Marriage and Integration Andrew Sullivan appears in today's Times:

Today is the day that gay citizens in this country cross a milestone of equality. Gay couples will be married in Massachusetts - their love and commitment and responsibility fully cherished for the first time by the society they belong to. It is also, amazingly enough, the day of the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that ended racial segregation in schools across America. We should be wary of facile comparisons. The long march of African-Americans to civil equality was and is deeply different from the experience and legacy of gay Americans. But in one respect, the date is fitting, for both Brown and this new day revolve around a single, simple and yet deeply elusive idea: integration.

Sullivan sees two integrations: 1) the human integration. Gays, he writes, grow up in an institution that they are, in turn, barred from furthering. 2) civil integration. Sullivan write that, in Massachusetts, many couples are not celebrating gay marriage...but marriage.

What these couples are affirming is not something new; it is as old as humanity itself. What has ended - in one state, at least - is separatism. We have taken a step toward making homosexuality a non-issue; toward making gay citizens merely and supremely citizens.

Sullivan's most powerful passage is this:

I remember the moment I figured out I was gay. Right then, I realized starkly what it meant: there would never be a time when my own family would get together to celebrate a new, future family. I would never have a relationship as valid as my parents' or my brother's or my sister's. It's hard to describe what this realization does to a young psyche, but it is profound. At that moment, the emotional segregation starts, and all that goes with it: the low self-esteem, the notion of sex as always alien to a stable relationship, the pain of having to choose between the family you were born into and the love you feel.