Editor’s Note: Karen Ocamb is the news editor for Frontiers in LA, a major LGBT publication in Southern California. Prior to working in the LGBT press, Karen was a producer at CBS Network News and a freelance writer and producer. She lives in West Hollywood with her two rescued dogs. 

The august San Francisco courthouse, perked up by thousands of noisy, sign-carrying demonstrators playing to scores of national reporters and camera crews March 5, did not intimidate Robin Tyler and her wife, Diane Olson, who were the first California plaintiffs to file a same-sex marriage suit in 2004 and were represented by Gloria Allred. 

Shouting matches over Proposition 8 – the constitutional amendment that eliminated the right for same-sex couples to marry in California – were mere white noise compared to the drama about to happen as the California Supreme Court last week heard oral arguments on whether to uphold or invalidate the initiative that passed by a slim majority last November.

Tyler and Olson had been here before, almost a year to the day on March 4, 2008, for oral arguments in the marriage-equality case, which can be heard here. Their lawyer, famed attorney Gloria Allred, filed the first marriage lawsuit on February 24, 2004, 12 days after Tyler and Olson, and their friends Rev. Troy Perry and his partner Phillip Ray de Bliek, were denied marriage licenses at the Beverly Hills Courthouse. Asking for — and being denied — marriage licenses was part of the nationwide Freedom to Marry Day demonstration held every Valentine’s Day for years.

But this time was different. This time Tyler was angry because her labor union — the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) — had refused to give Olson medical insurance after Tyler retired because, as an AFTRA person told Tyler, the two were “just domestic partners … That’s just the way it is, hon.”

Tyler and Olson announced their lawsuit on the same day in 2004 that San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom defied state law and permitted same-sex couples to obtain marriage licenses.

Four years and many tears later, on May 15, 2008, the high court ruled 4 - 3 in favor of marriage equality. Chief Justice Ronald George, a Republican, wrote the majority opinion establishing that lesbian and gay couples had been denied the “fundamental” right to marry. Additionally, for the first time in U.S. history, gays were now recognized as a “suspect class” — a historically disadvantaged group that merited the “strict scrutiny” standard under the Equal Protection Clause of the California Constitution.

San Francisco-based lesbian pioneers Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, as well as Tyler and Olson, were given special dispensation to marry on June 16, a day before the ruling went into effect. (Martin, a longtime lesbian activist, died two months later.)

For their marriage, Tyler and Olson, who had been together 15 years, went back to the Beverly Hills Courthouse and staged a public Jewish wedding, carried “live” by several local television stations.

Thousands of same-sex couples followed suit last summer, though many others decided to wait until after the November elections, fearing that Prop 8 would pass, and their marriages — though now legal — would be invalidated.

The battle over the ballot initiative was watched nationwide and became the most expensive in U.S. history — with each side spending roughly $40 million. The Utah-based Church of Latter-day Saints alone poured in $25 million, with some members reportedly mortgaging their homes to contribute after the First Presidency sent out a letter calling on all parishioners to “do all you can” to pass the measure and restore “traditional marriage.”