UPDATED: Hillary Jabs At NPR Host: 'You Are Playing With My Words' On Gay Marriage

[frazzled]

114. I hate to disagree with Terry Gross

but no, gay marriage was really not a big issue with support in the 90s: it is what has made the stupendous strides made in equality so remarkable today.

I was there in the 90s. The 90s was very much still about the AIDS crisis; it was about outing as a tactic (which was rough at the time but I now believe has led to the recognition and acceptance of gay Americans); it was ActUp; it was about Pride; it was about housing and job discrimination; it was later about talk of civil unions. But even in the early 2000s, marriage was not a fully accepted position, even within some segments of the gay community itself: there was a contingency that felt this was an upper-middle-class, bourgeois thing, and there was discussion about whether it was desirable.

It's not that there wasn't always discussion of marriage among certain sets, but in the mid-90s, this was not in the least a political reality.