Gay Marriage Trailblazer Helps Raise Pride Flag

Peg Oliveira stood alongside the mayor and a crowd of New Haveners celebrating the start of Pride Month and watched a rainbow-colored flag rise above the Green.

She thought back to 2008, when she and Jen Vickery became the first New Haven same-sex couple to get legally married, in front of the Amistad statue at City Hall. 

And she thought back to 2015, when same-sex couples across the nation won that same right to get married, thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that is a decade old this month.

“We raise the flag as a symbol for ​‘We the People,’ ” Oliveira said at a Tuesday press conference, ​“and a call for the end to splintering our communities.”

Oliveira, a Yale psychologist and the director of the Gesell Program in Early Childhood, shared those words and memories during the latest annual raising of the Pride flag on the flagpole at the center of the Green.

The event was organized by the city and the New Haven Pride Center, and featured speeches by Mayor Justin Elicker, East Rock/Fair Haven Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith, APNH’s Jovanni Cabanas, pride center Interim Executive Director Lou Perno, and Oliveira. 

As Perno put it, Tuesday’s flag-raising ceremony served as a celebration for two important occasions: the start of Pride Month, which takes place June every year and which will see a host of LGBTQ+ events take place across town, as well as the ten-year anniversary of the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage across the country. 

That decision, which came down on June 26, 2015, established ​“the right to marry as a fundamental right protected by the U.S. Constitution,” Oliveira said during her time at the mic. She then quoted that case’s lead plaintiff, Jim Obergefell of Ohio, who celebrated the 2015 decision by stating that winning the right to marry made him feel ​“more like an American than I had in a very long time.” 

That fight for ​“feeling like an equal American,” Oliveira said on Tuesday, is ​“an ongoing struggle.”

While same-sex couples around the country won the legal right to marry a decade ago, Oliveira, who has lived in New Haven for more than 25 years, took attendees at Tuesday’s press conference further back in time to chart her own path-breaking journey.

She said that, in 2004, eight same-sex couples filed for marriage licenses in Connecticut, and were denied. In 2008, however, the state Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriages — and so, on Nov. 12 of that year, Oliveira and her bride-to-be, Jen Vickery, traveled with their then-three-month-old daughter to City Hall to become the first New Haven couple to do just that.

Oliveira thanked on Tuesday the late appellate Judge Herbert Gruendel, who officiated her and Vickery’s marriage and also served as her ​“wedding planner.” 

Back in 2008, Connecticut was only the second state in the country, after Massachusetts, to legalize same-sex marriages. This decade anniversary of the Obergefell decision, she said, is an ​“acknowledgment of that dignity for all same-sex couples.”

She concluded her remarks Tuesday by saying that the many colors of the Pride flag are a reminder that all individuals — regardless of their race, gender, religion, sexual orientation — deserve to be ​“treated with dignity and respect.”

In his own tribute to Oliveira, Perno read from the opening lines of this 2008 New Haven Independent article about her and Vickery’s brush with history: ​“They met at yoga, fell in love — and waited out civil unions to become New Haven’s first married same-sex couple.”