California Lieutenant Governor Gavin
Newsom was presented with an award honoring his gay advocacy at the
24th Annual GLAAD Media Awards in San Francisco.
GLAAD recognized Newsom's gay rights
advocacy with the Golden Gate Award. Previous recipients include
Jennifer Beals, Shonda Rhimes, Brooke Shields and Megan Mullally.
Newsom's involvement in the issue of
marriage equality goes back more than a decade.
In 2003, then-San Francisco Mayor
Newsom ordered city hall clerks to issue marriage licenses to gay and
lesbian couples in violation of state law. Several thousand gay
couples were married during the “winter of love,” but eventually
the California Supreme Court ordered the city to stop and invalidated
all the marriages.
Filmmaker Jennifer Siebel presented the
award to her husband.
“There's one fundamental that defines
the best of this city,” Newsom told the San Francisco crowd in
accepting the award, “and the best of this organization. And that
is we don't tolerate diversity, we truly celebrate our diversity. We
highlight all those wonderful and interesting differences, but at he
end of the day we unite around our common humanity. As Dr. King so
eloquently said, 'We are all bound together by a web of mutuality.'
We're all in this together.”
(Related: Adam
Lambert at GLAAD Media Awards: Love ties generations.)