True to form, Mary Bonauto didn’t even know she had been nominated for a MacArthur grant.
The unassuming yet tenacious civil rights lawyer from Portland has systematically taken the fight for marriage equality into courtrooms across the country, leading a charge that has seen 19 states legalize same-sex marriage in the past 10 years.
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Mary Bonauto: In Profile
Born: 1961 in Newburgh, New York
Education: Attended Hamilton College; Northeastern University School of Law
Work life: She has been an attorney with the Boston-based firm Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders since 1990. She is now its civil rights project director.
Family life: Bonauto lives in Portland with her spouse, Jennifer Wriggins, a professor at the University of Maine School of Law, and their twin 12-year-old daughters.
At a Glance
Mary Bonauto has been an attorney with the Boston-based firm Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders since 1990. She is currently its civil rights project director.
During her time at GLAD, Bonauto has been involved with every major state and federal legal battle over same-sex marriage.
In 1997, she and two other attorneys sued the state of Vermont for not allowing same-sex partners to enter into civil marriages. That case made it to the state supreme court and led to the creation of “civil unions.”
In 2003, she sued the state of Massachusetts on behalf of seven gay and lesbian couples. When the courts ruled in her favor, Massachusetts became the first state to allow same-sex marriage, paving the way for 18 other states to follow, either through legislation, court decision or popular vote.
She was instrumental in the 2012 citizen’s initiative that culminated with Maine voters approving a law allowing same-sex marriage, the first such law created by popular vote.
In addition to her work with GLAD, Bonauto also is the Shikes Fellow in Civil Liberties and Civil Rights and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.
2014 MacArthur Fellows
Danielle Bassett, 32, physicist, Philadelphia
Alison Bechdel, 54, cartoonist and graphic memoirist, Bolton, Vermont
Mary Bonauto, 43, civil rights lawyer, Portland, Maine
Tami Bond, 50, environmental engineer, Urbana, Illinois
Steve Coleman, 57, jazz composer and saxophonist, Allentown, Pennsylvania
Sarah Deer, 41, legal scholar and advocate, St. Paul, Minnesota
Jennifer Eberhardt, 49, social psychologist, Palo Alto, California
Craig Gentry, 41, computer scientist, Yorktown Heights, New York
Terrance Hayes, 42, poet, Pittsburgh
John Henneberger, 59, housing advocate, Austin, Texas
Mark Hersam, 39, materials scientist, Evanston, Illinois
Samuel Hunter, 33, playwright, New York
Pamela Long, 71, historian of science and technology, Washington, D.C.
Rick Lowe, 53, public artist, Houston
Jacob Lurie, 36, mathematician, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Khaled Mattawa, 50, translator and poet, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Joshua Oppenheimer, 39, documentary filmmaker, Copenhagen, Denmark
Ai-jen Poo, 40, labor organizer, New York
Jonathan Rapping, 48, criminal lawyer, Atlanta
Tara Zahra, 38, historian of modern Europe, Chicago
Yitang Zhang, 59, mathematician, Durham, New Hampshire
While Bonauto has been honored numerous times for her work with the Boston-based law firm Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, on Wednesday she was named to the 2014 class of MacArthur Fellows, a national award funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation that comes with a monetary award of $625,000 paid out over five years, with no strings attached.
“I had no clue that anyone had nominated me,” Bonauto, 53, said in a phone interview Tuesday. “I actually thought it might be a joke.”
The MacArthur Foundation has been awarding the grants, often called “genius grants,” since 1981, recognizing “exceptionally creative individuals with a track record of achievement and the potential for significant contributions in the future.”
Joining Bonauto this year were 20 other individuals representing a wide array of fields, including poetry, physics, jazz, mathematics, documentary filmmaking and social justice work.
Bonauto is the second MacArthur recipient to live in Maine at the time of the award. Ted Ames, a lobsterman and marine conservationist from Stonington, was a member of the 2005 class.
Bonauto, as she often does when speaking to the media, downplayed her role in the fight for same-sex marriage.”What they are really recognizing is the collaboration of so many people whose names will never be known,” she said.
Others, though, are happy to credit Bonauto. “We would not be where we are in Maine or this country without Mary,” said Betsy Smith, former director of EqualityMaine.
Patricia Peard, an attorney with Bernstein Shur who has known Bonauto for 25 years, said, “She’s the best lawyer I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve worked with a lot of great lawyers.”
Bonauto grew up Roman Catholic in Newburgh, New York, and attended Hamilton College about a three-hour drive away.
During that time she came out as a lesbian, an admission she said brought harassment but ultimately fueled her desire to make life better for gays and lesbians.
She attended Northeastern University School of Law, got her degree in 1987 and then took a job in private practice in Portland. That’s also where she met her partner, Jennifer Wriggins, now a professor at the University of Maine School of Law.
Bonauto was in Maine less than three years when a position opened at Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, then a small Massachusetts practice focused on anti-discrimination law.
She worked on a variety of discrimination cases at GLAD until 1997, when she joined two other attorneys in filing a lawsuit that challenged the constitutionality of Vermont’s ban on allowing gay and lesbian couples the right to marry. That case made it to the Vermont Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor. The result was the creation of “civil unions,” which extended legal benefits to same-sex couples without actually allowing them to marry.
Other states followed suit.
As historic as the Vermont legal fight was, Bonauto is perhaps better known for a lawsuit she filed in Massachusetts on behalf of seven same-sex couples that led to a landmark 2003 decision that struck down the state’s exclusion of gay and lesbian couples from the civil institution of marriage.
After the court ruling in the Bay State, Bonauto and her colleagues embarked on a systematic, incremental strategy to overturn same-sex marriage bans in other states, mostly in the Northeast and the West.
Bonauto and Wriggins, who have twin 12-year-old daughters, moved back to Maine in 2001.
In 2009, she joined advocates in Maine after a citizens initiative was launched to overturn a same-sex marriage law passed by a Democrat-controlled Legislature. Maine voters did overturn the law, but three years later, Bonauto rejoined the fight.
This time, same-sex marriage supporters were successful. In November 2012, Maine became the first state to approve same-sex marriage by a popular vote.
Even while she was fighting in state courts across the country, Bonauto has set her sights nationally as well.
In 2009, she led a team from GLAD in challenging the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Her work served as the template for United States vs. Windsor, the case that resulted last year in the U.S. Supreme Court striking down DOMA as unconstitutional.
Roberta Kaplan, the lawyer who argued for DOMA’s repeal by the Supreme Court, commented in a profile of Bonauto in The New York Times last year that “no gay person in this country would be married without Mary Bonauto.”
Former U.S. Rep. Barney Frank called Bonauto “our Thurgood Marshall,” referring to the lawyer-turned-Supreme Court justice whose legal argument in Brown vs. Board of Education led to the desegregation of public schools in the 1950s.
Smith, the former director of EqualityMaine, compared her to Martin Luther King Jr.
“She knew that there was no other way to do this work than to do it incrementally,” Smith said. “Many of us probably wanted to move faster, but she knew that there would be no progress if we jumped ahead too quickly.”
Sarah Warbelow, legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, said Bonauto wields power in a “quiet but effective way.”
“She’s not interested in getting credit, only in fighting for what’s right,” Warbelow said.
Bonauto is uncomfortable in the role of pioneer. The way she sees it, there is still a lot of work to be done.
“Every time another legislature approves same-sex marriage or every time we get a win in court, it’s still a rush,” she said.
The MacArthur Fellow status, and the generous grant that comes with it, is not likely to change anything for Bonauto, who said she’s as busy today as she was in 2003 fighting the Massachusetts law.
“Every time we get to common ground on something, another whole set of issues is there waiting for you to address,” she said.
Dianne Phillips, the current board chair of GLAD, said Bonauto deserves all the recognition she receives.
“I hope she does take a minute and enjoy the fruits of her labor,” Phillips said. “But for Mary, she’s always looking forward.”
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