Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart is a freelance writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. She's a frequent contributor to Slate's Outward.

My sexuality has been a matter of political debate for as far back as I can remember. As a member of a generation of gay men and women who matured to adulthood at around the time when gay rights peaked as a national wedge issue in the United States, I can’t wait for my sexuality to become politically uninteresting. I’m even more excited for the chance to be considered legally married to my wife regardless of what state I’m in, mind you—but the prospect of gay rights ceasing to be a political football is a nice bonus.

Within days, the Supreme Court is widely expected to make gay marriage the law of the land in all 50 states, bringing federal law into alignment with the 57 percent of Americans who support equal marriage rights. Unlike abortion, which continues to be a live political issue decades after SCOTUS ruled in favor of choice, opposition to marriage equality on the right is already becoming a bit like support for labor unions on the left—something to gesture vaguely towards when it’s convenient, then forget about.


Protecting “traditional marriage” remains desperately important to a small segment of the GOP base, but it’s one that is aging rapidly, and shrinking in numbers as it does. It’s clear the Christian right has already lost the next generation of conservatives—a staggering 59 percent of Republican millennials support marriage equality. Opponents of gay marriage are dying off, and the old politics of being gay in America are dying along with them.

If only it had always been so. The first presidential election I remember following was in 1992, and pitted George H. W. Bush against Bill Clinton. It was also the year that Pat Buchanan, (a man I recognized from childhood as the funny grandpa on that arguing show) gave his “culture war” speech to the Republican National Convention. Buchanan listed “…abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, [and] women in combat…” as the major items of the frightening, radical agenda Americans could expect to see enacted if they elected a Democrat like Clinton. At fourteen, I hadn’t realized yet that I was gay, so homosexuals and their rights seemed very far removed from me. I neither knew, nor cared, that Buchanan had set the stage for more than two decades of politicians on both sides using people like me to score points with their bases.

Back then, state sanctioned same-sex marriage was unthinkable for most Americans. The issue of the day was gays in the military, which the new president promptly made a colossal mess of with his Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. If Buchanan’s speech was red meat for conservatives, DADT was blood in the water. Clinton’s support for gays and lesbians was a political weakness, and in 1996 Republicans moved to exploit it. GOP candidate Bob Dole co-sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act, and Bill Clinton signed it into law, cleverly avoiding an election season trap and ensuring that once gays started marrying, our marriages would be of a second-class, federally unrecognized variety. I was a senior in high school that year, and had recently come to terms with the fact that I would never feel towards boys the things I felt towards other girls. Whether I even knew what DOMA was I don’t remember—’96 was the first election in which I voted, but LGBT issues, and my own personal stake in them still hadn’t fully registered. My high school self was a cultural Democrat, voting the way my parents and friends were voting out of a vague sense that Republicans were meanies who hated poor people.

The next year I went off to college and soon afterwards became aware of LGBT groups and LGBT activism. Many of my braver peers became politically energized, banding together in large ways and small ones to effect massive, far-reaching social change. I, on the other hand, just hoped the whole gay issue would disappear. Matthew Shepherd had recently been murdered, and I wanted other gays to just be quiet and keep their heads down. Demanding the right to marry one another seemed insane, as if the gay activists were purposefully strapping targets on our backs. Anyway, I reckoned I’d be fine with civil unions.

As I graduated college, in 2000, George W. Bush was styling himself as a “compassionate conservative.” (A compassionate conservative, I discovered, is a conservative who will make strategic use of anti-gay posturing during the primaries, but pivot towards tolerance in the general.) By then I’d spent four years honing my civil unions schtick, and I felt pretty slick about it. Why insist on a word that made people uncomfortable, when we could use a different one? And, who cared about getting married anyway? George W. Bush and Al Gore were basically the same on most issues. I voted for Nader—take that, conformists!

My pro-civil union stance didn’t exactly make me popular with my fellow lesbians. And, for a while, it seemed unlikely that marriage equality would ever be relevant to my own life. I dated occasionally, but never seriously, and was closeted at my first job out of college, where I worked with kids.

I spent a lot of my time online, buddying up to straight male libertarians. In my home state of Massachusetts this was a contentious period for same-sex marriage, but my sole contribution to the cause was to gently chide my libertarian friends for justifying their support for anti-gay-marriage ballot initiatives by claiming to oppose government sanctioned marriage more broadly. If they felt so strongly against government-sanctioned marriage, I figured they should do more to end the practice among straight couples.

The Massachusetts battle over marriage equality was resolved in 2004, when my home state became the first in the nation to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. In response, Bush’s compassionate conservatism went out the window—and in came a Federal Marriage Amendment so severe that it would have prevented not just marriages but even civil unions for gays in every state in the nation. “Because the union of a man and woman deserves an honored place in our society, I support the protection of marriage against activist judges. And I will continue to appoint federal judges who know the difference between personal opinion and the strict interpretation of the law,” said the President, at the Republican convention. I couldn’t believe I ever thought that guy and Al Gore were indistinguishable.

The 2004 election made for a tough year to be gay—it’s hard not to take it personally when the news reports voters coming out in droves to register their disapproval of your relationships, and citing “moral values” as their top issue. Favoring civil unions became increasingly difficult to justify when those who opposed our marriages opposed civil unions equally as strongly. Bush’s anti-gay wedge never stood much chance of entering the US Constitution, but it may have been powerful enough to win him re-election. The conventional wisdom of the day was that the marriage issue, including the amendment and several DOMA-style state ballot initiatives, boosted turnout among Christian conservatives. In Ohio, it may have tipped the electoral balance.

On the bright side, the backlash against marriage I feared never materialized in Massachusetts—support for same-sex marriage in the state consistently increased after legalization. I took to saying that, while I would have settled for civil unions, now that we actually had marriage rights in our state I was in no hurry to give them back.

By the very next election, the anti-gay wave was cresting. Neither Barack Obama nor Hilary Clinton was quite ready to say they actually supported same-sex marriage in 2008, mind you. Instead, I watched them compete for the gay vote by insisting that the civil unions they supported were strong ones, and that they strongly, strongly supported them. On the right, there was no shortage of candidates whose Christianity went hand-in-hand with excluding gay Americans from one of our most important social and legal institutions, but the guy who won the nomination wasn’t exactly an anti-gay firebrand. And, when he added one to his ticket, she became a national laughingstock.

Four years later, President Obama was able to publicly state his support for same-sex marriage nationwide and still win handily. It was an exciting time to be gay; albeit a slightly annoying one. I lost count of the number of times I was cornered by a new acquaintance at a party who just had to tell me what a huge supporter of gay marriage he or she was. I’d nod politely, unwilling to betray the cause of LGBT rights by castigating an overeager ally, while thinking all the while “You poor fool—we’re not all alike. I was for civil unions!”

But, like the president, I was evolving too: I’d met my future wife in late 2010. She was not at all amused by my pro-civil-union hipsterism, insisting that the word marriage was far from an empty or insignificant one, and that any regime of civil unions would result in our relationships being considered less valid than straight ones. She and I got engaged on June 20, 2013, the day of the DOMA decision, and were married in Massachusetts in 2014.

The timing of our wedding was in many ways a practical decision. My wife was headed for grad school in conservative Tennessee, and once DOMA had been struck down it seemed that we might have some measure of protection if we married before moving to a red state. But my wedding was about so much more than practicalities. While I’d long since ceased arguing about marriages versus civil unions, I don’t think the symbolism of marriage ever felt real to me until I was married in front of about one hundred friends and family members.

Many of the elders attending had not supported same-sex marriage ten years previously, but there they were, congratulating and affirming us in the same way they would have done for any other couple. That sort of public ceremony can reach into the deepest parts of the psyche, driving out uncertainty and prejudice. Since the wedding, we’ve had family members who were once vehemently against gay people adopting children eagerly asking when we plan to start a family. Civil unions couldn’t have accomplished that. It needed the magic of that word, marriage.

That brings us to the current political moment, standing on the brink of a federal right to marriage. Even though I’ve read the analyses, and I know the smart money says it’s going to break our way, all I can think about is what will happen if it doesn’t. The consequences will hit the LGBT community hard, particularly in states where federal courts decisions have resulted in marriage licenses being issued. Here in Tennessee, one of the 13 states left behind in the wave of rulings, little will change. We’ll keep filing our federal taxes jointly, our state taxes separately and watching politicians argue over whether we deserve dignity or if we’re degrading the moral character of our great nation.

In 2016, we’ve got a barrelful of GOP candidates, and some of them have already begun returning to old tricks, attempting to distinguish themselves from the crowd by emphasizing their anti-gay bonafides. Mike Huckabee, apparently considering “traditional marriage” too lacking in hyperbole, has begun referring to marriage restricted to one man and one woman as “biblical marriage” (one wonders if he’s read the parts about Kings David or Solomon). Polling with Huckabee in the middle of the pack (according to Real Clear Politics’ rolling average) is Ted Cruz, another anti-gay crusader, who championed legislation that would have returned the ability to define marriage to the states in the wake of the Court’s previous decision to overturn DOMA.

Although the most serious candidates have attempted to sound more moderate (being perceived as anti-gay no longer plays well with the mainstream electorate), as long as GOP candidates need the Christian right to win elections, Republican candidates for president won’t be championing LGBT rights, which means we’ll probably hear tepid statements of support for traditional marriage and state’s rights in this area for another four years and beyond. But, if the court rules in favor of marriage equality, the power of these statements will drain away. My marriage will be safe, and the political class will have to find new wedges to natter on about.

None of this means that LGBT organizations won’t continue their advocacy on a variety of issues important to the community, or that their Christian conservative counterparts are ready to roll over and admit defeat. The symbolic importance of marriage is hard to underestimate, but marriage equality won’t end discrimination against LGBT people in the workplace, stop acts of violence targeting them for their orientation or gender identity, end homelessness among queer youth, or bring affordable medical treatment, documentation changes, and safe and equitable access to public restrooms to trans men and women.

Of all these other issues, only trans bathroom access seems to have shown any potential to polarize people the way marriage rights once did, but since trans individuals are few in number and can often pass invisibly in public (Huckabee’s fantasies about entering the girls’ shower notwithstanding), it’s unlikely that transgender issues are going to take the place of marriage as the next front in the culture wars.

The reduced attention may translate into a slowed-down pace of change on these issues from here on out, but at least LGBT folks will start to have a chance to be perceived as individuals, rather than as political fodder.