Today is a day to remember. Twelve years ago today, same-sex couples gained the right to marry in a U.S. state for the first time. In the U.K., on the same day, the government repealed Section 28, which had prevented local authorities from “promoting homosexuality.” And three years to the day later, my spouse and I made our own marriage legal.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issued its ruling in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health on November 18, 2003. Marriages began the next May, with Chief Justice Marshall’s poetic words becoming a surprise hit at many a ceremony. (Including, I admit, mine and Helen’s.) Our choosing of the date was purely coincidental, driven by our move to the state and the need to have me on her health insurance–but I’m kind of tickled that it happened to be symbolic on another level.
The U.K.’s Section 28, which since 1988 had forbidden “the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship,” was an artifact of fear during the 1980s AIDS crisis and the response of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party. It cast a pall over the LGBTQ community when I arrived there in the fall of 1988 for two years of study and didn’t seem to be going anywhere when I left in 1990. Clearly LGBTQ activists made a difference between then and 2003.
Celebrate today, then, as a minor LGBTQ festival. Not as important as Pride Month or LGBTQ History Month, perhaps, but a day to remember nonetheless. Me? I’m baking a cake for my sweetheart—but we have something extra to celebrate as well.