From a piece I wrote at Gaywheels today:

We have reached a curious point in LGBT history.

For those of us in the Western World, it’s not the toughest point. We’re not being sent to concentration camps, we’re not being massacred (although LGBT folks in other parts of the world can’t say the same). And although HIV and AIDS remain major medical concerns, our friends, lovers, neighbors, and siblings aren’t dying all around us like they were 20 or 30 years ago.

No, the problem now is that we’ve gotten our foot in the door. Or, to use another metaphor, we’ve been given a place at the table, and the chair has been pulled out, we just haven’t been allowed to sit down yet.

African Americans reached a similar point in the early 1960s. Brown v. the Board of Education had done away with the doctrine of separate-but-equal, ushered in fifty years before in Plessy v. Ferguson. Legal rights had accrued, ensuring that Americans couldn’t discriminate against other Americans based on the color of their skin. To anyone with half a brain, it was very, very clear that African Americans had won their civil rights.

And yet, there were idiots like George Wallace, still standing in the doors of school houses, saying, “Not on my watch”.

That’s more or less where LGBT Americans find ourselves today. We even have our own George Wallace to ridicule: Judge Roy Moore, who is, ironically or not, also from Alabama.

Read the whole thing here, if you like.