It's been 25 years since Matthew Shepard, a gay 21-year-old University of Wyoming student, died six days after he was savagely beaten by two young men and tied to a remote fence to meet his fate. His death has been memorialized as an egregious hate crime that helped fuel the LGBTQ+ rights movement over the ensuing years. From the perspective of the movement's activists—some of them on the front lines since the 1960s—progress was often agonizingly slow, but it was steady, per the AP. Vermont, for example, allowed same-sex civil unions in 2000. A Texas law criminalizing consensual gay sex was struck down in 2003. In 2011, the military scrapped the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that kept gay, lesbian, and bisexual service members in the closet. And in 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriages were legal nationwide.
But any perception back then that the long struggle for equality had been won has been belied by events over the past two years. Five people were killed last year in a mass shooting at an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado. More than 20 Republican-controlled states have enacted an array of anti-LGBTQ+ laws, including bans on sports participation and certain medical care for young transgender people, as well as restrictions on how schools can broach LGBTQ+-related topics. "Undoubtedly we've made huge progress, but it's all at risk," said Kevin Jennings, the CEO of Lambda Legal, which has been litigating against some of the new anti-LGBTQ+ laws.
"Anybody who thinks that once you've won rights they're safe doesn't understand history. The opponents of equality never give up. They're like the Terminator—they're not going to stop coming until they take away your rights." Some of the new laws are directed broadly at the entire LGBTQ+ community, but in many states, the prime target of legislation has been transgender people. Shannon Minter, a transgender civil rights lawyer with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, depicted the wave of anti-trans bills as the one of the gravest threats to the LGBTQ+ community in his 30 years of activism.
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"We are in danger now, given the ferocity of this backlash," he said. "If we don't stop this with sufficient urgency, we'll end up with half the country living with very significant bias and lack of legal protection." James Esseks, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's LGBTQ & HIV Project, reflected back to the Supreme Court's historic same-sex marriage ruling in 2015. At the time, he said, many activists were thinking elatedly, "OK, we're kind of done. ... But the other side pivoted to attacking trans people and seeking religious exemptions to get a right to discriminate against gay people," he said. "Both of those strategies, unfortunately, have been quite successful." (More Matthew Shepard stories.)
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