David Moore and David Ermold discussed
standing up to Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis in an interview with
men's fashion glossy GQ.
Moore and Ermold were repeatedly denied
a marriage license by Davis, who claimed that to grant them a
marriage license would violate her conscience. Video of their
rejections catapulted Davis into a Christian celebrity.
Moore told the magazine that he knew he
was gay at a young age.
“I was always picked on. I was the
smallest kid, plus I was gay, plus I was poor,” he said.
The men met on a dating site. Moore,
who didn't have a computer, messaged his future husband on a library
computer.
“About four months after we first
messaged, he came down to Kentucky to visit from Pennsylvania. Four
months after that, he moved down here full-time,” Moore
said.
Ermold also grew up poor outside
Philadelphia. He said his parents split up when he was 5 because his
father was “a bad man.”
Davis' continued refusals to issue
marriage licenses to gay couples landed her a brief stint in jail.
Moore said that he cried when he
learned that Davis had been jailed.
“This is not what I wanted,” he
sobbed.
“We're also complicit in her fame.
We're the ones that filmed her originally. It's funny, I saw the
rally speech where she said, 'God is on the throne. He's on the
throne.' She sees herself in that position. It's not God,” Moore
added.
The men agreed that the controversy was
emotional because it made each realize that they had become
desensitized to homophobia.
“Even among friends, we've come to
accept it,” Moore said. “We had a mirror held up and realized,
okay, this was happening all this time, but we just ignored it. We
just let people treat us this way all this time.”
“That's what's the hardest thing
about it all: the reminder that you've been letting it happen for so
long,” Ermold added. “And I have that word accommodation,
because we've been already making accommodations for our entire
lives.”