On the morning of December 17, 1990, according to the press release he sent beforehand to local media, Bill Woods had plans to make news, not history.
He would bring three same-sex couples, two female and one male, to the main office of the Hawaii Department of Public Health in downtown Honolulu, where they would complete applications for marriage licenses. Woods was not a lawyer, but had studied the family-law code, which included in its marriage regulations a reference to “the husband” and “the wife” without any specific indication that there had to be only one of each or requirement that together they be capable of reproduction. Woods had envisioned two possible scenarios. In one, the three couples walk out of the office as the first same-sex couples on earth legally authorized to marry. In the other, Woods would tell the assembled media to follow him and the couples as they walked to the local headquarters of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU lawyers had ignored and humiliated Woods all year in his efforts to conduct a mass wedding ceremony alongside Honolulu’s pride parade, but now would be pressured by the media coverage into taking his project seriously.
That morning, Woods told the three couples he had recruited to meet outside the old Blaisdell Hotel, whose office floors were home to both the ACLU and the Gay Community Center that Woods had launched and almost singlehandedly ran. Gathered around a park bench, Woods made introductions. Joe Melillo and Pat Lagon were longtime friends of Woods’. Antoinette Pregil and Tammy Rodrigues had contacted him after reading in a local newspaper clip that he wanted to help same-sex couples marry; they thought it would likely solve the legal problems they faced as lesbian parents to foster children. Ninia Baehr and Genora Dancel had been the last to enter Woods’ orbit, when just the week prior Baehr had called the community center after enduring an earache to inquire if there was any way she could be covered under her girlfriend’s health-insurance plan. There was not, Woods explained to each of them separately, unless they wanted to join him in testing whether the state was ready to let them marry. “He didn’t ask, ‘Are you an axe murderer?’” Baehr later recalled. “He didn’t do anything to see, Are you the Rosa Parks we need?”
After explaining his plan, Woods led his six charges down Beretania Street to the health department. There were registered license agents scattered across Hawaii, including government officials and even employees of large resort hotels that catered to wedding parties, but Woods, with an eye towards dramatic confrontation, selected the most highly trafficked of the available locations.
