US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

[Regarding] the gay civil rights movement in the last twenty years.... None of it would have happened as it did, if we had not been radicalized by mass death, stripped of fear by imminent death, and determined to bring meaning to the corpses of our loved ones by fighting for the basic rights every heterosexual has taken for granted since birth. No spouse was ever going to be turned away from his husband's deathbed again, as far as I was concerned. Never. Again. For me, marriage equality is not an abstract concept. It has always been my attempt to make my friends' deaths mean something more than tragedy. And it is non-negotiable.

— Andrew Sullivan, 2012

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.