Thread by @AlexandraErin

I've talked about how naive I still was in November, 2000, when I was twenty years old and thought Al Gore looked kind of petulant and if he'd just concede we'd get another one term Bush and how bad could it be?

Let me tell you about teenage me and gay marriage.

The first time gay marriage even got on my radar as an actual possibility was the first time it got on a lot of people's radar who were of about my generation in the US: the Baehr case in the state of Hawaii.

As a deeply closeted tween/young teen, I was excited.

I imagined that we were seeing the first movement of a sweeping pendulum of history, that momentum was going to be on the side of gay rights, and that legal rights would lead to normalization and acceptance and gay relationships and people would just be relationships and people.

It was big news! It made like the little scholastic newspaper thing that our school got handed every so often in social studies. Teachers talked about it. The news talked about it.
And it ran for years. 1991-1999. Basically paralleling my entire tween/teen decade.

At one time I knew the whole thing chapter and verse because it had been a source of so much hope and joy for me. Now it's a dim and distant memory but I remember how it ordered: the straight majority voters of the state of Hawaii voted to amend the constitution to block it.

The course of justice which had seemed so swift and sure and certain and true to me was stopped, the inexorable pendulum swing halted mid-air, because they asked the kind of people who used "gay" as a catch-all synonym for "bad" what they thought about human rights for gays.

We talk a lot on here about what radicalized us and I think that was a big first step.

But you know what kills me? I found that even years later, most of my straight peers thought the whole thing had been settled. Gays could get married in Hawaii.

Years later... like, well into the 21st century, any time the subject of same-sex marriage in any state came up, someone around me would say, "What's the big deal? Just move to Hawaii."

When the state of Hawaii finally passed a law approving civil unions (2009!)... "They already got marriage. Now they want special rights?"

Bush v. Gore happened not super long after the state of Hawaii passed Constitutional Amendment 2 to specifically block same-sex marriage and it preceded a bunch of legislative defeats for even civil unions in that state, and happened amidst "Defense of Marriage Acts" nationwide.

So high school age me could think: "Sure, things suck right now but I can see them getting better. I know they're getting better. I'm going to grow up to be an adult in a world where things are better."

Twenty-something me? Oof.