AUSTIN - More than 40 years ago in a small chapel off the Gulf Freeway, a hulking ex-tackle from Brownsville slid a ring onto the finger of his partner, transforming the slight man wearing a blond bouffant wig standing opposite him into his husband. In their hands they clasped the first marriage license ever given to a same-sex couple in Texas.

The story of Antonio Molina and William "Billie" Ert is full of firsts. It marked Texas' first gay marriage and the first recorded instance of a same-sex couple receiving a license to wed in the Lone Star State. It was also stained by finality, a quixotic love story that set back the Texas gay marriage movement 40 years while also helping to inspire a generation of civil rights advocates.

By 1970s standards, Molina and Ert's story went viral, making front-page headlines from El Paso to East Asia. "Two men seal vows with a kiss," the Denton Record-Chronicle reported on Oct. 6, 1972. The Straits Times of Singapore's headline read, "And then they were wed ... HE to HIM."

Molina's hometown newspaper, the Brownsville Herald, ran a photo of the beaming couple holding their marriage certificate, he in a suit and tie and Ert in a white beaded dress, elbow gloves and wig. That wig, it turns out, was what separated their success from the handful of gay couples who already had attempted to get married.

"We wouldn't have issued any license if we'd known he wasn't a female," Wharton County Clerk Delfin Marek said at the time. His deputy said Ert's "frosted shoulder length wig" fooled her.

Ert even had a voter registration card that listed him as "female." It was this document that months before provided the couple with their first inspiration for the scheme.

From different stock

Molina and Ert met in Chicago five years before, where the latter was plying his talents as a female impersonator, mostly singing and dancing, in the city's nightclubs. A native of somewhere in that amorphous region between Buffalo and Toronto, the former Ice Capades skater and hairdresser also had become a regular performer in the posh supper clubs of Toronto, Dallas and Houston, where he was billed as "Mr. Vicki Karr."

Molina came from altogether different stock. Born and raised in Brownsville, he lettered in high school football in 1957, and then enlisted in the U.S. Navy. At 6 feet and 235 pounds, he once worked for U.S. Steel and was a shipping clerk when he married Ert in 1972.

The couple had been together for a number of years when they exchanged rings in a small ceremony at Houston's Harmony Wedding Chapel, Rev. Richard Vincent, who officiated the ceremony, told The Advocate two days after their wedding.

"We marry souls, not bodies," said Vincent, an activist minister who helped found the gay-friendly Dallas Metropolitan Community Church. "They met the requirements as set forth by the church; they love each other, and they had a license, as I signed it. As far as I'm concerned, they are married in the eyes of God and in the eyes of Texas."

The timing of the marriage was perfect for homosexual activists.

The U.S. Supreme Court was poised to hear the case of another gay couple who sought and failed to receive a license in Minnesota, Jack Baker and James McConnell. While awaiting on the High Court to rule, Baker and McConnell quietly went to another Minnesota county, obtained a license and were married in 1971.

By the time Molina and Ert tied the knot, a handful of other same-sex couples from Washington State to Kentucky had tried unsuccessfully to follow in Baker and McConnell's footsteps. The nascent gay rights movement, born in the wake of a police raid on a Greenwich Village gay club known as the Stonewall Inn, seemed poised for a breakthrough.

The public and the courts, however, were not ready.

"When Antonio and Billie tried to marry, the medical profession considered homosexuality a mental illness. Most states, including Texas, criminalized it, and there were no legal protections for gays and lesbians anywhere," said Mark Phariss, who currently is challenging Texas' gay marriage ban with his partner, Victor Holmes.

Much of the general public's discomfort with the idea was directly attributable to the movement's early characters, said State University of New York-Buffalo Law Professor Michael Boucai.

"In the Texas case, you have a drag queen. That's not how gay marriage advocates like to represent their current constituency," said Boucai. In Kentucky, one half of a lesbian couple who sued for marriage operated a questionable massage service. Two men in Washington State did not actually believe in the institution of marriage, but still thought they should be able to partake. "They're just not convenient."

Hopes dashed

The reaction against Molina and Ert's union was swift, and at times, dangerous.

Just days after the Supreme Court declined to hear the Minnesota case - effectively killing any hopes the nation's highest court would weigh in on same-sex marriage for the next 20 years - the Texas legal system came down on Molina and Ert.

Citing the justices' decision and a recent opinion from the Texas attorney general, Marek, the county clerk, refused to formally record the marriage certificate. Molina sued, arguing state law did not explicitly prohibit gay marriage because it said any two "persons" could enter into a union.

Attorney General Crawford Martin disagreed and issued a ruling that said marriage in Texas was intended for opposite-sex couples only because the law included such words as "husband" and "wife." Harris County District Attorney Carol Vance called Molina and Ert's marriage license "a worthless piece of paper."

The Houston Police Department's vice squad chief went a step further, threatening to press charges against the couple and their minister for performing the ceremony and obtaining a document by false pretense.

The threats and legal troubles went from bad to worse. Martin said Ert could be sent to jail for two to five years for signing his name on a document marked "woman's name." Soon after, a district judge threw out Molina's lawsuit.

Molina appealed the ruling and Ert went to the papers and local gay publications with their story. The two even appeared on CBS with Vikki Carr, the female singing star on whom Ert based his drag act.

The stress of the experience began to whittle away at their strength, however, and in May 1973 the couple's final appeal was thrown out because they filed it too late, a blow from which their legal battle would never recover.

Intended to expand the right to wed in the Lone Star State, their disputed union actually moved Texas in the opposite direction. State lawmakers considered the attempted marriage an embarrassment and a call to arms.

In 1973, they agreed to replace "persons" with "a man and a woman" in Texas marriage law. During committee discussion, they mocked the couple.

"I don't think that clerk ever suspected that football player wanted to marry one of his teammates," one senator is heard joking as the others laughed. The governor signed the bill into law in June one month after Molina and Ert's case was thrown out.

Audio clip: Senators discuss Molina and Ert's wedding in 1972.

The failure took a lasting toll. In October, a local newspaper reported Molina had left his lover of nearly six years. Soon after, Ert shot himself.

"I just shut my eyes and pulled the trigger," a friend said Ert told her. The suicide attempt was unsuccessful, however, and Ert continued to perform in Houston clubs as Mr. Vicki Carr for at least another two years, as evidenced by an October 1975 show announcement found by local LGBT historian J.D. Doyle.

Losing the trail

Here, however, their trail goes dark. Attempts to follow Ert's performing career or unearth an obituary failed. (See editor's note below.) Molina died in 1991, and is interred in the Houston National Cemetery. Reached for comment, his sister-in-law refused to broach the subject.

"He's gone and I just don't want to talk about him," Anna Vargas Molina told the Chronicle in late October.

"It is really hard for most of us now to realize how brave they really were, but they were undoubtedly brave," Phariss said.

Nicole Dimetman-DeLeon, who filed the current case challenging Texas' ban with her wife Cleopatra DeLeon, said it's hard to fathom the obstacles gay couples faced 40 years ago.

"I feel like we don't have as much to lose as many of these folks did back then," Dimetman-DeLeon said. "You have to put it in context. Cleo and I are free to be very normal."

Molina did not live to see the state further toughen the marriage restrictions he and Ert inspired. Six years after his death, state lawmakers followed the national trend and included a phrase in state law explicitly prohibiting marriage by same-sex partners. In 2005, voters enshrined the ban in the state Constitution.

Only now, as Texas finds itself as one of just 15 states with such a ban remaining, are gay rights advocates hoping for their first victory in 40 years. A federal appeals court in New Orleans will take up the issue on Jan. 9.

'Court of public opinion'

Evan Wolfson, the New York lawyer and activist known as the father of the modern gay rights movement, said Molina and Ert's story is a reminder it takes more than just legal precedent to win over hearts and minds.

"These early marriage cases really were reflective of the fact that gay people have always wanted it," said Wolfson, whose national Freedom to Marry group just launched a grass-roots effort in Texas. "But they also remind us it's not just about filing the case in court. You also have to make the case in the court of public opinion."

They may have been inconvenient, even radical, said University of California-Berkeley Professor of Law Melissa Murray. But early activists like Ert and Molina also were necessary.

"What these cases did was to bring gay couples, loving couples to the forefront, out of the closet and out of the shadows," Murray said. "I don't think you could have a contemporary marriage movement without them."

Of course, Ert and Molina had no way to know what, if any, effect their actions could have on future same-sex couples. In a letter to the gay publication DAVID 41 years ago, however, Ert echoed the hopes and arguments of today's same-sex marriage advocates.

"This is 1973 and not 1956," Ert wrote. "I see no reason why the gay community should have to hide behind closed doors to live and love who they wish, be them two females or two males. The U.S.A. is the Land of the Free, so they say, and tell us."

Editor's note: William "Billie" Ert died after a lengthy illness on Sept. 12, 1976. Ert had returned to Canada before his death and had been seeking treatment at the M.D. Anderson Cancer and Tumor Research Center, according a report in the Nov. 3, 1976, Advocate. The report mentioned Ert and Molina's marriage, but did not mention whether the couple retained ties before his death.