The commemorative Facebook profile filters have appeared, so we can officially declare that it’s Pride month, and no Pride month is complete without a healthy sprinkling of infighting from the LGBT community. Every year, there’s a new thing to be upset about, along with the typical Pandora’s Box of complaints. I won’t get into those for fear of bringing this year’s complainants down on my head. But in a time where we’re relatively safe – at least, safe enough to fight about who gets to march where in our parades – I’d like to talk about where we as a community have been, and why the yearly Pride Wars aren’t helping us get where we’re going.

I’m not particularly old, but I’ve spent my entire life deeply involved in the LGBT community. I remember crying in school when I learned that the state my mothers got married in had rejected marriage equality at the ballot box. I also distinctly remember going to visit one of my moms in the emergency room and being stopped and questioned as to my relationship with her. By that point, marriage equality was enshrined in law, but I couldn’t help thinking of what would have happened a few years earlier. What if my mother had been barred from staying with her wife in the hospital? It happened back in the bad old days. There are places where it’s still happening.

The hot new thing in the young LGBT community is to talk about how marriage equality was a Pyrrhic victory, and I get how it could seem that way to someone who didn’t live without it. Mostly what I remember is being frightened. Frightened of how people would react to my family when we went out in public. As long as people assumed we weren’t a family, we were safe, but when they realized we were, we were in trouble. I remember my brother and I listening in a restaurant to the homophobic ranting of the person in the booth behind us, both of us wanting to intervene but both afraid of what would happen to us and our mothers if we did.

I wouldn’t say my brother and I lost friends over having two moms, but it’s fair to say that people avoided associating with us because of our unique family structure. I lost count of the times I was told I was going to hell, or that my whole family was living in sin, or the times I wound up in the principal’s office because I’d crossed the wrong homophobic parent or playground aide. We were ostracized. We were mistreated. We were judged by nearly everyone we met. That’s what it was like in the bad old days before marriage equality was legalized. That, and worse things, too.

I remember what it used to be like. I’m not ready to let it slip into the past, and given the current political and social climates, we can’t afford to do so. So this year, when you think about picking a fight over some part of the Pride celebrations, think about what it was like even a few years earlier in your own lifetime. Think about that, and think about how much further we have to go.