While I too celebrate the ruling, it is with decidedly mixed feelings on the details.

It is enough for me to observe that same-sex couples must enjoy the civil right of forming marriages like opposite-sex couples do if they want them.

It’s funny when the grassroots push for same-sex marriage began in the last couple years of the 1990s, queer activist like me were taken by surprise. Many of us thought of civil marriage as a sort of heteronormative institution we weren’t particularly interested in emulating.

We insisted that queer people enjoy all the rights other people enjoy, but we were also busy thinking about ways to create better, more inclusive, healthier institutions.

I’ll never forget attending an expensive fundraiser for the Hawaii initiative. My straight business partners suggested we buy a ticket to the $1,500 a plate dinner because besides being a good cause it would be a good networking opportunity for me.

I was fairly well startled, I have to tell you, by the passion of the other gay men and some lesbians who attended the fundraiser. They fiercely demanded marriage equality in ways that had never occurred to me before that night, and alone among all of them I was the activist, a Queer Nation and Act Up alum.

None of my traditional activist friends were even interested in same-sex marriage then as an issue. I think what this speaks to is it the average LGBTQ person was motivated primarily by perceived injustice, by being denied equality even if they didn’t necessarily want it for themselves.

Activists soon changed gears and embraced the fight, because that’s what everybody wanted. But I’m not so sure things turned out as well as they could have.

I really do think lesbians and gay men have tended to embrace heteronormativity (or you know, emulating it) by presuming that traditional marriage and family is what everyone should want.

We used to have bigger ideas than that, and I think we lose something by narrowing our focus.