While discrimination has enormous costs, sometimes we forget the little things that you can lose when you're discriminated against. One example is that before the repeal of DADT, gay and lesbian couples couldn't publicly kiss each other in front of their fellow soldiers upon returning home from a deployment. Now that's no longer the case and yesterday a lesbian couple shared the traditional homecoming first kiss when the Oak Hill docked at the Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek yesterday in the Virginia Beach area.
There's a few things I think are great about this, but the most important is that Citlalic Snell and Marissa Gaeta weren't trying to pull any big publicity stunt with the kiss. They didn't call in the gay rights organizations, or trying to rally support among their fellow sailors, and even seemed a little embarrassed by all the attention. They just did what sailors apparently always do when coming home from a deployment -- they bought raffle tickets (about 50 of them) in the raffle that decides which sailor gets the first homecoming kiss. It just so happened that they were the lucky couple.
I have to admit that I'm actually quite happy to see that this moment in LGBT history happened in Virginia. Between the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage passing in 2006 and an Attorney General (Ken Cuccinelli) who is extremely opposed to any sort of gay rights, we've needed something positive to happen in VA for basic equality.
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