With New York City’s West Village looking as though someone dropped a leaflet bomb filled with rainbows, it’s hard to ignore the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, recognized as a seminal moment for the gay liberation movement and the modern fight for queer rights. Organizers expect the New York City Pride March, which commemorates the uprising, to be the largest in history, with 4 million queer people filling the streets of Manhattan.

Pride has long occasioned debates about the extent to which queers should be celebrating or still rioting, and has exposed the divide between those in the community with more privilege and those with less. But with the advent of marriage equality in 2015, this divide has become a chasm.



In the Northeast, along the West Coast, and in a couple of states in the Midwest, LGBTQ people can not only get married, they enjoy, by and large, standing equal to those of their straight counterparts. In these places, it is against the law to fire someone for being queer, deny them a lease, kick them out of a home, or refuse them service at a business just because of sexual preference or gender identity. But this is not the case in 30 states, where, 50 years since Stonewall, protections against the most basic forms of anti-LGBTQ discrimination simply don’t exist.

They don’t exist in Missouri, where Mary Walsh worked in the telecommunications industry for 30 years before retiring with her wife, Bev. The couple, who married in 2009, thought they had found the perfect place to spend the rest of their lives together when they came across Friendship Village, a retirement community in St. Louis. But after sending in their deposit, the facility told them they could not move in because they were a same-sex couple.

“I thought we had finally reached a point in our lives when we wouldn’t have to worry about discrimination anymore.” Walsh wrote in a recent op-ed in USA Today.