Treetop proposal

Something light to start the day: The video above from National Geographic is another one that I didn't share because of my irregular blogging over the past couple months. I think I was originally going to use it as part of a longer post, but I forget what that was going to be about. So, here it is all its own.

I’m a huge fan of romance and love, and over the years I’ve posted a few videos celebrating both. There was a flurry of gay marriage proposal videos as marriage equality arrived in one US state after state, and then kind of slowed after the US finally achieved 50-state marriage equality.

To be sure, people still post videos, but I now only share ones that are unusual in some way—like this one, for example. I can’t remember ever seeing a treetop proposal before.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when a video like this from a mainstream media organisation like National Geographic would have been unthinkable. That’s not just because marriage equality hadn’t arrived yet, but also because the everyday lives of real gay people just weren’t being reflected.

And that’s one of the things I’ve noticed the most: It’s not just that for a time gay marriage proposal videos were everywhere, it’s that more and more gay people are being included as part of the ordinary content produced by various media companies—not special coverage, and not treating us or our lives as unusual or exotic, nor even including us just because we're LGBT, but instead just as ordinary people. This is what progress looks like.

One of my activist colleagues back in the day used to say that the LGBT rights movement was more or less a long march toward banality, because he felt the whole point of the struggle was to make it so that LGBT people were just people. We’re still not at the end of that march, but we are closer than at any point in my lifetime.

So, two guys who love each other both decided to propose to each other at the same time and place, and National Geographic shared their story as they do lots of stories of real people. That’s good in itself. But videos like this of happy gay people in love always make me smile. Always.

And that’s reason enough to make sure I shared it… eventually.