Black Americans have experienced an arduous journey to gain all of their civil rights in the United States. People of African descent have been indentured servants, slaves, three-fifths of a person, second-class citizens, and finally, with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, people of color were given all of the same rights and responsibilities as white Americans–at least on paper.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed most forms of discrimination against individuals on the basis of their racial, ethnic, national, and religious affiliation; eventually, discrimination on the basis of sex was also banned. Separate but equal–the idea that had been the law of the land–was struck down at the federal level on July 2nd, 1964, the day the Act went into effect. However, sexuality is still not a condition which the federal government has deemed to be outside of the realm of which a person can be discriminated against.

That’s right: There are no federal laws which have banned discrimination on the basis of how a person chooses to behave sexually in their private life.

In a way, it comes down to the distinction between “behavior” on one hand and “state of being,” on the other hand. Being black, white, Puerto Rican, or Haitian is something you are, not something you do. Choosing to have sex–and with whom–is a behavior; coitus is an action–an action any of us can choose not to engage in. None of us can wake up tomorrow and stop being whatever race or ethnicity society has lumped us into.

This is not to say that people who are lesbian or gay choose to be lesbian or gay, anymore than I have chosen to be a woman who drools over men who look like Ryan Lochte. Whether or not some people make a conscious choice about their sexuality is a question for another day.

Another point that further complicates the issue of what degree of legal protection should sexuality obtain is that fact that there are gay/lesbian people of every racial and ethnic designation. Every black person I know, even those black people who grew up in the deep South and are old enough to remember what life was like when women like Rosa Parks has to sit on the back of the bus and give up their seat if a white person wanted it, remembers there being gay black folks around. Everyone had–or knew someone who had–and aunt or uncle who never got married, but spent time with a ‘special friend’ of the same-sex. Gay people have always had their special clubs or parts of town where they hung out.

Bottom line is this: Gay, lesbian, and transgender people have always been around. The difference is that now, gay, lesbian, and transgender people want the same rights as everyone else–rights that they have not always had.

So the question is this: Will the rest of society see fit to give the LGBTA community the same rights as all other citizens of the United States? The jury is still out.