Ellen (at right) is my cousin, and if you need evidence that marriage matters to gay people, don’t read the blogs or ask a psychologist or a law professor, just ask actual gay people like these. (Click photo to expand.)

(Photo: Same-sex couple Shelly Bailes (L) and Ellen Pontac celebrate the ruling to overturn the ban on gay marriage outside of the Philip Burton Federal building August 4, 2010 in San Francisco, California. By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images. Used without permission; taken from The Daily Dish.)

In both cases, he found for the plaintiffs, and in what language! The decisions, with Chris Geidner’s commentary, are here.

I just finished reading Gill, and I can’t remember being so buoyed by a federal court decision since Lawrence v. Texas.. The defendants’ arguments were absolutely demolished; they were pulverized, in language about as blunt and absolute as I can ever remember reading in a court decision (perhaps save the Orly Taitz ruling). Judge Tauro went through every asserted justification for the law (and some that were not asserted) and just knocked them down, concluding that the only possible motivation for the law was “animus” (well, duh — as he quoted, the animus was on display right there on the floor of the House), and that in such a case, the law runs directly counter to elementary Constitutional protections.

This is all just common sense to gay people, but to hear it bluntly and matter-of-factly affirmed by a federal judge, in the impersonal language of a court opinion, is thrilling. Read the decision. It’ll make your day!

In a train like that, you’re reminded of just how wide the definition of the word “gay” has to stretch in order to encompass all of us. At least once a year, people turn out and claim the label who might not fall into the neat Chelsea (or Astoria) or Park Slope (or Red Hook) categories that come first to mind. Even in our homogenized, corporatized, cupcakes-and-Carrie-Bradshaw New York, there’s some diversity left.

Thank God for diversity — not the politically correct one-child-of-every-hue-on-the-cover variety, but the actual festive, jostling reality of America, gay and ungay and everything in between. We would be less than we are if any of the pieces were missing.

And thank God for the generations that came before mine, who marched angrily and proudly in drag and leather chaps (and swept me along with them at the tail end of things, to stand up to LA police on horseback and to CHP officers in Sacramento on the Capitol steps in 1991 to yell “Shame!” at Pete Wilson) so that my boyfriend and I could spend Gay Pride 2010 walking along the Hudson River in lower Manhattan not really thinking about gay rights at all. It’s not over — it never is — but wow. The social changes I’ve seen in the past thirty years go beyond what I ever would have imagined in 1980.

I admire the courage and forthrightness behind the initiative; the philosophy behind it is that visibility helps increase safety in the short term and lead to social change in the long term, which you can hardly argue with.

As a side note, I just learned the word “aguas,” which (in Mexico only) means “look out.” Literally, it apparently originally meant “look out, I am about to throw toilet water [or, probably more literally, urine] out the window onto your head,” but nowadays it is conventional to follow it with a description of what the hearer is supposed to look out for, e.g., “¡Aguas! ¡Viene un carro!” The things you learn…

Larry Kramer is probably more directly responsible than any other person, living or dead, for the (belated) response of the U.S. government, and of American society generally, to the AIDS crisis of the early 1980s. To those who came of age after anti-retroviral medications made it possible to imagine living a somewhat normal life with the HIV virus (albeit a normality distorted and weighed down by complication and risk), it may be hard to imagine how terrifying AIDS was when it first appeared. It inspired a fear-driven cultural backlash against the gay community just as that community was starting to come into its own — and a culturally powerful impulse, in an entire generation, to stand together and fight.

The generation in question was the one immediately preceding my own. I was young enough not to know many people personally who died from AIDS-related infections in the early years, but I did know some — and I knew many, many people just a few years older than myself whose entire social networks had been devastated. (I was about to write “decimated,” but for some of the people I’m thinking of, the implication that only one in ten lost his life is vastly inadequate to the pain and dislocation they lived through.)

It’s important that young people remember that the comforts they know — their confidence in their differentness, the medical treatments available to them, their legal protection against discrimination — did not come without a fight. And in the very first days, fighters like Larry Kramer were the ones setting the example.