Gay Marriage happened. It actually did.
We look back at the past decade of American history and remember, oh wow, gay marriage was only legalized like five years ago. The entire culture has changed around gay marriage so rapidly that it’s hard to remember that, in 2010, only a couple of states allowed it. Being LGBT+, even in the most open of online communities, wasn’t generally something accepted.
I think it’s awesome.
Gay marriage has so completely changed the rest of the United States that it’s made every other place on Earth without it look like ancient barbaric wastelands. Japan, famous internationally for its comic books about boys kissing, is treated more and more backwards with every passing year, and honestly, it’s probably deservingly so.
The fact that I can write a gay romance web novel (I have no shame so here it is) and share it with friends and family and none of them will bat an eye… It’s not even something I had considered until I sat down to write this post, and it’s honestly bewildering me now. How did things move so quickly? How did it normalize so permanently?
I mean, it’s not like LGBT rights have improved THAT much in the past decade. We still have people act like it’s an unholy abomination and comment gladly on Facebook with their “I have a gay relative, so it’s OK that I can say this” posts. We still have transgender people treated like second-class citizens who can’t even use the bathroom for fear of retaliation. And countries outside the U.S., even first-world ones like Japan, can’t celebrate what the U.S. can. For all of that, I don’t want to praise the world TOO much. There’s still an extremely long way to go.
But gay marriage? The ability for same-gender couples to come together and start a family and live in harmony? It’s like… Dang, that’s a completely regular thing now.
Read my other 2010s Retrospective waxing poetic about the normalization of same-gender relationships in media.
