Love Cubed

This simple cube, a colorful riff on the Human Rights Campaign's yellow and blue logo became sort of ubiquitous this week on my (and many people's) social media feeds as the Supreme Court heard cases on Marriage Equality.

Lots of creative people made their own clever versions of it, and many friends made it their profile picture for the days of the hearings. Susanne actually superimposed it on our wedding picture for her profile pic.

I don't know what the official stats are on how many people put it up for a time, but I want to take a moment to share how it felt for me to look at Facebook this week.

It felt so warm. And powerful. And supportive. Dare I say, I felt embraced?

I found myself languishing over the name of each and every FB friend over these few days, thinking about them and reflecting on our respective journeys that brought us to this place of so publically embracing the very idea of legal recognition of same-sex marriage.

Some are activists. Some not so much. I thought about whether 10 years ago or even 5 years ago these same friends would have had the courage to post something so publically? Would I? After all, it's not that long ago that being gay could hurt your chances of getting a security clearance. (Or ironically rather, being secretive about being gay could send a signal you were open to blackmail and thus a potential security risk.) 

I know people who worry that if they seem supportive of gay rights, people might think they are gay. I know people who are not out to everyone in their lives so they live a double life trying to keep it all straight (pun intended) and wouldn't feel comfortable putting this as their profile picture. To this day some cannot be openly gay in their jobs at the risk of losing them. And I of course am fully aware that I have friends who firmly believe that marriage should only be between a man and a woman. Nothing against me or my family--it's just the way they think.

But I couldn't help but notice though that some of my friends who frankly are not particularly supportive of gay marriage seemed to have many friends commenting on unrelated posts who proudly featured this little pink and red logo for a few days. That warmed my heart too I must say.

I do not begrudge anyone for not wanting to be associated with this profile pic changing. I just wanted to say that for those who did, what you did meant a lot to me.  Too many gay people grow up fearing the unknown and what many of you did is make yourselves known. And speaking for myself and Susanne and our family, that meant and means A LOT. Thank you. -Monica