That’s not to say that more diverse options in media is a bad thing - I think it’s great! But it also means that the days when a gay sitcom like Will & Grace reaches fifteen million people (and bends their sympathy toward justice and equality) are over.
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Even then, with cable and satellite TV and the beginnings of online video, Americans tended to be more familiar with the same major cultural touchstones, because we had limited choices in entertainment compared to today, when Netflix could drop a multi-million-dollar series that nobody you know hears about because the algorithm doesn’t recommend it to you amidst the practically infinite options. In the early 2000s, thirty million people watched Ellen’s coming out episode because that’s how we consumed culture twenty years ago. Since then, I think we may have unwittingly lost some cultural ground due to the ever-increasing diversification of culture. Part of the work of queer liberation has been the winning over of mainstream culture, reducing bigotry, dispelling falsehoods, and steering culture away from idiotic ideas like “gays are recruiting kids.” In fact, when Joe Biden became the highest-ranking federal official to endorse the freedom to marry in 2012 (creating what was an extremely chaotic day for us in the office), he specifically cited the show Will & Grace as having done more to push American support for marriage equality than anything else.
So how did we win marriage in the past, and how do we protect it now? There’s certainly an urgent legal strategy to pursue, which I happily leave to smarter figures than me. Marriage - the equal legal recognition - is important. It was an excruciating fight, as were the countless cases throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s of gay couples devastated by the HIV epidemic, left with no legal recourse when one partner fell ill or died and hostile family swooped in to take control, separate long-term lovers, and seize their belongings.
Eventually, eight years after the crash, Karen won guardianship - one of the first Supreme Court rulings to recognize a same-sex relationship as having equal legal footing to a straight couple - and was finally able to care for the love of her life. The parents insisted their daughter wasn’t a lesbian, and did everything in their power to prevent the two women from ever seeing each other again. Karen, her partner, wasn’t allowed to see her in the hospital, and soon got into a years-long legal dispute with Sharon’s parents over who should look after her. In the early 1980s, Sharon was in a catastrophic car crash and suffered severe brain injury. But extending the freedom to marry to queer couples isn’t some nice-to-have for the wealthy.Īt times like this, I think about Sharon Kowalski and Karen Thompson, a lesbian couple who met in the 1970s, exchanged rings in a commitment ceremony, owned a house together, and by any meaningful measure were clearly a committed couple. I think that’s certainly the case for many people, including some I worked alongside for several years.
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The framers never said “gay marriage” or “interracial marriage,” but following the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment introduced the terms “due process” and “equal protection,” which basically mean (in super-simplified terms) that all people are entitled to the full protection of the law (no picking and choosing which laws to apply), and that laws should apply to everyone equally (no picking and choosing which people they apply to). There’s a whole family of Supreme Court rulings that affirm rights not specifically called out in the Constitution. The solution to this alarming new heading may lie, in part, in a ship full of gay pirates. How concerned should we be? Very, I think - but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do. Constitutional law is a slow ship to turn, but it seems as though the country’s changing course with unusual swiftness, and with the impending ruling on abortion we may soon find numerous other rights that we thought were safe tossed overboard.