nation

LOS ANGELES - Richard Adams, who used both the altar and the courtroom to help begin the push for gay marriage 40 years before it reached the center of the national consciousness, has died, his attorney said Sunday.

After a brief illness, Adams, 65, died Dec. 17 in the Hollywood home he shared with longtime partner Tony Sullivan.

Adams and Sullivan met in 1971 at a Los Angeles gay bar called the Closet. They were granted a marriage license in 1975 but for years fought in vain to see it recognized by governments and a population for whom the idea of two married men was still strange and foreign. They were subjected to anti-gay slurs even from government agencies.

"They felt that in the end, the most important thing was their love for each other, and in that respect they won," attorney Lavi Soloway said.

"No government or no law was ever able to keep them apart."

The couple's public life began when they heard about a county clerk in Boulder, Colo., named Clela Rorex, a pioneer in her own right who took the unprecedented step of giving marriage licenses to gay couples after learning from the district attorney's office that nothing in Colorado law expressly forbade it. Her office became what the New York Times soon called "a mini-Nevada for homosexual couples."

Adams and Sullivan traveled to Colorado, had a ceremony at the First Unitarian Church of Denver and were granted a license from Rorex before the state's attorney general ordered her to stop giving them to gay couples.

Adams and Sullivan's primary motivation in marrying was to get permanent U.S. residency status for Sullivan, an Australian, and they promptly put in an application with what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

They received a one-sentence denial from the INS that was stunning in its bluntness, using an offensive term to describe the men. The INS issued a follow-up response that removed the offending language but gave no ground for its thinking.

Adams' attempt to have that decision overturned was the first federal lawsuit seeking recognition for gay marriage, according to the Advocate magazine and the Los Angeles Times.

He took the INS to court in 1979 and later filed a separate lawsuit on the constitutionality of denying gays the right to marry. His position appeared strong, as he was defending a marriage he had been granted officially.

Despite reaching the highest federal appeals courts, he was met only with rejections.

Sullivan's deportation became likely in the mid-1980s, and the couple appeared on the "Today" show and "The Phil Donahue Show."

Adams' application for Australian residency also was denied, so the couple spent a year in Europe before returning to a low-profile life in Los Angeles.

But they recently reemerged and are the subject of an upcoming documentary, "Limited Partnership." And two days before Adams' death, they were working with Soloway on a challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, one of two gay-marriage laws the Supreme Court has agreed to hear.