U.S. Supreme Court – Credit: Davis Staedtler/flickr
When it comes to politics and governance, I’m generally overstocked on cynicism and lacking in sentimentality, but I still found myself shedding a few tears of joy when I saw the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of marriage equality.
Despite the fact that the march towards equality can feel painfully slow, we know just how quickly the marriage victory came — far faster than almost anyone, gay or straight, friend or foe, would have predicted. In fact, it’s worth remembering just how ludicrous the idea of legal gay marriage once seemed, both as a goal and an institution. Marriage proponents were treated as comic relief; many gays and lesbians asked, “Why on earth would we want to get married?”
And yet here we are, in a world lit up in rainbow colors. It’s a nice place to be.
We got here through the hard work of so many people, who have been highlighted and profiled and interviewed in these pages and others over the past decade. But just as important as the individuals who guided this campaign has been our own grassroots — the thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people who said, “This is why we want to get married. This is why we want to be full and equal members of our society.”
Marriage equality wasn’t a trickle-down victory. Our relationships provided the foundation for the movement. Every commitment ceremony, every domestic partnership, every early marriage demonstrated to family, friends and neighbors that our lives are much the same as theirs, that we are equal in our desire for love and stability. I’ve seen the change in my own family — what once was unthinkable became familiar and accepted, even in the rural American heartland that anti-gay politicians assume to be their bedrock. It wasn’t pundits on television or amicus briefs that changed their minds, it was the simple experience of actual gay people being open about their lives.
That’s why, for me, marriage is part of the continuum of activism of the ’80s and ’90s, when the AIDS epidemic began forcing America to deal with homosexuality as something more than parades in San Francisco and New York. In the face of government indifference, bureaucratic hostility, and sheer hatred, LGBT people became the advocates that no one in power would be. I don’t share the apocalyptic worldview or bottomless anger of Larry Kramer, but we all owe him a debt for using that anger to help save our community. And, frankly, we owe a debt to all the people who were willing to storm the FDA, chain themselves in government buildings and heckle the president of the free world. While too many were lost to AIDS, there are others who are still with us — I’d consider this a good time to celebrate “Hug an ACT UP Alumnus Day.”
Just as ACT UP and Queer Nation built on the history of Mattachine and Stonewall, the movement for marriage built on what preceded it. AIDS showed the country what happened to people considered less than human: patients left to die alone by fearful hospitals, surviving partners stripped of their homes by bigoted family. These issues intersected with marriage, the same way that marriage would intersect with immigration rights, visitation rights, and women’s equality.
So marriage is part of a continuum that did not end last Friday at the Supreme Court. As has been noted, there are states where you can get married and then get fired for it, because there are no workplace protections for LGBT employees. Homophobic families in most states can still subject their children to crackpot gay “conversion” therapies. Transgender men and women still face astounding discrimination, in courts, hospitals and hometowns.
We should all celebrate enthusiastically now that we’ve achieved a fundamental milestone of the movement. I would even encourage some extended basking in those rainbow lights. But don’t forget we have a ways to go in making the world an even nicer place to be.
Sean Bugg is the former editor and co-publisher of Metro Weekly.
GLAAD has released new data showing that 1,042 anti-LGBTQ incidents were reported across 47 states and the District of Columbia in 2025 -- a 5% increase over the previous year, according to the organization’s ALERT Desk Anti-LGBTQ Extremism Reporting Tracker.
Anti-LGBTQ incidents were defined as "an act of harassment, threat(s), vandalism, and/or assault against an individual, group, and/or organization," with explicit evidence of anti-LGBTQ bias as a motivating factor.
The incidents included 128 acts of hateful vandalism, 76 violent assaults, 22 threats of mass violence, and 15 arson attempts.
The Dallas Landmark Commission unanimously approved rainbow-colored steps outside Oak Lawn United Methodist Church as a temporary art installation, allowing the display to remain for up to three years despite objections that they violate historic preservation codes.
As a designated historic site, Oak Lawn United Methodist Church is required to seek city approval before making major exterior changes, including paint colors, according to Dallas-area PBS/NPR affiliate KERA.
The LGBTQ-welcoming church did not submit an application to the landmark commission before repainting its exterior steps in the colors of the "Progress Pride" flag, incorporating the traditional rainbow along with black and brown stripes and the blue, pink, and white of the transgender Pride flag.
A Wisconsin man is maintaining his innocence after being accused of using Grindr to carry out a sinister catfishing scheme against another man.
Matthew Huebschman, 32, of Appleton, pleaded not guilty to a single charge of stalking during a December 15 hearing before Outagamie County Judge Carrie Schneider, according to Seehafer News.
Police allege that Huebschman used the gay dating app Grindr to impersonate the victim and invite men to the victim’s home without his knowledge, then watched from a nearby location as the men arrived.
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