There’s a raft of life-changing civil rights just waiting to be won by the Gay, Lesbian, Transsexual, Bisexual movement in America and we need the President we helped elect to step up.

Now.

The tipping point, the Year One watershed that startled almost as many gay people as straight ones by its passing, was the Prop 8 amendment in California last November. Recriminations about how or why this happened have their place, but here’s the result: overnight 18,000 previously legal same sex marriages entered a new an unprecedented legal limbo, and all future same sex marriages were indefinitely postponed.

That this was happening on the same night Obama was elected made it feel like living in two separate Americas simultaneously, like watching the last scene of two Shakespearean dramas, with startlingly different outcomes, superimposed, one over the other. It sucked.