The end of a queer decade

Photo by Kelly Burkhardt

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Charles Dickens was a straight, cisgender white man, and the year was 1859, but that quintessential opening of “A Tale of Two Cities” could not be a more accurate assessment of how the decade of the 2010s was if you were LGBTQ.

Along with huge gains for LGBTQ people over the past decade, there were also frequent checks on LGBTQ political progress.

In December 2010, President Obama signed the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Repeal Act, allowing gay men and lesbians to serve legally in the military.

In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became the highest-placed political figure in the world to state before the United Nations General Assembly in Geneva — contravening anti-gay laws everywhere — that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.” Clinton made international headlines: “The U.S. vows to fight for homosexual rights abroad by using foreign aid and diplomacy, declaring gay rights an inalienable human right,” read the BBC World News.

In 2013, a native Philadelphian, Edie Windsor, won her Supreme Court case making DOMA — the Defense of Marriage Act — unconstitutional in its restrictions on lesbian and gay couples who were married in states or countries where same-sex marriage was legal.

In 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, another SCOTUS ruling made same-sex marriage legal throughout the nation. That night, Obama lit the White House in rainbow colors in honor of the historic ruling.

The mantra “Love Wins” flooded social media, joining the 2010 It Gets Better Project with hopeful memes.

While lesbians and gay men won the rights to marry and serve in the military, trans people were fighting for and achieving visibility, with two Black trans women, Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, as standard-bearers in mainstream media. Cox and Mock told their stories in memoirs and on TV. In 2014, Laverne Cox, in all her high-fashion beauty, was on the cover of TIME for a story titled “The Transgender Tipping Point.”

TV took up the mantle of both gay and trans visibility. Shows like “The L-Word,” “Modern Family,” “Transparent,” “Queer Eye,” “Pose” and others featuring LGBTQ characters and stories won awards and normalized LGBTQ lives for straight America — some with more nuance than others. In 2019, GLAAD’s annual report on the status of LGBTQ visibility on TV put queer, trans and nonbinary characterizations at an all-time high of 10 percent.

Women brought sports out of the closet. Out lesbians ruled soccer, with Abby Wambach winning the World Cup and two Olympic Gold medals while the men won none. In 2019, Megan Rapinoe won the Ballon d’Or as the World’s Best Player and a World Cup of her own. Wambach and Rapinoe were the greatest soccer players in the world, and they each made concerted pleas for LGBTQ rights in that role.

As the decade drew to a close, U.S. soccer stars Ashlyn Harris and Ali Krieger, who had met on the soccer field in 2010, tied the knot in Miami on Dec. 29.

Throughout 2019, Pete Buttigieg rose through the ranks of 25 Democratic presidential candidates to land in the top tier — the first openly gay candidate of a major political party in U.S. history ranked first in polls in the early states at year’s end.

But even as these dramatic social and legal changes were happening, the fact of LGBTQ oppression remained. The exciting progress wrought throughout the Obama years have been all but vitiated under the Trump administration. No more declarations of Pride month from the White House as there were under Obama — not even for the historic Stonewall 50 celebration. Trump also banned rainbow flags outside U.S. embassies.

And that much-vaunted declaration by Secretary Clinton in 2011 has been renounced as well: nine of the top 10 recipients of U.S. foreign aid criminalize homosexuality, making it punishable by prison or even death.

President Trump instituted a ban against trans people in the military. Trump has championed so-called religious freedom laws, policies that have impacted every aspect of LGBTQ life from employment to healthcare to buying a wedding cake.

Bathroom bills have been championed by Republican lawmakers in the states and by Betsy DeVos in Trump’s Cabinet. The Equality Act, which would protect LGBTQ people from discrimination, was passed by the House in June 2019 but has been sitting in the Senate ever since. And while it sat, the Trump administration challenged two gay cases and one trans case of employment discrimination before the Supreme Court in October.

Violence is an increasing fact of LGBTQ life. Trans women of color have been murdered at a disproportionate rate. The Human Rights Campaign counted 25 deaths of transgender folks in 2019, primarily trans women of color. The 2018 FBI Crime Report released in November showed a dramatic increase in hate crimes against LGBTQ folks with nearly one in five of all such crime victims identifying as LGBTQ.

While the It Gets Better Project was founded in 2010 to counter the rise in suicidal ideation among queer and trans youth, The Trevor Project released a study in 2019 showing that LGBTQ youth were self-harming at rates far above their straight peers and had suicidal ideation at nearly double that of straight teens.

Poverty is on the rise among LGBTQ people with women and trans people most impacted. LGBTQ elders face a higher rate of homelessness than their straight peers.

In December 2019, a study showed straight Americans thought LGBTQ people’s issues were getting sufficient attention in news media or even too much attention, but GLAAD and HRC found LGBTQ issues are being covered less, not more.

But as the 2010s ended, LGBTQ activism surged. And in 2018 and 2019, more LGBTQ people were elected to office than in U.S. history in a “rainbow wave” that included the first Black lesbian mayor of Chicago and the first out trans woman in the Virginia House of Delegates. In 2019, in Philadelphia, an out trans woman, trans man and lesbian were on the ballot, and an out queer woman was elected as judge. 

As the 2020s begin, impeachment and an election provide opportunities for LGBTQ people to fight on. It’s a new decade, and LGBTQ rights remain at stake — and worth fighting for.

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Victoria A. Brownworth is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, DAME, The Advocate, Bay Area Reporter and Curve among other publications. She was among the OUT 100 and is the author and editor of more than 20 books, including the Lambda Award-winning Coming Out of Cancer: Writings from the Lesbian Cancer Epidemic and Ordinary Mayhem: A Novel, and the award-winning From Where They Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth and Too Queer: Essays from a Radical Life.