This is what the fight is like
Sooo, apparently the extremely tenuous and recent nature of the LGBTQ+ community's legal right to exist was not actually super widely known to a lot of people on Tumblr?
Which clarifies some stuff in retrospect. I have so often wanted to grab people by their lapels and shout, "Stop picking on someone for not meeting your entry requirements! We need everyone we can get, you asshole! DON'T YOU KNOW HOW MUCH THEY HATE US OUT THERE?"
Aaaapparently... no, they did not know. Or they knew and were a conservative psyop preparing the ground for our loss of legal rights. Fun times!
So: Look, it is bad. Shit is scary. They really do hate us out there. You're not wrong.
But: This is what we've always fought. This boat we're in with its antique fittings and strange markings on the floor is a battleship. Work has always been going on in the basements, and when shit gets tough, we clear away clutter and roll out the cannons.
I found this chart a couple weeks ago and hung onto it because it felt like the map to my first 25 years on this earth:
[Image description: A graph titled "Same Sex Marriage: Public Polls since 1988." It is from FiveThirtyEight's NYT column. It records the percentage of US Americans polled who would say yes or no to legalizing same-sex marriage, from 1988 to 2011.
The two lines begin with roughly 10% saying yes in 1988, and 70% saying no; the two lines gradually draw closer over the years, until by 2011, the percent saying finally dips under 50%, and the group saying yes makes a tentative reach for the majority. End of image description.]
After some great social change has happened, when everyone has admitted that gay marriage is very cute and Pride is a colourful parade, hooray, people like to pretend that it was just natural and inevitable and happened on its own. People just became less prejudiced! Courts just decided on a case! Governments just passed a law!
In reality, it was a vicious fucking fight, every fucking time. Every fucking where. There are a lot of people who deeply, sincerely believe that a hundred years ago, society had good rules about sex and gender and intercourse and marriage, and that changing those rules has made the world worse. They don't always agree on the specifics, but they can work together far enough to fight anyone with new ideas.
This is why we are a community. Even when we don't have the same experiences of attraction or identity, even when we don't do the same things, even when we have wildly different ideas of a good time. Because when these groups take aim, we're all under fire, and none of us is responsible for why they hate us.
In some ways I think it's a miracle that there seems to be a generation that did not grow up, as I grew up, constantly glued to news reports about What Percentage of Society Hates Us this month. I can't imagine who I'd be if my brain and heart and soul hadn't been tied up, that whole time, in the political question of whether I'd get to dream of a decent future.
I think that it will give us strength to have people who can imagine a world where no one hates us. Who believe in it so strongly they can taste it. That's my prediction: If you didn't know this was coming, you'll be a boon to us, because we have always needed joy so fiercely, in this fight, to keep us going on. We have needed drag queens and punk bands and "her wife" and safe space stickers. Parade floats and wedding days and little dogs with rainbow collars, badges and banners and meetups, because more than anything else we need to fight our own despair, and our fear that the world will never get any better than this.
It will. We know it will. We can taste it.
Look up to the history, organizations, and people who've got us this far for information on what forms of activism will actually advance our political goals. Look to the side to make sure the comrades within reach are keeping their heads above water, and that you're keeping enough joy going to stay alive. Look back to see who's more vulnerable than you are that you might have forgotten or been tempted to leave behind. Look after each other. Look after yourself.
We can do this.
To your battle stations.
If you are only-just-barely old enough to be on this website, if you JUST turned 13….you still predate, by a few months, the day I got spit on by a member of the Westboro Baptist Church for being in an equality march. Here’s the event. I was 21.
My role in the spitting was standing by a barricade. I wasn’t engaging at all, because we’d already been warned several of the counter-protestors had been attempting to incite riots, so we weren’t even LOOKING at the WBC. And apparently I just happened to be close enough to spit on.
And as a protestor whose future depended on not being arrested several hundred miles from home, I had only one choice. You’d probably like to hear that I beat the shit out of Shirley Phelps-Roper, and trust me, I wish I could tell you the Hollywood version of this story where I did that and everyone went “wow! This person was just standing there and got spit on! Clearly this is a sign bigotry is the wrong choice and we should grant full queer rights RIGHT NOW!” But that would be a lie. So instead I’ll tell you what really happened: with the words “trying to incite a riot” clanging in my head and the specter of jail time as a visibly queer person dancing in my mind, I smiled at her, and said “Jesus loves you, ma’am” and did not wipe her spit away until she was out of sight. I walked about a quarter of a mile with her spit drying on my cheek, to protect the thousands of people around me and the millions for whom we marched.
Less than thirteen years ago. If you’re just old enough to vote, you were probably literally in your kindergarten class when this happened. If you’re just old enough to drink, you were in third grade. A teacher might even have flipped on the TV to let you watch A Historic March, if you happened to be in a place like LA or Maryland (as we used to put on our signs in those days, Maryland, the Marry-Land, because it was the first state where same-sex marriage was legal). Most places certainly not, but perhaps in a few.
The battle never ended. But I want to leave you on a note of hope, not despair. And I want to underline what OP said about needing every person we can get.
I did not cry when Shirley Phelps-Roper spit on me. I didn’t cry when we started reciting the Constitutional right to assembly off the side of a building. I didn’t cry standing outside the White House, wondering if Malia and Sasha were seeing what was happening outside and if so, what their dad would tell them about it, or listening to any of the speeches. But I did cry that day, and thinking about what made me cry is bringing tears to my eyes again now.
It was a straight couple along the side of the protest route. Probably in their 40s or 50s. Black man, white woman, holding a sign they’d made out of a bedsheet.
It said “STAY STRONG 40 YEARS AGO OUR MARRIAGE WAS ILLEGAL TOO WE STAND WITH YOU.”
We’d been instructed under no circumstances whatsoever to leave our groups, because of the whole they-might-incite-a-riot thing and also because it simply wasn’t safe to be alone and confused and visibly queer in a city that wasn’t your own, surrounded by people who said you didn’t have the right to exist. So I couldn’t hug those people. But I waved at them, along with a whole bunch of other protestors, and they waved back at us.
It was a pair of allies who’d faced similar discrimination and hardship who’d made me feel hope. The other queer people around me were amazing, but that couple is the one that stayed in my mind. They represented a world where we could win, because they had won. And I promise you, not a single person around me was suggesting they didn’t belong there. I think we all fell a little in love with them, actually, for accepting the risk and putting themselves out there and finding a way into DC (which is no small feat even when there’s no protest on, DC transportation is horrible) to hold up their bedsheet and tell us they loved us.
If someone says “you have my gun and sword, let me help,” you don’t stop to ask what army they’re from or tell them they’re in the wrong uniform. You shove over a little and you let them get in line, and you ask how many bullets they have.
I’m tired. I don’t have all that much ammunition left. But you’ve got me as long as I can keep shooting.
Let’s go.
You have my spear, my little revolver, my husband's handguns, my axe, my sword, and my Maryland pride.
Living this close to DC for my whole adult life has been... interesting.
That graph is from 2011, and shows a very slight majority of the population approving of same-sex marriage.
For some perspective, here’s the current graph:
Yes, that’s right, 67% or over 2/3 of the population are on our side now. 25 years ago it was the opposite.
Another interesting tidbit, just for fun:
“People often say that same-sex marriage now is like interracial marriage in the 60s. But in terms of public opinion, same-sex marriage now is like interracial marriage in the 90s, when it had already been legal nationwide for 30 years.” --Randall Munroe, XKCD
And before anyone points out that marriage is just a reiteration of heteronormativity, my answer is: yes, and? If this many people object to us doing something that boring, how do you think they feel about us the rest of the time?
We need to hang together.
Nobody is free until everyone is free.
If you think that, then you’re probably quite young, and need to learn a little more about the AIDS pandemic and why we picked marriage as the nail to hang our hat on.
For a more immediate view, I’m going to ask my elder queers to provide some information on trying to see your hospitalized partner or correctly execute their estate. I’m just a little too young for the first-hand view of that.
But I will share this shocking fact I learned during my marching days, and it should explain a lot:
In the United States of America, OVER A THOUSAND INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES are granted to married couples, but not to unmarried couples or domestic partnerships.
These range from hospital visitation to paying inheritance tax to how you do your income taxes.
We didn’t pick it to be boring. There are many huge reasons we picked it, and tbh calling it “boring” is a huge disservice to those who died on the steps of the CDC to bring you that right.
I've been an adult longer than gay sex has been legal in the U.S. (2003)
I've been an adult longer than same-sex marriage has been recognized everywhere in the U.S. (2015)
I've been an adult longer than same-sex couples have been able to adopt children in the U.S. (2017)
I didn't fight in WWII or some shit, I went to HS in the late 90s. The rights LGBTQ people have in the U.S. haven't even existed 25 years.
