After Marriage Equality, What?

In the sixty-five-year history of LGBT activism in the United States, the present moment stands out: at no other time would a rational observer of American social movements have called our struggle the one most likely to succeed. Gays were pariahs in the baby-boom era, facing harassment wherever we gathered. The leftist bromide of the post–Second World War decades as a golden age of job security simply didn’t apply to gay Americans. What we today call “discrimination” was the normative condition for any gay person before the liberation era—finding or holding down a good job, with some exceptions, intrinsically required carefully concealing one’s homosexuality. While a few laws prohibiting antigay discrimination by employers and landlords were passed in the 1970s and ’80s, they were difficult to enact and easy to repeal.