Change is Here. Change is Great.

My grandmother used to say she didn’t believe any generation would ever see as much change as hers had. She grew up in rural Tennessee, and watched cars, telephones, and televisions go from clumsy oddities to sleek must-haves for modern life.

My grandmother, of course, was wrong. The change in our lives due to the Internet and other new technology is beyond anything she ever imagined. We are vastly more connected, more knowledgeable, and more entertained than anyone ever has been in the whole history of humanity. And in the realm of social progress and acceptance, what we’ve achieved is also amazing.

I grew up in the era of Donahue and Oprah, when the word “homosexual” was first beginning to be mentioned on TV. I think I come from the very last generation of gay people who thought they were alone in the world, who didn’t know when they were kids that there was anyone else out there like them. Now, kids come out in elementary school, high school students fight in court to bring their same sex partners to prom, and everybody finds other people just like them to chat with online. The President himself talked about gays and lesbians in his State of the Union speech last night, and no one blinked (well, John McCain said some pretty idiotic things, but he didn’t act shocked that the subject came up.)

We still have a long way to go, of course. Those school kids still get beat up sometimes for their bravery, and gays and lesbians still have to stay in the closet to serve in the military. Believe me, I am the first to get frustrated as our march toward full equality halts and sputters, goes backward or sideways, and our opponents come up with the most inane arguments imaginable and yet somehow, unbelievably, still beat us at the polls.

But with all of that, I am in awe of my life today, and yours, too. In my twenties I lived in redneck Nevada, but I read avidly about what ActUp was doing, holding kiss-ins in Times Square and shouting that Silence=Death and otherwise making real pests of themselves for straight people who didn’t want to know. The sight of two men holding hands out in the open was simply shocking, unbelievable. ActUp members got arrested for kissing each other in public places.

And now we’re fighting for marriage equality — marriage! Actual, legal, traditional-as-hell marriage! — and we’re able to take on these fights openly. We have magazines and whole TV networks and sites like Change.org to air our grievances and rally our forces. We have an enormous amount yet to accomplish in terms of education and legislation and continued change. But we have the tools to do it, and we’ve come so far already that it’s downright dizzying.

I am, myself, married to the man of my dreams. And when we walk down the street together, we hold hands without even thinking about it.

Photo credit: Rich Stadtmiller