We as a community seem to be alternating between devastation and numbness. Words fail me. How do you describe what it is like to have your state vote against your marriage…. against your entire community’s beautiful, beautiful marriages? For some reason, the sadness there is so deep it seems as though words would not even do it justice.

And so, instead, I would like to write about our marching. Because, while they seem to have imagined that taking away our right to marry would just make us shut up and disappear, it has done quite the opposite. Last night, an estimated 5,000-10,000 of us gathered in Los Angeles to show the world that we are still here. We took to the streets to look in the faces of the people who voted to take away our marriage rights, and were surprised to find those people largely missing. Whoever they were, they certainly weren’t around last night. Instead, by and large, the thousands of citizens we encountered greeted us with high fives and friendly honks. Even the police blocked traffic to allow us to pass peacefully through they streets of West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Hollywood. Perhaps they suspected that our tentative hopefulness could easily turn to rage. That our chants of solidarity and determination were preferable to any other way we might have expressed our wide array of emotions surrounding the news of our deep loss. Whatever their reasoning, I am grateful. It was surprisingly healing to be able to stand up in front of my state and say… We will not be silenced. We will not disappear. We will not give up. And we will not even allow you to crush our spirits. You may spit on us, you may take away something we consider to be core to our humanity, and you may cover our community in tears, but still, like dust, like air, like love itself…we rise.

And so, I am left with an unquenchable desire to continue taking to the streets and marching. I’d march this state from border to border if I thought it might make a difference, carrying on the chants we shouted throughout Los Angeles last night: “What do we want? EQUALITY! When do we want it? NOW!!” Who’s with me?