Despite the "logistical nightmare" it posed for her Secret Service detail, Hillary Clinton took to the New York City streets Sunday for her third LGBT Pride march and the first ever for a presumptive presidential nominee of a major political party. Her appearance recalled 2000, when she became the first first lady to march in a Pride parade during her inaugural Senate bid in the Empire State, and then again in 2006 during her re-election campaign.
But her embrace of LGBT Pride once again, in the midst of her campaign’s general election rollout, reminds us of just how far LGBT politics have come. Clinton, like Barack Obama, walked a tightrope on LGBT issues during the 2008 election cycle. While both candidates duked it out for LGBT support in the primary, neither did anything so high-profile and media friendly as march in a Pride parade. Instead, their battle for LGBT votes was waged more through policy positions and a series of interviews granted to LGBT-specific news outlets both at the local and national level.
When Clinton finally conceded the primary race to Obama in June 2008, he faced the growing conundrum of how to address what was fast becoming one of the priciest ballot measure battles in American history—Proposition 8, which ultimately passed in November, stripping same-sex couples in California of marriage rights they had already been granted. In keeping with the politics of the time, Obama and his team played both sides of the marriage issue, with the candidate emphasizing his contention that marriage was "between a man and a woman" in mainstream outlets, while he sent a statement to a California LGBT club saying that he opposed "divisive and discriminatory efforts" to amend the Golden State's constitution with language prohibiting same-sex marriage.
Throughout most of his first term, President Obama and his White House aides would continue to advance the contradictory lines he and his campaign drew during the summer of 2008, until May 2012 when he famously completed his "evolution" on marriage equality during a sit-down interview with ABC's Robin Roberts. Obama's embrace of same-sex marriage in the midst of a presidential re-election campaign would forever change the national politics of the issue going forward.
Hillary Clinton's historic, photo-rich walk Sunday past the Stonewall Inn—now a federally recognized national monument—is a testament to the decades-long work of LGBT activists to make their love not just accepted, but celebrated. Indeed, Clinton’s four-block march of solidarity down Christopher Street was replete with cheering and chants of gratitude: “Hillary! Hillary!”