must give their full real names, but MCC leaders were already out of the closet.

Calling itself the "Toward a Gayer Bicentennial Committee," Gilbert's group sued in federal court.

U.S. District Judge Raymond J. Pettine heard the case: Toward a Gayer Bicentennial Committee v. the Rhode Island Bicentennial Commission.

Representing the gay group was a 34-year-old ACLU lawyer, Stephen J. Fortunato Jr., who would later become a Superior Court judge. "The city took the position that this kind of activity would inflame bystanders and provoke terrible things," Fortunato recalls. "Well, the First Amendment doctrine that had evolved at that time in the Supreme Court of the United States … is that we will not tolerate the heckler's veto. In other words, just because people are going to yell and scream and be outraged at the people holding the assembly, you, law enforcement officials, you, Walter McQueeney, you've got to protect the marchers."

Judge Pettine, who died in 2003, ruled in favor of a Gayer Bicentennial. With one day's notice, around 70 marchers gathered downtown for Providence's first gay pride parade, June 26, 1976. They marched to drums, a guitar and buzzing kazoos, displaying the American flag and gay pride banners.

"I've never been so terrified and so proud to be doing anything," says Belle Pellegrino. "Every one of us had the same feeling. You didn't know if you were going to die."

There were no serious incidents. A religious group handed out leaflets and told the marchers to repent or be damned. Many spectators were gay people still in the closet. The headline on a small story inside The Providence Journal the next day said: "City tolerates first homosexual parade."

Judge Pettine's ruling was the Rhode Island movement's most significant court victory. From there, the battle would move to the legislature for a clash that would last more than a decade.

DENNIS BYRNES and his partner had been together nearly 20 years when, in 1994, they signed a sales agreement for a house under construction in western Cranston. They put the house they owned across town up for sale and were relieved to find a buyer. "I was going back and forth to the new property, checking to see how things were going with the accessories," Byrnes recalls. "And things weren't moving at all. We had dates to be out of our home."

Byrnes called the builder. "He told me that he just wasn't going to sell to me and my ‘buddy,' as he put it. I told him, ‘I don't understand what you're talking about.' And he said, ‘Let me just put it this way -- it's a family neighborhood; we don't feel you'll be comfortable there.' And when he said it that way, I understood. And I said, ‘Well, you're a real son of a bitch.' "

Next, Byrnes called his lawyer, who told him he had no case. A bill to protect gays and lesbians from housing and employment discrimination had been debated for 10 years at the State House, but had failed each time.

Byrnes and his partner had a little good luck when their buyers couldn't nail down financing, and they were able to stay in their home. They're still there, having been together 31 years. They married in Massachusetts last July.

The episode remains "one of the most embittering experiences for us," says Byrnes, 59. "To have that kind of prejudice hit you, it's just immobilizing."

Discrimination based on sexual orientation became illegal in Rhode Island in 1995. The 12-year State House fight over civil protections for homosexuals followed failed attempts to pass anti-discrimination ordinances in the City of Providence.

In May 1978, Rev. Ragona, then 49, planted herself on the steps of the federal building downtown on a hunger strike, to protest the Providence City Council's refusal to ban discrimination against gays on the two biggest issues of that time: "Could we get and keep a job? And could we get and keep housing?"

For the next eight days, Ragona lived on the courthouse steps, drinking herbal tea, and using the restroom at the train station. During the cold nights, Ragona felt very close to God. "That fast changed my whole spiritual life; I discovered a side of myself I didn't know -- a peaceful, quiet side."

In 1980, in another local story that made national headlines, Judge Pettine ruled that Cumberland High student Aaron Fricke could take a boy to the prom as his date. They danced together several times. A few students walked out.

In 1982, Wisconsin broke ground as the first state to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The next year, advocates formed the Rhode Island Alliance for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights to push for civil protections. The group would rise in prominence, as the political influence of the MCC began to wane locally.

In 1984, two Democratic legislators from the East Side of Providence, Rep. Linda J. Kushner and Sen. Sean O. Coffey, submitted gay rights bills in the General Assembly. The bills would die in committee, the beginning of a fight that would rage annually for the next decade.

The Providence City Council considered an anti-discrimination ordinance in 1985. At the time, Milton Noble, executive secretary of the Rhode Island Association of Evangelical Churches, said the proposal threatened to legitimize "practices which, based on scripture, are immoral." Other opponents included the editorial page of The Providence Journal and the Most Rev. Louis E. Gelineau, Catholic bishop of Providence.

Bishop Gelineau maintained that the ordinance could be interpreted as support for a gay lifestyle. "In the mind of the church, an atmosphere or environment should not be created which encourages such activity," he said.

The late Julia Pell, daughter of U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell, lobbied at the State House as head of the R.I. Alliance for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights. Weary after many years of battle, she wrote in 1993: "I'm tired of people saying they are tired of hearing about gay rights. I'm tired of being told … that I'm a pervert, that I just haven't met the right man, and that basically I'm the scum of the earth. Will you all please just get a life?"

With the bill on a legislative precipice in its 12th year, a rookie Republican governor would nonchalantly push it toward passage.

THREE MONTHS into Lincoln C. Almond's first term as governor, the legislation proposing civil protections for homosexuals neared another vote. Almond bumped into a reporter in a hallway, and, shrugging off a decade of controversy, mentioned he'd sign the bill if it came to his desk. "If it is passed and signed into law, four months from now people won't even know it exists," Almond said at the time.

One week later, the bill passed the House by a vote of 57-41, and then in May passed the Senate, 26-21. Bishop Gelineau stayed neutral, though the legislation was similar to the Providence civil rights ordinance he had opposed in 1985.

Almond, who left office in January 2003, says now that he was deliberate in his public support for the bill. "I thought that was what [legislators] needed to hear, that I would sign it," says the former governor. "My feeling was it was a good bill and we shouldn't tolerate any discrimination."

Opponents warned the civil rights law would be just the beginning of the gay movement's demands. "We would be naïve to believe that the passage of this particular bill brings to a conclusion the efforts to normalize homosexuality via government action," said Noble, of the Association of Evangelical Churches. He predicted that gay advocates would soon push for more, including a repeal of the sodomy ban, sensitivity training to reduce suicides among gay youths, legalization of gay marriage and domestic partner benefits.

He was a clairvoyant.

"WHAT A LOVELY NEST of carnality is Providence!" writes The Guide, a magazine of gay travel, entertainment, politics and sex, in an issue last summer. "Sure, it's not a huge metropolis. But size isn't everything."

Rather than size, Providence offers variety:

"From twink stripper-bars to first-rate drag shows, raucous bathhouses to pounding disco clubs, an array of flamboyant fetish clubs and friendly gay neighborhood taverns, Provi-dence has it all," writes Peter Cini, in The Guide.

There are more than a dozen gay clubs and bars in the city, most within a 10-minute walk around downtown. Variety? The Alley Cat, on Snow Street, is known as the gay "Cheers"; at the Providence Eagle, the dimly lit leather bar on Union Street, all-male pornography plays on TVs the way 24-hour sports channels play at straight bars. The Mirabar, on Richmond Street, turned 60 last year, earning a feature story in the local gay-issues magazine, Options. The magazine, which celebrated its own 25th anniversary in September, described a typical scene at Mirabar: pounding dance music, pulses of light, and the bar's "shot boys," who "dance their pants off," to their briefs. "At the height of the night, the whole place screams WILD PARTY at you," the magazine writes. "The occasional straight women there know it's better than any hetero dance club in the state."

The variety attracts patrons from a wide area. "I think you can look at Providence as a gay male playpen for Boston," says Cini in an interview. "It's the place gay guys go to party, and party hard." He describes the Providence scene as both gay and "pan-sexual," a blended stew of gay and straight, men and women. "The classic, exclusively gay club is almost a dinosaur."

Bob Thibeault has been part of Providence's gay entertainment scene for more than 40 years. He brought a gay club to Smithfield in the 1960s, and opened the original Club Gallery in Providence in the '70s. "They refer to me as the godfather of the gay life in Providence," Thibeault says with a smile, in an interview at his new Club Gallery, on Point Street.

Outside the club, someone had nailed a sign to a utility pole:

Gay? Jesus loves you. Whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

Inside, on a weekday afternoon, a few daytime regulars sip drinks at the bar, as the staff readies for the night crowd. Patrons range in age from their 20s to their 70s.

Thibeault remembers gay life in the '50s and early '60s. "The closet doors were closed," he says. Rhode Island gay bars were known only by word of mouth. Men were not allowed to dance with each other, and the police were quick to crack down.

Thibeault helped break the taboo on gay dancing, more than 30 years ago. "The kids kept asking me, 'Can we dance, Bob?' " At the time, Smithfield had "a great chief of police," Arthur Gould, who told Thibeault that his club would have no trouble from the law if it stayed peaceful. So Thibeault told his patrons: Go ahead and dance.

Word spread that Smithfield had gay dancing, which cut into the Providence business. The Mirabar installed a dance floor on its second level, with lights controlled by a downstairs switch. If the police showed up, the downstairs staff would flick the lights, and the dancers would stop.

"Sad but true," says Paul Murphy, who has worked at Mirabar for 23 years. "And the kids coming out now, they're running around the streets screaming, and they got their high heels on and their hands are flailing, and they don't realize that, 30 years ago, you'd go right to jail for that."

IN OCTOBER 1986, Marvin Feldman, a gay man from Providence who had contracted AIDS, died at his parents' home on Woodbine Street. Cleve Jones, a gay rights activist and Feldman's former roommate, spray-painted a memorial to his friend on a sheet -- a simple stencil of Feldman's name on a field of Stars of David. The tribute to Feldman became the first panel in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which would grow into the largest community art project in the world, at more than 44,000 panels.

Last October, Cleve Jones praised the effectiveness of new AIDS drugs, which are keeping HIV-positive people alive and productive.

"The new medications work extremely well," he said. "I'm an example." But with the drugs has crept a sense of complacency that AIDS has been tamed, he said. "The reality is the overwhelming majority of those infected with HIV have no access to these drugs. There are people dying in Africa, but there are also people dying in Oregon and Alabama."

LIKE MANY in the gay community, Murphy, from Mirabar, credits former Mayor Cianci with encouraging gay life in Providence. The gay-friendly message resonates, he says, when a straight mayor marches in the Pride parades, frequents the gay clubs and judges all-male beauty contests.

"Whatever he was," agrees Dorothy Noller, a marcher in the first Pride parade, "Cianci supported the gay community."

In late summer, in one of his first interviews since returning from "vacation" at Fort Dix penitentiary, Cianci reflected on his evolution into a gay-friendly mayor, after hesitance in the 1970s. "The city has changed dramatically, and my attitude changed dramatically, too," says Cianci. "I felt obligated to be the mayor for everybody."

Cianci raised the rainbow flag at City Hall, served as grand marshal of the Pride Parade, and called the numbers at gay Bingo. "It didn't take much for word to get around that Providence is a gay-friendly place."

In 1997, Cianci appointed W. Fitzgerald Himmelsbach, an openly gay man who owned gay clubs, as the city's first liaison to the gay community. [Himmelsbach served five years; he resigned after a bathhouse he operated was linked to several cases of syphilis; Himmelsbach died in 2005.]

"It wasn't just hiring a gay liaison, it was hiring him to be effective in the organization of the administration," says Cianci. The liaison had direct access to the mayor and to department heads. "That's what made the difference."

In 2002, Providence elected David N. Cicilline the first openly gay mayor of a state capital. "My sexual orientation was pretty irrelevant in the campaign," Cicilline says. "That says a lot about the people of Providence." He credits, in part, the city's colleges and young demographics. "Part of the movement for equality is generational." Younger people support gay issues, he says.

Seventy-one percent of high school seniors nationally agreed that "gay people contribute in unique and important ways to society," in a 2006 poll by Hamilton College and Zogby International.

Ninety-eight percent of gay travelers are influenced by a destination's gay-friendly reputation, according to the Providence Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau. Chasing gay tourism dollars, the bureau last year advertised Providence in a travel guide published by the Boston gay weekly Bay Windows.

What does it mean for a place to be gay friendly?

In interviews with gays and lesbians around Rhode Island, one answer came up over and over:

It means you can hold your partner's hand in public.

Noller, 56, gets that feeling in Providence. "I don't have a fear of retaliation," she says. "If you put me in Kansas, maybe I'd be shaking in my boots."

THE ERASABLE marker board has become Cory Howland's tether to daily life: every parent-teacher conference, every sports game, every pediatric appointment must go on the board. "I have to do it so I don't miss anything," he says. "And I still do -- my daughter missed dance two weeks in a row because I completely forgot what day it was."

The 40-year-old gay dad is raising five children -- twins Eva and Troy, 12; DaShawn, 10; plus another sibling pair, Elijah, 5, and Zara, 3.

He hadn't expected to raise all five alone. He had been sharing dad duties with his partner. The relationship ended painfully in November.

"I always knew I was going to do this, to have a lot of children," he says. "Always hoped it would be with somebody. Always knew it might not be."

The family lives in suburban Warwick. Pencil marks on the wall show how fast the kids are growing. On the fridge, a chart displays chores for the children.

Howland is a social worker. His mother is foster parent. "It seems like a crime to me in our country that we can't find families for all of the children." He says he believes he was put on earth to be a dad. "I almost think God created me gay so I couldn't just go out there and procreate. … He put me on this path to adopt children who otherwise might not have been adopted. I do feel it was God's plan for me."

He runs a tight ship. Every child has chores. There are no bribes paid for housework in the form of allowances. Church on Sunday is mandatory, and they always say grace. "I like the structure in the house because I think kids crave that," he says. "I think they like to be directed, they like to be taught."

The household is black, Latino, white, gay, straight -- and remarkable for the way the kids scrape their plates after dinner and put them in the dishwasher without being told.

The kids pile onto a bed for story time. The tale is God Gave Us You, about a very thankful family who happen to be polar bears. Later, Howland battles the older kids in the card game "Speed." He beats DaShawn and then Eva. "Wiping the floor with all the children," he says with a grin. But then Troy beats his dad. Howland praises him in the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobe, "I have taught you well, my child."

With five kids, there are times he could yank his hair out. And he worries about not having a woman in the house, especially for Eva at a critical age. Relatives pitch in. Straight single parents have the same problems, he says.

He also prepares the children for ridicule.

"We recognize there's a lot of homophobia in society and the kids are going to have to face it. Put it right out there to them: People are going to make fun of you for having gay dads. People are going to make fun of you for being black or Latino. They're going to make fun of you for being adopted. And there are some positive ways to deal with it."

Single gay people have been adopting kids "forever," according to adoption lawyer Charles Greenwood. For about the past 15 years, Rhode Island has also quietly allowed gay couples to adopt, says Greenwood, who handled the first gay couple adoption in state history.

Representing a lesbian couple in 1993, Greenwood sounded out Family Court Chief Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah Jr. One of Greenwood's clients had adopted a child as a single person, he told the judge. The couple sought to have both partners named legal parents.

"This was not an adversarial proceeding," Greenwood recalls. "But you still need the agreement of the judge."

Greenwood's legal argument was essentially this: State law doesn't prohibit unmarried couples -- gay or straight -- from adopting together, so let's presume it's legal.

Judge Jeremiah recalls researching the law, and finding situations in other states in which the adoptions were approved. He granted the adoption, perhaps the quietest milestone for Rhode Island's gay community. "I didn't really think it was a big deal," Jeremiah says.

That adoption went "unnoticed" by the public, says Greenwood. Rather than trumpeting the ruling and risking new opposition, advocates kept quiet, he says. "I think that was a good decision by the gay and lesbian community. Clearly they knew about it, because I was getting a lot of calls." Greenwood has personally handled about 50 gay couple adoptions since; other lawyers also do them.

The next few dominoes fell quickly.

In 1998, the Rhode Island General Assembly repealed the 102-year-old ban on sodomy, which prescribed a 7- to 20-year prison sentence for anal or oral sex.

Vermont then became the first state to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples, in 2000.

And in 2004, Massachusetts took the giant step, for which the Rev. Troy Perry had agitated since 1968.

ON A BREEZY Saturday morning in late September, more than 20 gay Rhode Island couples who legally married in Massachusetts assemble on the steps of the Rhode Island State House for a political protest and a group picture.

Advocates locally want to legalize gay marriage through the General Assembly rather than the courts; they don't want to take a chance on a court decision they might regret. Gay marriage legislation has been filed at the State House in all but one year since 1996, says Jenn Steinfeld, co-chair of the advocate group Marriage Equality. In many of those years, legislation that would ban gay marriage was also introduced. Bills on both sides generally die in committee.

Tiffany and Jessie Rauch-Dickson, both 30, of Providence, married in Massachusetts in October 2006, after about 12 years together. Their marriage "adds a huge level of protection for us, for those who don't see us as a couple," says Jessie.

After hearing stories about longtime same-sex partners being banned from hospital rooms because they're not "related" to the patient, they don't take chances. "I had to go to the emergency room . . . and we brought our marriage license with us," says Tiffany. They bring their marriage certificate when they travel.

Essjay Foulkrod, 82, and Pam Brightman, 56, of Warwick, paid a lawyer to draft legal agreements in case something happened to one of them, "which was very, very expensive to have done," said Brightman. "Which heterosexual people who are married don't worry about."

They later married in Massachusetts and have testified at State House hearings in favor of gay marriage. Brightman, who says she was beaten up leaving a gay bar many years ago, is an activist because, "I'm going to stand up for my rights and my life. I was beaten up for doing nothing. Now that I'm doing something, I'm not afraid. And that closet is only for clothes now."

Foulkrod grew up in the 1930s and '40s when the closet doors were shut tight. "I just didn't know any gay people at the time," she says. "I look back and I can identify all kinds of people who I liked who I now realize were gay." She married a man who was about to go off to war, and then raised a family. "I tried the other life. It worked out fairly well, but it wasn't right."

Standing in opposition to same-sex marriage are top General Assembly leaders, Governor Carcieri and Bishop Tobin.

Carcieri explains his opposition in a legal brief: "Marriage as the legal union of one man and one woman is clearly the bedrock of Rhode Island family law."

Bishop Tobin argues against gay marriage from the perspective of Catholic moral teachings. "I think we have the right and even the need to challenge immoral behaviors -- not because we don't love people, but precisely because we do love them," the bishop says.

He says he understands the "emotional desire" of gay and lesbian couples to seek legal recognition. "But that shouldn't be confused with accepting or approving of what is presumably immoral and unnatural sexual activity."

A Massachusetts court in September 2006 concluded that Rhode Island law doesn't ban same-sex marriages, and therefore gay Rhode Islanders could get Massachusetts marriage licenses. Last February, Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch issued an opinion that same-sex marriages performed in Massachusetts are valid in Rhode Island. "Legally, as far as I'm concerned, it was a no-brainer," says Lynch. "It's a basic civil rights question."

(Lynch's sister, Margaret Lynch-Gadaleta, married her partner in Massachusetts last year. Lynch says his sister's same-sex wedding did not affect his legal opinion.)

Bishop Tobin suggested the attorney general had been influenced by the "relentless gay agenda."

"I have worse things said about me every day," Lynch says. He maintains that he admires the bishop, but "I have a responsibility to literally more people, and a responsibility to the law. These are the rights of real people."

An opinion from the attorney general carries some weight, but it isn't law. Legislative combat over same-sex matrimony returns to the State House this month.

THE REV. TROY Perry retired two years ago. The MCC now has nearly 300 churches in more than 20 countries, though it is no longer in Rhode Island; its closest church is in Boston.

A documentary about Perry's life, Call Me Troy, was shown in September at the Austin [Texas] Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. That month, the government of Singapore prohibited Perry from delivering a speech on gay issues. Nothing like that had ever happened in his 40 years of activism with the MCC. "And yes," Perry says, "we have had problems."

Problems such as AIDS, which killed thousands of church members. MCC churches have been burned down, Perry says. Three pastors have been murdered -- most recently the Rev. Ed Sheriff, a 68-year-old clergyman in Sacramento, Calif., stabbed to death in 1999.

Perry predicts the gay movement's biggest fight, the last item on his gay agenda, will be with the federal government. Tax laws, for one, are harder on same-sex couples -- domestic partnership benefits many companies provide for gay employees are treated as extra income by the federal government, and taxed. The Defense of Marriage Act, passed in 1996 and signed by Democrat Bill Clinton, forbids federal recognition of same-sex marriages.

The reverend appreciates the irony that his work puts him at odds with many religious people. "There are people who say, absolutely, Scripture says homosexuality is a sin, just as it says slaves are supposed to go home and be good to their masters. None of us quotes those Scriptures today. The culture has moved on about slavery. Some Christian religions hold on to the gay thing."

Perry's body still bears the scars of his suicide attempt 40 years ago, at the dawn of the gay rights movement. He notices the scars every week or so, and shudders at what he might have missed.

 

marsenau@projo.com / (401) 277-7231