The Voting Rights Act, essentially a cornerstone of the civil rights movement, is arguably as significant an issue for African-Americans as marriage equality is for LGBT Americans. My grandfather was one of the first black men in Memphis to drive buses for the city. When the daily clashes between civil rights activists and police began, he kept driving buses downtown, against my family's wishes, so that marchers could get to the protest. My grandmother, one of the first black nurses in Memphis, was cutting coconut cake on her birthday when the radio in the living room announced that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. The civil rights movement and the significance of the Voting Rights Act are as viscerally significant to my identity as the blood that connects me to my grandparents. As writer Michael Arceneaux, a black gay man, put it this morning on Twitter: "Shorter SCOTUS: Gays up, Blacks down." If such a blunt assessment makes you uncomfortable, imagine what it feels like to be a queer person of color today.

Though it's a coincidence that the court would issue rulings impacting both causes in the same week, the tension between influential LGBT leaders and minority voices within the LGBT community predates the Stonewall riots. Even the "official" memory of Stonewall tends to sanitize the image of the hustlers, drag queens, effeminate gay men, and trans people who were among the first to start fighting that fateful night at the Stonewall Inn. The task of balancing identities and causes, then, isn't new to us, only more grating.