I watched Milk tonight.

It made me think about the national story “arc” of equal rights as it applies to sexual preference. In particular:

• Historically, who have been the heroes, the leaders, of the gay rights movement?
• What are the current goals of the gay rights movement?

Who?

Other than Harvey Milk, I asked for other known leaders on Twitter. Ellen Degeneres was the most household name mentioned. Others were Harry Hay, Vito Russo, Quentin Crisp, Tim Gill, and Dr. Evelyn Hooker.

I had never heard of any of these people (except for Ellen, whose activist work seems a little light). I suspect most Americans haven’t, either.

Who is the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for this civil rights movement?

Current goals

In Harvey Milk’s era, policemen were beating homosexual men because they could. I’d like to think as a country we’re now better than that.

Is the gay community’s main goal now same-sex marriage?

In 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health ruled that the state may not:

deny the protections, benefits and obligations conferred by civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry.

In the majority ruling, Chief Justice Margaret Marshall wrote that the state constitution, as it was already written, “forbids the creation of second-class citizens.”

Unfortunately, the ruling cannot stop the federal government from creating second-class citizens out of same-sex couples:

federal law confers marital benefits only upon opposite-sex marriages, more than 1,100 benefits remain unavailable to married same-sex couples in Massachusetts.

The Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) seems to be the offending legislation.

There is an organization called GLAD that filed a lawsuit to strike down Section 3 of DOMA two weeks ago on March 3, 2009. It was filed in the Federal District Court in Boston on behalf of Massachusetts residents with help from Boston law firms Sullivan & Worcester and Foley Hoag.