(

is a musician and founder of the Elton John AIDS Foundation.

is chairman of the Foundation)

Last week, as India’s Supreme Court was weighing the repeal of Section 377 of India’s penal code, we read a story about Aditya Das, who traveled six hours by bus to attend the first gay pride parade ever held in Bhubaneswar.After marching through the streets, waving rainbow flags and hearing cheers of support, Das said, “I felt I had reached heaven.”As two openly gay men, we understand that feeling. We know what life can be like for those whose love is demonized. And we know firsthand how acceptance—not just by friends and family, but by the government—has changed our lives, and the lives of countless others. In 2014, twenty-one years after we first met, and shortly after same-sex marriage became legal in England, we celebrated our wedding day. We reached heaven—with our two sons watching and the law on our side at long last. Our love was recognized, our family dignified, our humanity affirmed.Still, our travels around the world soberly remind us that we’re the lucky ones. We’ve visited many countries where homosexuality remains criminalized. We’ve seen the horrible consequences of legalized discrimination, both on individuals and on entire nations.That is why we commend the Supreme Court for its remarkable decision to repeal the colonial-era Section 377. September 6 will go down in history—a day when India became more equal, a day when 18% of the world’s LGBT population was told, in the words of Justice Indu Malhotra, that they are “not an aberration but a variation.”And we congratulate the plaintiffs and activists who sacrificed so much, for so long, to get to this moment. They, too, belong to history.Of course, we know that progress is seldom a straight line. We saw it in the United States with Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that banned gay marriages in California less than six months after they were legalized. And you experienced it with Section 377, which re-criminalized homosexuality after Delhi’s High Court ruled the ban unconstitutional.We know, too, that changes in law don’t necessarily equate to changes of heart. While this is a momentous shift for the world’s second most populous country, it doesn’t mean that people’s minds or lives will be altered overnight. We still have important work to do. But we are confident that, with this decision, India is on the path to permanent, positive change.Repealing 377 wasn’t just the moral thing to do. It was also the smart thing to do. The World Bank estimated in 2014 that homophobia costs India $31 billion a year in “lower educational achievement, loss of labor productivity, and the added costs of providing health care to LGBT people who are poor, stressed, suicidal or HIV-positive.” And that was four years ago—consider how that figure has likely risen since then. Acceptance is a precursor to opportunity, and India’s people and economy will prosper as a result of this historic repeal.Of course, repeal will also improve the health of your people. During the legal fight over Section 377, opponents falsely claimed that legalizing homosexuality would increase the spread of HIV/AIDS. On the contrary, studies suggest that criminalizing homosexuality actually fuels HIV epidemics, while tolerance for the LGBT community lowers a country’s HIV rate. Now, LGBT Indians will be able to escape a cycle of stigma and discrimination that dissuades far too many from educating themselves about prevention and accessing life-saving treatment.In its decision on Section 377, the Supreme Court justices noted that the Indian Constitution is not a “collection of mere dead letters.” In a similar vein, India’s LGBT community is hardly a collection of mere numbers or statistics. They are sons like Aditya Das. They are mothers and uncles and sisters and grandchildren, who know as well as we do that there is no substitute for equality. And while there is still important work to be done, this week, equality is the law of the land. We congratulate all of India on this historic and joyous occasion.