A winning movement

In the space of a few decades, homosexuality, transgenderness, and LGBTQ rights have become a poignant political issue in the United States. Long considered sick, perverted, or deviant, LGBTQ people have now achieved major institutional assimilation, particularly since obtaining the legalization of same-sex marriage, first on a state-by-state basis, and then at the national level. The movement for equal access to marriage bears significant similarities with the African American civil rights movement. The parallel between the end of prohibition on same-sex marriage and the Loving v. Virginia ruling, which ended the prohibition on interracial marriages in the South in 1967, has been emphasized many times in commentaries on the successive rulings by the Supreme Court, in the cases of Hollingsworth v. Perry (2013), United States v. Windsor (2013), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). One of the important differences between these two situations is that the Southern states remained unified in defending legal racial discrimination and segregation until the end, whereas new states rallied to the legalization of same-sex marriage with every passing year after 2004. Yet the geography of racism and that of homophobia and transphobia do overlap significantly.

In the United States, as elsewhere, the path to equal rights involves many different aspects of LGBTQ people's lives, of which marriage is merely the most visible.