But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and The Outspoken podcast Network.
The reason gay people are discriminated against and disdained is.
Because of love. It's because of.
Who we love that people think we're loving in the wrong way. So what's the central language, what's the central structure of love in this society? And of course that central structure and central language is marriage. So I thought if we could claim that structure, if we could claim that language as ours, that would change how non gay people understood who gay people are and would build support not only for us to have marriage, which is important in its own right, but to have everything.
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South, I thought being gay was the worst thing I could ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn that by seeking out our history, and what I've found are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love. In this episode, we'll learn about Evan Wolfson, otherwise known as Mister Marriage, the man who spent thirty two years fighting to win gay marriage in America. From iHeart Podcasts.
I'm joining in Solvice and this is What We Loved. I've been thinking a lot about my own memories around marriage growing up. I grew up Athletic an Indian, and marriage is sacred in both of those cultures. Even though I didn't know I was gay when I was a kid, I just knew there was something about marriage that didn't fit me. I remember attending my cousin's wedding when I
was eleven years old. She looked beautiful in this all white gown that had a long train, But even then I knew that I would never be the groom waiting for his bride at the altar. I was mostly enamored by the pearls and the last detail in my cousin's gown. Looking back, I now realize I never thought i'd get married because marriage wasn't something I was allowed to aspire to. My next guest, Evan Wolfson, was one of the people that changed that for me and for so many other
queer Americans. Part of the reason for this podcast is to introduce us to the queer heroes that pioneered and fought for our rights. Evan is one of the architects of gay marriage in America. He spent thirty two years working to make gay marriage the law of the land. He started working on the legal argument in the eighties, and in two thousand and three he founded an organization called Freedom to Marry. It was responsible not just for creating the legal road mop but also for opening America's
mind to the idea of gay people getting married. And yet, even though he's nicknamed Mister Marriage, it was amazing to learn that, just like me, when he was a kid, he didn't think he'd get married either.
One of the things I actually mentioned in my book was I relate the story of a childhood memory I have, and it was probably from when I was around ten or eleven, and I was lying in bed in my parents' bedroom with my mom, and we were watching TV and chatting and so on, and I turned to my mom and I can remember doing this kind of out of the blue to her and saying, I don't think I'll ever get married.
Her reaction, what do you mean?
And I think what I meant at the time, without even fully knowing it or understanding it, was that the images that were being presented to kids like me of what marriage was somehow just didn't fit. And I do again have this very singular memory from that early age of that conversation and of course, what it turned out was kids like me, of course, should be able to get married. It was the images that were being presented, it was the language. It was the law that was wrong,
not us. And later on I found my way to changing that.
And that's such a good segment. When was the first time you knew something was different and you maybe thought you felt intrigued by something gay?
So I think I always knew as a kid in elementary school, I was aware of being different, but that didn't necessarily have a finger on it until you know, I got a little older, and I remember this episode where I was walking to school, elementary school, and this kid yelled at me, do you know what a fagot is? And I responded to him, yes, a faggot is a bundle of sticks, because I had read this book of Japanese fairy tales which I remember, and it talked about
a fact carrying a fagot of sticks. But of course I then found out what he meant by that taunt. So from a very early age, and even before I had a full understanding of what I was feeling or thinking, I was aware of being different, and definitely in elementary
school I was aware of being attracted to boys. And whether I had the word gay in mind or not at that point, I don't know, but I remember there was somehow this issue of I think it was Life Magazine could have been looking at that point, and there was this picture of two young guys sitting together, probably with teenagers.
I don't know.
I would have been fifteen, sixteen, fourteen, I don't know exactly, but it made such an impact on me. I wanted to know those boys. I wanted to be with those boys. The cover, well, it was if to the extent I remember them. They were sitting next to each other, probably one had his arm around the other, Their legs were, you know, next to each other. They probably were wearing shorts.
So it was.
A pre language awareness of an attraction and a desire and an interest and an affinity to these you know, guys I don't even know. And on the one hand, it was innocent enough that it was lying on the kitchen counter in Life magazine. But I was able to find something that touched a chord in me even before I was ready to start singing that song.
It's so funny that you mentioned how that was one of your first experiences with this little boy calling you a fuggot or saying do you know what that is? And I have the same experience that I felt like for me, it was almost as though kids could smell it on me. It's funny how we share a lot of us share those experiences.
Absolutely, and this is why history actually is so relevant because it does actually bring you the experiences and journeys of previous generations. It's very personal and individual, so it's not just about what the group has achieved in a particular time or era. There's also the individual and it's important to remember that even today.
So when did you end up coming out? Was it in college?
Yeah, so the answer is no. I went to college from nineteen seventy four to nineteen seventy eight. I was not openly gay. I really didn't do anything gay for.
The most part.
I never wound up having sex with a guy at that point I wanted to. I was kind of feeling like I wish I knew what to do. And you know that sounds kind of dumb, because there was a gay bar on the edge of campus that people knew and talked about. But I never had the courage or sort of wherewithal to leave the coll in the dorm room and go over there. So during college I just never found the pathway or the luck of being hit on, etc. Or at least hit on hard enough that I fell to come out.
I just feel like in college hormones are raging, and that's kind of the time where gay men. There's so many stories of gay men that will go undercover or hide their sort of sexuality but still have these gay experiences. And you weren't sort of desperate to have that.
Well, I wasn't desperate to have it, I guess, or at least not desperate enough.
Maybe I'm projected.
No, No, I think it's a very fair comment. I guess you could say I was sexually motivated enough that I did have girlfriends in Oh wow, so you were having sex with women. I did have sex with women in college. Yes, two women, and one remains a very very close friend.
And at the time, you know, sex is sex.
It was, it worked, it was I enjoyed it, but it wasn't really who I was and what I wanted. And once I actually did figure out my way to having gay sex and having gay relationships, I haven't gone back. And of course, ironically I found it in a place that people would think would be much much more difficult than college or whatever. It was in the Peace Corps in West Africa in Togo.
After graduating college, I've enjoyed the Peace Corps and travel to Africa for two years. It was there that he had his first major revelation that planted the seeds of gay marriage in his mind.
So I was in the small village about a half hour off the nearest paved road, so you know, you had to ride on a dirt road for about thirty minutes to get to the nearest paved road and the other bigger market village to then ride to the nearest quote so remote and yeah remote. And I was there for two years. So in the middle of this village, in the middle of you quote unquote nowhere is where I first began having sex, wow, and having not really relationships but certainly friendships.
And was it illegal there?
It was illegal.
I remember one day going to the school yard where I was teaching, and there was a notice posted on the bulletin board that stated the anti gay, anti so called asodomy law and you know, warning basically that homosexualized is illegal, And of course it terrified me. Not enough to stop, but it did give me one of many, you know, sleepless nights where I was afraid something I
was doing would catch the eyes of the village. But I never had any actual bad incident, but I do remember that thing appearing on the bulletin board and it being very terrifying.
So it was illegal to have sex.
What was the consequence, like, go to jailism?
Yeah it was, I don't remember. It was five years, ten years, whatever, it.
Was five or ten years. Oh yeah, Wow, I'm curious to know what was queer life like in this remote village in the eighties, yeah, or in the late seventies.
Yeah, I was there from nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighties.
Yeah, what was that like?
Well, there was no queer life as far as I knew, but there were friendships, and in those friendships I was eventually able to find some guys who I would have sex with. And what I discovered and this was one of the major epiphanies of my young life at this point that later set the stage for my writing my thesis on marriage and launched my career. But at the time it was just an observation. I discovered that many of the guys I was having sex with were not gay.
I mean they probably They were happy to do it. They were curious. It was, you know, sex, so why not, they liked me, whatever the mix of motives on there, and we did it and it could be great, it could be fun, or it could be you know eh. But it just really wasn't for them in the same way that it definitely was for me. But some of the guys that I stumbled into this opportunity to have sex with were probably gay. I mean I thought they
were actually more like me. And yet they lived in a society where the images, the law, as you and I discussed, and even the language just did not allow for a vision of a life that would be true to who they are. So that really taught me something important, which is that who you are is profoundly affected by the structures, the opportunities, the law, and even the language that your society gives you, even on something as central to who you are as your sexual and romantic attractions.
In other words, if you aren't able to see or even know that there's the possibility to be out and to be proud, you don't even think that's who you are.
You don't know that there is a quote category of gay people. You don't know that there's a kind of life that can be led this way as opposed to that way. It's just a given or a natural that there's only this and there's only that, and you have to find a way to break out of that in order to envision a different kind of life for yourself. And then you have to break out of the law and the social forces in order to then be free
to act on that. And that's the work of my activism, and that's the work of each one of us in our own personal lives, even if you don't think of it as activism. You have to find a way to figure out who you are, what you want, and how you can make it happen for yourself.
It's nineteen eighty and Evan is back in the US from the Peace Corps. He's officially out and enrolled as a law student at Harvard. For his Harvard thesis, he wrote about why gay marriage was an important step on the road to full equality. It's one of the earliest formal arguments in modern history made for gay marriage. Evan's thesis would later become America's roadmap to legalizing same sex marriage. The history of gay marriage in America is actually pretty recent.
The first legal records of gay people trying to obtain marriage licenses are from the nineteen seventies, after the Stonewall Riots. But this movement toward progress was met with backlash. Later that decade, states across a Maria began enacting bans against gay marriage. The country would go on to adopt an ultra conservative attitude for the next three decades. This helped elect Ronald Reagan, a staunch conservative, to the White House.
His campaign slogan make America Great Again. By the eighties, gay marriage wasn't even a priority for most gay rights groups. Gay sex was still illegal in multiple states, and the AIDS crisis was just starting to creep up. This was the backdrop to Evan writing his thesis on gay marriage despite the opposition, though he had a vision. So you come back to the US and you go to Harvard Law School and you're writing your thesis on gay marriage.
What sort of sparked your interests in gay marriage at the time.
So at the time I knew I wanted to write about how to make the world better.
For gay people.
And you're out at this point.
Yes.
By this point law school, I come back from my I've now had sex, I now know what I want, and so I start this process of coming out to classmates, to casual friends, and I come out to my family.
And so I decide as part of.
That that I want to write about how we can change the world, how we can make the world better for gay people. I drew first on that Peace Corps experience of who you are being shaped by the forces and the language around you. And then I also drew on another important formative experience that happened while I was in law school. So i'd come back from the Peace Corps, I was obviously making friends and finding sex and finding boyfriends, trying to build.
A whole life.
And then I also squeeze in a little law school during all of that. And one day I read in the New York Times book review about this groundbreaking new book called Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality written by a guy named John Boswell, a professor at Yale, that had come out, and I immediately knew I had to go out and get it and did. It was this massive
telling of history. It was basically telling of the first several thousand years of Western history, tracing from Biblical times to essentially the Renaissance, the way in which homosexuality had been treated in different societies, and the forces and factors that explained the different ways in which different societies had encountered gay people and treated gay people and understood homosexuality.
And this book changed my life.
This is the book that changed my life, because what it showed me was that things had not always been the way they were now in twentieth century America, in you know, nineteen eighties, in the circumstances and ways in which gay people like me were treated in which homosexuality
was disdained. That yes, there had been terrible periods in which that had been the case in other societies, But there also had been many societies that extolled same sex love or the thought of it is just perfectly natural and not even that important, you know, a distinction. And that gave me this insight that if things had once been different, they could be different again.
We could change this.
And so, drawing on that book and drawing on this experience in the Peace Corps, I thought to myself, Okay, so I want to write about why gay people are oppressed why is it bad today unlike all these other societies, and what.
Can we change and how can we change it?
And what I concluded in thinking about it was the reason gay people are discriminated against and disdained is because of love. It's because of who we love that people think we're loving in the wrong way, we're choosing to love. And so then I asked myself, Okay, so what's the central language, what's the central structure of love in this society and indeed in almost every other society that's ever existent, And of course that central structure and central language is marriage.
Marriage.
So I thought, if we.
Could claim that structure, if we could claim that language as ours, it would change how non gay people understood who gay people are, and would build support not only for us to have marriage, which is important in its own right, but to have everything, to just have full opportunity and inclusion and dignity and respect and freedom in our society. And so that led me to write about marriage.
And then the very end of the paper, after I went through all kinds of history and popular culture and talked about the movies and had a whole chapter on feminism and sex roles, etc.
At the end, I threw in a.
Little bit of law and talked about here's the legal pathway that the courts could follow. And I think it was because this paper was so sprawling and so multidisciplinary that my professor had no idea what to make of this paper, and it only got to be. It got to be because the law was almost and afterthought, it was like the last part, although flash forward thirty two years later, the legal roadmap that the Supreme Court followed in our marriage victory was very much the legal argument
that I made in my paper. And what that showed was that the paper had its finger on something important, which was it wasn't just about the legal argument. It was about getting decision makers, including the public, to want to get to the right answer, to be able to understand, to be able to see the answer.
It's interesting because you write this thesis about gay marriage in the early eighties, but they're actually still sodomy laws on the books, so it's illegal too for people that don't know what's oto me is it's gay sex pretty much so in some states, while you're talking about gay marriage, there are some states where it's actually I legal to have sex at the time.
So yeah, I mean as a young attorney when I began volunteering for Lambda Legal, one of the important gay legal rights groups and one of the few that existed at the time. I'm in the early eighties, when I began volunteering and then ultimately becoming a volunteer attorney and then later going.
To work there.
I wrote the brief, the quote unquote gay brief in the Supreme Court case Bowers versus Hardwick, which was a case in which we challenged the so called sodomy laws.
Tell me what happened in that yeah.
So essentially, in that case, the police burst into a guy named Michael Hardwick's bedroom, found him there with another guy having oral sex. This was in Georgia, and arrested him.
And when news of that arrest came to this small little band of activists, including me, we seized on this as an opportunity to take his case to the Supreme Court to try to strike down the so called sodomy's laws, these laws that made it illegal to have same sex sexual intimacy, and we argued that that was a violation of his personal freedom and dignity, the freedom we all as Americans have to intimate association to be able to make our own decisions about whom we have sex with,
and equality being treated equally, that if it wasn't illegal for others, it shouldn't be prescribed by the state against gay people. And we fought that case all the way up to the Supreme Court, and on June thirtieth, nineteen eighty six, we lost WOW five to four. And I still remember getting that phone call from one of my dear friends and spending about two or three days wondering if I could even stay a lawyer. Did I really even believe.
It was a big loss.
It was a huge loss, It was an epic loss, and I really wondered whether I could stay in the system, whether I believed in change. And I spent about two or three days until I finally decided that the reason this happened is not enough people know who gay people are, and that if more of us came out and told our stories and had conversations with them and pushed them to think about their values, that we could change it.
We could fix it.
And so I went out that day to the Oscar Wild Bookstore, which.
Existed then in the West Village.
And bought a little pink triangle pin and put it on and said I will not take this off until we overturn Hardwick. And I wore it for the next seventeen years until we succeeded. And I was on Anderson Cooper's show when we got the news of the win, and while on the show talking about what it meant and how then we're now going to move forward and win the freedom to marry, which at the time seemed uncertain to many people. This was two thousand and three.
I took off my pink triangle pin and put on a Freedom to Marry pin and said, Okay, now I'm going to wear this until we win the freedom to marry, which I then wore for the next twelve.
Years or so.
You have a funny story about Michael hardwith too right, I don't.
Know funny it is, yeah, so yeah, gee, we'll go with that. So we all went to have breakfast in the Supreme Court cafeteria on the March Day in nineteen eighty six when we argued the Hardware case. And so we're sitting there having breakfast and the team is talking and I happened to look up and saw this drop
dead gorgeous guy walk into the cafeteria. So you know, while I was still doing my lawyer thing, I was actually really looking at this very cute guy who came in, who then proceeded to come over to our table and introduce himself. And it was Michael Hardwood. And so that was my meeting of the plaintiff. And we sat and chatted and so and we immediately hit it off. And so we went into the Supreme Court together, sat together in the argument.
Whenever the Supreme Court would ask a hostile.
Or difficult question, we would, you know, like squeeze each other's knee or like look at each other with this total energy and chemistry flowing between us. Afterwards, we all went out to lunch and we're all talking about how did we think it go?
We all thought we were gonna win.
And meanwhile Michael and I were looking at each other, looking at you, looking, and finally had the chemical idea of let's get out of here. And so we went out and went for a walk. And it was this gorgeous March day in nineteen eighty six. The cherry trees were out,
my first time ever seeing them. The whole city was beautiful and gorgeous, and so we strolled and strolled and strolled throughout Washington under the cherry trees, stopped in front of the White House, kissed defiantly, and spent the day together.
I'd later discovered amongst my friends it was this total scandal because they were like shocked that, you know, these two gay guys, despite everything, found time to go and get to the core of what it was all about in even in the midst of this historic day.
You know, kind of going back to your journey, Evan, by the nineties, you're really starting to get into the gay marriage court cases. But was it a personal dream of yours by this point to get married?
Yes, I mean I always wanted to, if not get married, at least I always wanted to fall in love and have a partner. And I spent many, many, many of my early years as an activist and as the most prominent activist, pushing and arguing and fighting for the freedom to marry. Kind of whinily single?
Were you lonely?
Yes, sure I was lonely. You know, I was also dating and trying and cruising and so on. But yes, I very much wanted to have a boyfriend. So I would sometimes joke with people that when they would point out how ironic it was that I'm single, you know, even though I'm mister marriage, and I would say I'm closer to winning marriage for gay people than i'm and than I am to having a boyfriend myself.
Evan Wilson had one of the biggest civil rights victories in American history in twenty fifteen. He and his organization, Freedom to Marry, worked to push the issue of gay marriage all the way to the Supreme Court, and they won. Freedom to Marry was essentially a campaign aimed at opening the hearts of Americans to the idea of gay people getting married. They went state by state, educating people, sharing
stories of queer love, and building new allies. In a little over a decade, Freedom to Marry had helped increase American approval for gay marriage from forty percent to sixty percent. One of the core elements of Evan's strategy was that before getting to the Supreme Court, he wanted two have already won gay marriage in a majority of states. This way, by the time it got to the Supreme Court, it would be a no brainer. But his journey to winning
those states was peppered with loss. In two thousand and eight, California held a vote called Prop eight where they voted against gay marriage. This was a massive loss for the movement. If a liberal state like California couldn't get on board with gay marriage, it could be a huge roadblock to nationwide victory. So two thousand and eight happens, and you lose one of the biggest liberal states, California. What was that like for you? Like such a huge loss?
Well, the story of how we won marriage sprawls over several decades, so the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, the two thousands. There are many, many battles and ups and downs and losses and defeats. So when California came along, many many people experienced that as the biggest blow, as the biggest loss.
By then, I'd already gone.
Through many of these losses and had had to figure out a way to keep it going through the losses. So I by that point I actually was explaining to people that this is part of what I called the scary work of winning. And the lessons from the scary work of winning include the lesson that you can't always win.
You are going to lose battle. The question is how do you engage those losses so as to at least lose forward, how do you turn that loss and what you got out of that loss into the gain that, even if not enough to win in that particular moment, gives you what you need for the next round and the next round, following your strategy to your goal. And so two thousand and eight was experienced as a terrible cruel, difficult blow when we lost California, and it was a terrible, unfair,
cruel blow and very harmful to individual couples. And at the same time, in two thousand and nine, we went on to our winning this year, ever, taking what we had lost, the lessons, the momentum, the awakened consciousness, the new determination on the part of many who were shocked by that loss into finally taking action, and we turned that into the next battle, on the next battle, on the next battle, and that's how we won. So I
didn't experience it as the biggest loss. I experienced it as a painful loss that was also a galvani that took us.
To a whole other level.
Yeah, and wins trump losses. I like the tell us about.
So in my speech that I gave at another dark moment where we lost thirteen ballot measures in one year, and Bush got elected, and we were blamed for it.
And this was in writing about the year two thousand.
And four, I said, any year in which we lose thirteen ballot measures, painful and ugly as it is, and see somebody like Bush, an opponent, get elected to the
White House, terrible as that is. If in that same year you've also won marriage in a state like Massachusetts, as we had, and couples have begun getting married for the first time, as they did in Massachusetts in two thousand and four, that's a winning year because the power of the win, the power of those couples getting married, and the stories of their love and the images that we can put in front of people in open hearts and minds, the win will trump the losses, you know,
flashing forward to the end of our story here, when
we won. By the time we won, after having lost and lost and lost and lost and lost and lost and lost over decades, we began winning and then winning, winning and losing, then winning, winning, winning, losing, losing, winning, winning, winning, wing, and by the end we won nearly one hundred court rulings, having lost almost all the early ones as a prelude to going to the Supreme Court and winning in twenty fifteen, and the freedom to marry struggle important as it was
to win marriage, even more important is that it stands as proof and as a model for how to make the world better, proof that you can do it, proof that we can change things even when they look scary and bad.
So in the midst of all of this, even though you've mentioned you weren't driven by your own personal desire to get married, you do end up meeting the love of your life and you get married. Correct, But what was it like actually experiencing the thing that you were fighting for.
Yes, by the time I met my.
Now husband Chung, freedom to marry was underway, and we clicked immediately from.
The day we met.
We were pretty much seeing each other steadily from that point on. And even though I'd always written and argued and preached about the power of love and that love is what this is about, now I was in the position of having it for myself and seeing its wondrous
power and its effect. And the day we got married, when we actually got married, which was almost ten years after meeting, I could experience the power of the wedding and the whole getting ready to get married and inviting people your wedding and talking with people about your wedding and what are you going to wear to your wedding and who's coming to your wedding and all of that.
Even though I knew it intellectually and had talked about it and written about it for years now, I experienced it, and the glow of that day still stays with me to this day, more than ten years later.
Now take me to the moment where you actually win. So it's twenty fifteen and you get this news that gay marriage is now the law of the land, thirty two years in the making for you. What was that first private moment like for you when it really all hit you and you're married at this point?
Oh, yes, I'm married. I have a wonderful team. The Freedom to Marry campaign is rocking, and we win. And
this was June twenty sixth, twenty fifteen. So we're gathered around the table in the in the conference room, and we're all looking at our devices and clicking and pushing, and most of my staff is now at this point younger than I am, but nevertheless, I, the old guy in the room, was the one who actually saw it first, and I read that to the group, and then as soon as I read it, I was a little nervous because you know, people are going to take it seriously when I say it, and I wanted to be sure
it was right. But then everybody started seeing saying that we had won, so of course we cheered. We had remembered because it was now the eighth day that we had gathered and done this to have champagne, So we quickly toasted champagne, and then we all ran to our battle stations to do the rest of the work we needed to do that day, to push out the victory, to explain it. And my job, as the only actual attorney at Freedom to Marry, was to go back and actually read the decision.
So I go back to my office.
And I'm reading the decision on my desktop and I started to cry.
And I surprised.
Myself by starting to cry, because, as I've said too many times, it really wasn't the personal emotion that was driving me. And at first I thought that I was crying because it actually was the paper I wrote in nineteen eighty three. It was like, exactly what we said was the right answer, and so I thought that was what was moving me, why I was crying, and it really wasn't actually until like two days later when that
weekend happened to be. It was June twenty sixth, so it was Friday in twenty fifteen, and was Gay Pride, so it was, as you can imagine, this immense eruption of joy, celebration and people. I realized that part of the reason I was crying was a sense.
Of relief that I had always believed we would win.
I'd always communicated that I believe we would win over many many, many many years, repetitively conveyed it, and yet to now realize that I didn't have to keep doing it, that we didn't have to find hope again, and in the face.
Of a loss, fight fight, fight, fight and.
Pull back on the scary work of winning and all that kind of stuff, that we actually had won. And that then made me think, Wow, I have really been hardened in this work over all these decades that it didn't even occur to me that I might feel relief like any other human being would until two days later. And what that then illustrated was this is work. It is difficult, it is hard, and even for people like me who always seemed confident and hopeful and determined and
who were grateful to be in this role. And I wouldn't trade any of it. It was a privilege to be part of something meaningful and important, but it does require you to gird yourself for that and to rise to your moment.
I love that, and you know you you have championed probably the biggest civil rights issue victory of a generation. What do you think is the sort of next frontier of LGBTQ fights.
So on the day we won June twenty six, twenty fifteen, I was actually, on that day finally able to get the New York Times to agree to run an op ed that I'd written, And my op ed was all about, as you just put it, what's next. And the only part of that that I don't like is the word next, because there really wasn't actually a next. We were always working on many things. It was never the case that
we only worked on marriage. We were always working on youth and seniors and trans and employment and the military. So next kind of makes it sound like you do one thing and everybody agrees on that thing, and then you go to the next and that's.
Not how it works. All we're all worrying on all these things.
But some things are really effective, and some things are really galvanizing, and some things can bring along other wins. If and this is what my OpEd was about, we now harness what we've won to the next work and the next work and the next work. And harnessing is important because there's a tendency on the part of some people to think, Okay, we won that check, put it on a shelf, it's history, whereas it actually winning something as powerful as marriage can be the gift that keeps
on giving. It can continues to be a changer of hearts and minds. So the many, many organizations and businesses and labor unions and ultimately politicians and academics and others who we brought along on marriage are now there for us as we fight to defend trans people or work to assure that every gay young person is growing up
in a healthy environment. We have so much to keep working with if we build on what we've done and harness what we've done, rather than think we're just careering from one thing to another, as if nothing that ever happened before made any difference or wasn't a lot of work. That is, as I said, the gift that keeps on giving,
so quote unquote, what's next. What's next is pushing back against the toxic and ugly attacks that we're seeing on trans people, on gay people, the efforts to roll back the gains that we won, which are connected to even deeper efforts to roll back even bigger gains for women, for racial equality.
This is not the first.
Time this has happened, but we now have the proof that we can change it. And there will be losses and ugliness and cruelty, but there is also always the power of change, and that's what we have shown.
So last part of the interview. In one word or one sentence, what do these words mean? What is justice?
Justice is that everybody be treated in a way that is right and kind and equal.
Freedom.
Freedom is fulfillment. Freedom is the ability to pursue your dreams in a world respectful of others, and live up to your full potential and your dream.
And what is love. Love is.
The sustaining, giving and getting that tells you you're not alone in this world, old that there are things that are bigger than you, and that you are cherished by others as well.
But We Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolves. New episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in to tell your story, email us at butt we Loved at gmail dot com, or send us a message on Instagram or TikTok at butt we Loved. We are a production of The Outspoken Podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts. But We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers are Shehino Zaki, Michael June, Emily Meronoff, and Joey patt Our.
Executive producers are Me, Maya Howard, and Katrina Normal. Fact checking by Marisa Brown. Original music by Steve Bone special thanks to Jay Bronson and rockel Ellis. If you love to this episode, leave us a rating and follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.