A year-long series looking back on the most significant moments of the past 25 years, how they changed our world, and how they will continue to shape the next 25.
Michael Ignatieff is the author of The Rights Revolution, among other books, and teaches history at Central European University in Vienna.
There are days that, looking back, can feel like the culmination of a whole era. A day like that happened in the final months of Barack Obama’s second term, the first year of the Justin Trudeau government.
On that sun-filled morning in June, 2016, my wife Zsuzsanna and I were in our Sunday best, standing beside a female rabbi from New York and family members, in front of a chuppah, a Jewish wedding canopy, set up in a plowed cornfield about a half an hour outside of Des Moines, Iowa.
Two men, one of them my former student, the other his Jewish partner, were about to get married in front of friends and family. One year earlier, on June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States had declared that it was legal for persons of the same sex to marry each other.
People celebrate outside the Supreme Court in Washington on June 26, 2015.MLADEN ANTONOV/Getty Images
A Jewish wedding in an Iowa cornfield was an exuberant celebration of American diversity, though that word has been so poisoned that it’s hard to use now. It wasn’t only the diversity of race and religion, secular and believer, but political diversity too.
Iowa is a Republican stronghold and the groom’s family, who owned the field, were Republicans. You could tell from their faces that they were working through complex emotions, but plainly one of those emotions was simple love for their brother, their son, their nephew. The female rabbi presided over the ceremony with brisk authority, while I offered up phrases of congratulation to the shy, reserved young man who had signed up for my classes at Harvard a decade earlier, and his devoted partner.
That night, in a big white tent up on the hill, celebrations got raucous, a great mixture of a traditional Iowa country corn fest and Jewish wedding, with the couple carried in chairs, and wild dancing of the hora, that dance where you circle faster and faster till you can hardly breathe. Next morning, late, the couple came down, looking happy and wearing identical New York Mets jerseys.
In the hotel where we were all billeted, sitting together and feasting on bacon and eggs, there was a quiet feeling that we had made a little history. We’d been part of something that had changed life for the better. Thanks to decades of struggles and battles, waged by courageous people, rising up against shame and lying and persecution, two men had won the ordinary but life-changing possibility of happiness that comes with marriage. And there would be no going back.
Now, of course, the situation we are in today leaves nobody sure that anything is irreversible any more. It’s possible that history may just go backward.
One way to help ensure it doesn’t is to understand where this moment in an Iowa cornfield fits into history, and why, as a result, it’s one change that is likely to survive whatever else may be taken away in the years ahead. For this wasn’t just a chapter in the history of gay marriage; it belonged to a wider history about how, beginning 60 years before, gay and straight, black, white and brown, men and women, citizens and immigrants had joined together in the legal, social and cultural battles of the 1960s to ensure that equality would become everyone’s right. This was the rights revolution from the mid-1960s that overturned and transformed both private and public life for all of us. If that’s the story that came to its culmination on that day in June, then defending it, making sure it remains irreversible, should matter to us all.
When I was finding my own sexual identity in the turbulent 1960s, I didn’t know a single person, male or female, who was explicitly or publicly gay. I suspected some of my friends might be, but the tacit rule was “don’t ask, don’t tell.” I can’t re-enter the mental world of the teenager I was then, but I’m sure I was a bundle of prejudices in relation to gay men. These prejudices didn’t just force gay people into the contortions of denial; they also ruined lives.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that a close friend of my parents, John Holmes – a warm, funny man who was part of our family during my growing up – had been forced out of the Canadian foreign service in 1959 for having had an affair with a man during a posting in Moscow. In 1964, another colleague of my father, John Watkins, actually died under interrogation by the RCMP for a suspected homosexual affair while posted as ambassador to the Soviet Union. Incredible as it may seem now, the culture of official Ottawa associated being gay with being a potential traitor. This association did untold damage to honourable men.
What began to change Canada – and change me – was the politics of the 1960s. I’d never thought about the rights of homosexual people until 1967, when justice minister Pierre Trudeau said that there was no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation and decriminalized consensual acts between couples of the same sex. I worked for Mr. Trudeau during his 1968 leadership campaign, and his stance not just on gay rights, but also on divorce and abortion, became a key part of why I was drawn to him. If liberalism meant anything, I came to see, it meant striking down barriers and enlarging the realm of liberty for everyone.
Mr. Trudeau’s leadership certainly changed hearts and minds, but he did not act alone. Over in England at the same moment, the Labour government was also decriminalizing consensual sexual behaviour between members of the same sex and the Nordic countries began doing the same. If you were my age, you couldn’t have missed the connection between the limited new freedom – gay marriage was still two generations away – that went with decriminalization, and the civil-rights victories that Black Americans, led by Martin Luther King Jr., were winning in the United States. In 1969, when the gay men and women in the Stonewall bar erupted and fought the police, anyone of my generation could understand, in the middle of the Vietnam War protests, why gay people were rising up against the extortion and vindictiveness of the New York Police Department.
Stonewall hardened gay activists for the next battle, when AIDS began to decimate gay life in the 1980s, and when, for a time, governments and corporations resisted funding research for a cure. By “acting up” – by refusing to suffer and die alone – gay men managed, with the help of great medical researchers, to convert a death sentence into a manageable condition. At the same time, beginning in the 1970s, feminists of my generation began dismantling the fear, condescension and superiority that still governed male views of women. One of feminism’s additional effects is that it also dismantled straight men’s construction of what gay men were like.
What held all these currents together – civil rights, feminism, gay activism and anti-Vietnam politics – was a belief that none of us could be truly free unless all of us could be free. We were all on the same difficult journey: facing up to the truth of our sexual identities, figuring out what it meant to create a society of equals, where we would be at home and at peace with all our differences, sexual and otherwise.
The Rights Revolution, as I called it in the CBC Massey Lectures in 2000, linked together all these campaigns for change. The goal of this revolution was not to imprison us in the ghetto of separate gender, racial or ethnic identities, still less in the silos of victimhood, but to free us so we could make our country a home for us all, for our differences, for our identities, for our particular histories. We did hope history was on our side. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King said, taking that phrase from the great 19th-century abolitionist, Theodore Parker, who had coined it first in his battle against slavery. Mr. Obama made the phrase a mantra of a presidency that saw gay marriage become the law of the land.
Activists hold signs in front of the White House on the day of the Supreme Court ruling.MLADEN ANTONOV/Getty Images
The arc of justice may bend toward justice, but it sure takes its sweet time. Gay men, sick with AIDS, had to fight the doctors to get treatment. Men and women serving in the U.S. military had to put up with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies of the Clinton administration, requiring them to be silent about their sexual orientation when serving their country. It was big news when Ellen DeGeneres “came out” in public, which tells you that the very idea of a celebrity being overtly gay was still a daring exception in 1997.
Looking back now, gay equality can look like an idea whose time just had to come. At the time, only the most providentially minded American liberal actually believed God or history was bending the arc toward justice. Canadians tend not to believe that their good causes are on the right side of history or benefit from favour with the deity. Life up here has left us with the belief that everything we achieve is down to our own hard work or dumb luck. We can’t afford to believe that history is on our side. We have some acquaintance with the tragedy and failure that waits in the wings.
So, unaided by American-style faith and optimism, we actually got the right thing done our way – that is, slowly and gradually, and even ahead of the United States. In respect of gay marriage, as in respect of public health care and national pensions, we took the basic steps earlier than the Americans. We were the fourth country in the world to legalize gay marriage, and the first outside of Europe. Our provinces got started first, with Ontario legalizing it in 2003.
Michael Leshner, left, and Michael Stark sign their marriage licence after being married by Superior Court Justice John Hamilton in Toronto on June 10, 2003, the day Ontario legalized same-sex marriage.FRANK GUNN/CP
The Civil Marriage Act passed Canada’s Parliament on July 20, 2005, making gay marriage legal across the country. The politics of getting it through Parliament was neither easy nor inevitable. Religious conservatives had trouble squaring marriage equality with what the Bible told them, and some MPs whose origins were in ethnic communities had to muster the courage to defy the disapproval of their religious authorities. So religious institutions were not compelled to administer gay marriages. Marriage equality split the Liberal caucus, but when it came to a vote, most Liberal MPs voted for the measure. All but three Conservatives voted against.
Since then, Canadians have disagreed about a lot of things, but on gay marriage the minds and hearts of a quarrelsome country have settled together in agreement. The Conservative Party has accepted gay marriage as a part of the fabric of the country. While political leadership mattered, it’s likely that the crucial change didn’t begin in public at all, but in the privacy of family life, when sons and daughters came home and sat their parents down at the dinner table or the sofa in front of the TV and said that there was something they needed to say. “Coming out” – living in truth – was what made the difference, and the public politics built upon and was made possible by those myriad moments of courageous truth-telling.
Recently, in Toronto, I helped officiate at another marriage between two men I’ve known and admired for a long time. What struck me was how ordinary it has become to see men embrace and make those vows of love and fidelity we hope, as we hope in all marriages, that they will keep. It’s become a standard part of life too, to see two men, looking unslept and harassed, wheeling their kids through a supermarket. My friends who married in the Iowa cornfield struggled to find a surrogate to bear their children, but now they have a little boy and a little girl growing up under their doting but exhausted gaze. What was once unthinkable is now part of ordinary life, and that’s what human progress, the real life-changing kind, should look like.
We should hope these changes are irreversible, but we cannot be sure. Before he was foully assassinated, Charlie Kirk toured campuses, preaching by the authority of some passage or other in the Bible that marriage could only be between a man and a woman. Mr. Kirk’s views still carry large political influence, but the MAGA coalition’s top leadership also includes Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury, Donald Trump’s most powerful member of Cabinet, who is a gay man, married with two children.
Which of these duelling elements of the MAGA coalition wins out is uncertain. Recently, religious conservatives brought a suit to reverse the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision of 2015, but the current Supreme Court turned it down. We can’t be sure that gay marriage is secure, for the States is in the full storm of a counterrevolutionary attack on everything that the men and women of the 1960s and after managed to achieve in the way of equality, freedom and opportunity. It would be fatal to assume either that some victories are irreversible, or that defeats are inevitable, still less that defeats must be borne by the victims alone. Beyond our shores, too, marriage equality for gay men and women remains out of reach in most countries. Only 38 countries in the world offer the equality that is possible in Canada.
In Canada, it never pays to assume that when counterrevolution begins to the south of us, it won’t migrate north. We’ve got our work cut out to prevent that happening. Currently, trans people are the most vulnerable members of the once-formidable coalition that fought for sexual and gender liberation.
Protestors gather at the Alberta legislature during a rally for trans rights in Edmonton on Feb. 4, 2024.AMBER BRACKEN/The Canadian Press
In this coalition, we once were a “we,” convinced that when women advanced, men did too; when gay men and women got the right to marry, marriage was strengthened for all; when Indigenous people in Canada got a break, it was good for us all. If we lose that “we,” if we sacrifice any one of our number to save the rest, it will be easy for the forces of counterrevolution to pick us apart, one by one.
It’s important, whatever our political disagreements on other issues, that the coalitions that brought victories for us all don’t break apart. We’ve come a long way, the country is a better place for it, and as long as we stick together, we can keep it that way.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct Martin Luther King's quote, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."