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Gay marriage, specifically, was about equal rights -- gay couples wanted to be able to, say, hold hands in the street without getting beaten up. Or visit each other in the hospital. Or file taxes jointly. Etc.
The whole point of gay rights was that they didn't want to have to keep in behind closed doors, the same way straight couples don't have to keep it behind closed doors.
They didn't want to have to keep a large chunk of their lives secret.
Pressuring churches to fly rainbow flags isn't really the same thing and I largely agree is overreach. On the other hand, a lot of chuches fly rainbow flags because their congragants actually think that gay rights are good, and that's their right as well.
It was about more than taxes and hospital visits, the compromises around civil/domestic unions and partnerships would have given them that. They wanted marriage and nothing less, to force it into the mainstream. Whether or not breaking the last few shreds of bonds holding civil marriage together was worth it for society in the long run, it was a very successful tactic.
However, now there is no reason to treat "only two persons" as the sacred inviolable unchangeable number, so why not "these three or more people really, really love each other and only want to be able to file taxes and visit each other in the hospital?" when it comes to poly marriage down the line? We've generally increased the age at which it's legal to get married, but why not lower it (e.g. if we're going to bring the voting age down to 16, or if we think 14 year olds are mature enough to be having sex and using contraception) in future?
We've now reduced marriage to "the state must recognise we love each other until the time we don't and want to break up" and that's it.
So, domestic partnerships really aren't the same thing; they're not recognized by the Federal Government, so they don't give a lot of rights. I've had a domestic partnership as a straight couple, and it's not really anything like marriage. You do get some rights! But hardly 'equal'. You only get health insurance from your spouse if their company is nice and allows it, for instance. It's not required.
Theoretically Civil Unions should have actually been "marriage minus the religious aspect". However, that was never really the case in practice: Civil Unions were never recognized by the Federal Government either. This meant that (for example) you can't get a spouse visa with a Civil Union. And still can't file taxes jointly. And if you ended up hospitalized in a state that didn't honor your civil union, you were just as boned as if you didn't have one.
Theoretically if there had been federally recognized Civil Unions that actually had all of the same benefits as marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges would probably have gone very differently. If the anti-gay-marriage people really wanted to preserve marriage for straight couples only, they really ought to have pushed for this, but clearly they didn't.
I strongly suspect if proper, recognized-by-the-federal-government-and-all-states Civil Unions had existed in the 90s (to be clear: Civil Unions have never been recognized by the Federal Government or all states. Not then and not now), we wouldn't have gay marriage today.
As for the religious aspect, there's the simple matter of religious freedom. I am fully on board saying that churches that don't want to marry gay couples shouldn't have to. However, that goes both ways -- churches that do want to marry gay couples should have the right to do so.
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No gays we ever knew growing up were getting beat up in the street for holding hands or were prevented from seeing each other in the hospital that we ever were aware of. Nor do I ever remember hearing anything like that until gay activism started becoming a thing. The former, nobody in our community (including our churches) had a problem with them. The latter was when everybody started having a problem with them.
Jointly filing taxes? Sure, you got me there. But at no point were any of these ever the kind of arguments I remember gay people leading with as I indicated above. They wanted to be allowed to peacefully live with their partners and engage in their own private activities without being persecuted for it. Many of them had that before gay marriage was a thing. Yes, I get that prejudiced people still exist. The point I'm getting at is we never saw any of that until gay activism started becoming a thing. And this is mostly the same with the trans community today; though that one I can remember there being prejudice against them growing up.
If you're someone who brings your partner along with you to our social gathering, everybody knew and nobody cared. You were still just like us. If you're someone who's all up in my face, calling me a bigot because I don't find your friend sexually attractive, you can get out of here with that nonsense.
Their right to free expression doesn't entitle them to a right to an audience. When you're acting out sex acts on the footsteps of my church while I'm trying to take my niece to Mass, don't call the police when one of the attendees forcibly throws you off the property.
Re: violence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_violence_against_LGBTQ_people_in_the_United_States (see incidents section)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavender_Scare
https://www.petertatchellfoundation.org/alan-turing-the-medical-abuse-of-gay-men/
Just because you weren't aware of it doesn't mean it didn't happen. While straight-up murder was not super common, being cancelled for the crime of existing-while-gay was quite common. Or, in Turing's case, being sentenced by the state to chemical castration.
Just because you didn't see the supression (and why would you?) doesn't mean it wasn't there. If you do any basic research instead of relying on remembered vibes from 50 years ago, it's very well documented.
The hospitals thing isn't gay-exclusive, it's basic HIPPA -- if someone is incapacitated in a hospital, if someone with no paper-trail relationship with them wants to visit them, they can't by default. They particulalry can't if the person's relatives don't want them to, and since gay relationships were either secret (relatives wouldn't know who this person is) or were unapproved by relatives... there were a lot of (fully adult, btw) instances of spouses dying alone. Marriage adds the spouse to the list of allowed visitors by default. Less glamerous, but very important.
These links all describe incidents at the start of the 1950s. What people get annoyed about is pointing to genuinely nasty things that happened to some number of gay people in the 50s to justify giving them complete cultural dominance* in the 2000s and 2010s.
*Until they were superseded by trans in the late 2010s.
You said "Nor do I ever remember hearing anything like that until gay activism started becoming a thing". The 1950s ones are the incidents that happened before gay activism started becoming a thing.
The 1950 to 1970s incidents are why gay activism started becoming a thing.
The wikipedia page has incidents up through 2025, which you would know if you had taken a look at it?
I am not OP.
That said, I looked at the two of your links that described clear incidents that are well known, and as I say they were from a time before my parents were born. The Wikipedia page I take seriously but it's a list of literally every violent incident or attempted violent incident that happened to a person who might have been LGBTQ, some incidents obviously anti-gay some incidents almost certainly not; I accept that there is significant anti-gay sentiment in some parts of the rural backwoods but you could compile a list of violent incidents affecting Jews, Christians, or indeed pretty much any identity group in a country of 300 million people and have it look pretty bad.
Ultimately I'm almost sure nobody here was alive in the 50s and I doubt most of us were alive in the 70s. OP seems to me broadly correct that the period of greatest gay-activist belligerence coincided with the period of greatest gay tolerance everywhere except the most rural of Red America.
Not aiming this at you but stating generally: I have a broad distaste for guilt-trip based activism based on events that happened far away and outside my living memory, and I think we have too much of it from a lot of groups. I also think that the campaigning around gay marriage served as the prototype for a lot of cancel culture, and vastly increased the harm done by transgender campaigners because everyone remembered what had happened to the people who expressed doubts about gay marriage.
Historically from the timing I think it's pretty clear that gay marriage had nothing to do with not wanting to get beaten up and very little to do with wanting hospital visitation rights - we had Civil Partnerships in the UK before we had gay marriage. Brendan Eich wasn't fired in 2014 to prevent academics getting chemically castrated and Tim Farron (head of the UK lib dems) wasn't defenestrated in 2017 to stop them getting stabbed. Broadly, as a pro-gay-marriage activist at the time I would say gay marriage was powered by It's About Time progressivism and a deep optimism about the flexibility and direction of society that was not borne out by events.
I was.
Oh, cool! Happy to be wrong.
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Hey gramps, do you remember anything about this episode in history (the psychosurgery bit, not the trans bit)?
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The above wasn’t me that you replied to. I wasn’t born in the 1950’s or 60’s (or 70’s) either. I also never said gay people never experienced any prejudice or persecution, in fact I made sure I stated as much.
Let me ask you this. LGBTQ activism may have achieved substantial political equality for gay people, but do you think the activism on par helped or harmed their social reputation in the eyes of the average person, the more aggressive it became?
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