For many years, I was passionate about the legalization of same-sex marriage, not because I wanted to get married, but because I wanted to stop talking about it.



Marriage, marriage and more marriage was all the media seemed to be interested in when it came to the rights of LGBT Americans – not poverty, job discrimination or violence – and many of the major LGBT organizations didn’t correct them either. Instead, they pressed harder for marriage to dominate all conversations about LGBT lives and politics, and allowed everything else to float below the surface.

Marriage, we were told with many of us wincing in pessimism, was our great white horse that took us to full equality. It was what would allow for ‘us’ to become ‘them’, and when that happened all the other issues we faced due to homophobia would be fought against with our well-earned political capitol, because surely America would take care of ‘us’ when we were finally now one of ‘them’.

Yet, as we enter the first year since the historic passing of same-sex marriage in the US, we are finding out this logic was wrong. Those pressing issues fueled by homophobia, in many ways, have only gotten worse. And the America that now supports us thinks we are fully equal just because we have matching wedding rings.



With the passage of marriage equality, “gay people have the same rights as everybody else”. At least that is what 50% of Americans think, according to newly released results from the second annual Accelerating Acceptance report conducted by Glaad, the LGBT media watchdog group. This stunning finding indicates that marriage equality did not build momentum to continue the fight for full LGBT rights.

Instead, roughly one-third of respondents are either ambivalent or apathetic about issues affecting LGBT Americans. Now that marriage equality is achieved, many Americans seem to think the job is done; they have no idea about other issues LGBT people face, such as job discrimination or access to housing.

Too many Americans, a full 27% according to the report, don’t know that violence against transgender people occurs on a daily basis – even though one transgender person was murdered every two weeks in 2015. And 37% said that LGBT homelessness is not an issue, even though nationally LGBT youth make up 40% of all homeless youth, while accounting for less than 10% of the entire youth population.



“Complacency is the enemy of social progress,” Glaad CEO & President Sarah Kate Ellis said with the release of the report earlier today, adding: “2015 was a monumental year for the LGBT community, but marriage equality is a benchmark – not a finish line.”

And while Ellis is correct that complacency is an enemy here, her argument is also incomplete – the issue isn’t only complacency, but more importantly, that we failed when we allowed for marriage to continually be our white horse.

Homophobia has never been just about a law blocking you from marriage; rather it’s about the violence one faces just for wanting to marry someone of the same gender. Homophobia isn’t only about a chapel not allowing same-sex ceremonies, but it’s about how legislation is passed that legally protects business from not serving me because I kiss another man.

And homophobia isn’t just about holding your partner’s hand on a street, but it’s about not being able to walk down the street due to violence in cities like Houston, Texas, which recently had a neighborhood go on “lockdown” due to so many hate crimes, a trend that is becoming more prevalent in the past few years.

Since marriage equality, this new complacency has also led organizations like Empire State Pride Agenda in New York to close, even though there’s “a hell of a lot to do”. That’s all because some sort of queer finish line has been crossed. But we mustn’t let it continue to do this.

We are more complex than marriage, and our issues are much bigger than that love between two people, and now with that hurdle jumped we must allow our issues to mirror that complexity, because we aren’t like ‘them’. Nor are our issues.

And the fight for equality can never again be reduced to a wedding, because if that tactic was successful then we wouldn’t still be fighting to dismantle racism in the US more than 40 years after interracial marriage was made legal.

It is now that we must allow that honeymoon phase of late-2015 to subside and return to work. Because this fight for full-equality will only become harder – like staying married.