For gay and lesbian rights advocates, June 28, 1969 remains a critical milestone. In now LGBT-friendly New York City, there were laws prohibiting homosexuality in public, and gay and lesbian establishments were routinely raided and shut down. But early that summer morning, gay patrons at Greenwich Village's Stonewall Inn had had enough of being harassed by police. They took to the streets, throwing bricks at police (who beat them in response) and shouting "gay power." The media was less than sympathetic, with the New York Daily News headlining its story "Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees are Stinging Mad." The Stonewall riots went on for days and gave birth to the modern LGBT rights movement.

That same month, 44 years later, the movement – which had fought for fair treatment in the workplace, health care and research funding for AIDS and other equality-related issues – scored a major win. In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states cannot ban same-sex marriage, giving gay and lesbian couples the same rights heterosexual couples have in spousal benefits and legal rights. Perhaps just as important, the ruling sent a powerful message of inclusion: the love and commitment between same sex couples, the decision indicated, were not lesser than those of opposite sex couples. After the decision, the White House, which LGBT activists complained during the early Reagan administration years was unable or unwilling to acknowledge the threat of AIDS to gay men, changed very literally, with the president's home itself lit up in the rainbow colors of the LGBT movement. And the Daily News? It celebrated the development on its cover, with a rainbow-painted American map and the headline "U.S. Gay! Equal Dignity in Eyes of the Law."

June again became a turning point this year for the LGBT community, but this time, it was with tragedy, as a gunman entered a gay and lesbian club, Pulse, and sprayed the Pride Month celebrants with bullets, killing 49 and wounding 53 others. The episode – the worst mass shooting in American history – shook the nation, but it carried a particular chilling message for the LGBT community. After so many decades of progress on LGBT rights and protections, was America going back to the Stonewall Age?

"I think it was really sadly a tragic wake up call for the nation on where we are on LBGTQ equality," says Jay Brown, communications director for the Human Rights Campaign, a leading lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights group. "We know there are still many people who can't live openly where they live." Last year marked a record number of murders of transgender people, with 21 killings the HRC knows of, says Brown, who is transgender. The FBI reported that in 2014, more than a fifth of the 5,462 hate crimes reported were motivated by someone's sexual orientation or gender identity. And activists believe the number is much higher, since many such crimes are not reported, or not reported as bias crimes.

"It's sadly something that many LGBT people deal with on a day-to-day basis, and can go unnoticed when there is progress made at other levels," Brown says.

Steven Petrow, who writes the "Civilities" column in the Washington Post addressing LGBT issues, says the movement may have become so singularly focused on one big-ticket item – same sex marriage – that people were distracted from other very real, and very dangerous, worries.

"What you've really had are two arcs. We've gone towards acceptance and marriage equality. And yet, there is always this arc of violence and discrimination," Petrow says. While Orlando was a shocking reminder of the danger LGBT people still face, "really what happened in Orlando is a huge magnification of many smaller types of murder and assaults that have been documented year after year."

Indisputably, LGBT people have made enormous strides, on both a legal and social level. The District of Columbia's Capital Pride Parade, which many years ago consisted almost entirely of LGBT people brave enough to be out, literally and figuratively, now has the trappings of many other celebratory marches. This year's parade included sponsorship by banks and hotel chains. President Barack Obama appointed the first openly gay leader of a military branch, Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning, who is one of a record 250-plus appointments of LGBT people to fulltime and advisory positions in the federal government.

The Violence Against Women Act was expanded to include protections for LGBT people. The "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rule requiring gays and lesbians in the military to conceal their very identity has been repealed. Meanwhile, Obama – a onetime skeptic of same-sex marriage whose record on LGBT issues is called "unmatched in history" by the HRC – has done numerous things at the regulatory level, from making it easier for same-sex couples and transgender people to change the names on their passports to requiring border security officers to treat LGBT-led families like any other families when they cross the border.

Most recently, and perhaps most controversially, the Obama administration issued an order to public schools, saying they cannot treat transgender students differently from other students, based on gender identity. Officials from 11 states have filed a lawsuit against the order.

Meanwhile, states and localities are battling over so-called "bathroom bills," with North Carolina in the spotlight for a new law saying people must use the public bathroom associated with the sex at birth, instead of the gender with which they identify. Some groups are also pressuring businesses to restrict bathroom access at their public facilities.

"Our concern is that predators would use Target's policy" to stalk and hurt females in the women's bathroom, says Abraham Hamilton, Public Policy Analyst for the American Family Association, which is organizing a boycott of Target stores because transgender people are permitted to use the restroom of their choice. "We have never, ever, thought the transgender community represents any danger whatsoever," he stresses. "Our concern is that predators would use this as cover."

Meanwhile, groups and individuals are still pushing back against the Supreme Court's same sex marriage decision, whether by refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay or lesbian couples, or by hoping to get new Supreme Court justices who might revisit the ruling. The National Association for Marriage is planning a March for Marriage on Saturday the 25th.

Attacks like Orlando – not to mention other assaults that have drawn less coverage – are in part a backlash against the legal and social strides LGBT people have made, experts say. "The reality is, there hasn't been a time and space where we would say, it's all good, you don't have to worry about your personal safety," says Beverly Tillery, executive director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project. "I don't think we've gone back to the Dark Ages. But we haven't gotten to a place where LGBT people are feeling safe." The myriad laws and proposals meant to limit transgender bathroom access, she says, exacerbate the situation.

"We definitely feel like the current climate for these anti-LGBT laws is contributing to a climate where violence is perceived as acceptable," Tillery says. "If the government is basically saying, not only do we want to deny LGBT people basic rights and protections but we're going to try to roll back those that have already been established ... that certainly sends a very strong message. We are concerned about that and we really feel like we're seeing an example of hate violence kind of being written into the laws."