Danger of taking gay rights for granted
When my wife and I married in 2016, we had the wedding of our dreams. We each wore wedding dresses; our fathers walked us down the aisle, one after the other; and we danced to Sam Cooke’s “We’re Having a Party” at the end of the night, in a circle surrounded by so many relatives and friends — including two nonagenarians. If not for the fact that there were two brides and zero grooms, it would have resembled any other heteronormative, middle-class American wedding in 2016.
That dream didn’t always seem possible. Before coming out in 2012, I struggled through months of therapy, preparing for the possibility of losing all connection with my Irish Catholic family. I prepared for the possibility that I would be viewed as an outsider, as someone different or perhaps even worse by friends, colleagues and strangers. I confessed nervously, first to my parents, brother and one trusted cousin, asking them to spread the word through layers of aunts and uncles and cousins. While it took some time for them to process the news — time that was truly painful — every single person in my family accepted us. They treated us normally; everyone acted like it was obvious that two girls, even two girls with long hair who wore makeup and high heels, could be in a relationship, and that was fine.
I knew then that we were lucky. I realize only now how extremely fortuitous the timing was. I came out to my family in the middle of the whirlwind sprint toward full LGBTQ rights that was sweeping the country during the Obama administration. Court cases affirming those rights dominated headlines; celebrities were coming out seemingly every day. It emboldened me to proclaim who I was and whom I was dating. The national climate allowed me to feel safe. It seemed as if people were on my side. When we married in 2016, we were benefiting from the good luck of landing in the most accepting time for LGBTQ rights in history.
Now, a year and a half into our marriage, things have started to change.
A study recently released by GLAAD, a 3-decade-old advocacy organization, found that for the first time since the survey began in 2014, non-LGBTQ Americans are growing less comfortable with LGBTQ people. Fewer than half of straight adults (49 percent) said they were comfortable with LGBTQ people, a notable drop from last year (53 percent). Compared to last year’s survey, significantly more respondents said they would be uncomfortable with a family member, a child’s teacher or their doctor who was LGBTQ. Meanwhile, 55 percent of LGBT individuals surveyed said they faced discrimination last year, a jump of 11 points over 2016.
The data represent a change from other polls conducted before 2017, which consistently showed that Americans were growing in their acceptance of LGBTQ people, including the latest Pew poll on the subject, from the spring of 2016.
When I first saw the headlines about the study, I was startled by the hard data showing that the equality I felt over the past few years and the progress that had been made could slip away. I never thought we could reverse course. Of course I had worried — however briefly — when Donald Trump was elected president. I worried that Vice President Mike Pence might push an agenda that was dangerous for my life. I worried that Trump would rubber-stamp any legislation that anti-gay GOP members found enough votes to pass.
But I hadn’t worried about public opinion changing. I couldn’t have imagined that once you agreed that I was a person who was equal to you, and my relationship was equal to yours, you could then go back to thinking it wasn’t.
But after the initial surprise, I also felt some sense of confirmation. There had been, I realized, a creeping sense gathering at the edges of my awareness of a shift in the straight people around me. Not all of them, of course. But enough.
I don’t think the data are entirely the fault of Trump and a handful of LGBTQ policy changes. This feels like a broader pendulum swing — during the Obama years, people felt social pressure to become accepting of different identities, and then they became resentful of that social pressure. Last year, one older man told me why he thought voters in Alabama were considering voting for Roy Moore: “It’s because people in this country are sick of being told how to think and live, and that they have to accept every trans-whatever person.”
The statement startled me, and then it frightened me. There’s something bigger than Trump happening in the country, and that change in sentiment — and willingness to express it — is more frightening than any single politician. In a fraught political environment like the one we’re in now, in an increasingly angry economic environment with widening inequality, societies often turn to scapegoats. I worry about the possibilities for that anger and that shifting public sentiment.
On my wedding night, a Protestant minister blessed our marriage in the eyes of God, and I danced with my father under a tent overlooking a moonlit bay. I didn’t think I was at risk of losing that dream anymore. I didn’t think that my identity, the very core of who I was, meant I had to give up a wedding or a family or be at risk for something much more sinister. But this poll brought me back to reality. Our equality, and the world’s sense of our humanity, is not set in stone. It is not assured. I am right to be afraid.