Was it Worth it? Memory, Victory, and Ambivalence in the LGBTQ Movement

• In Event: How TIME Matters to Movements

Abstract

Victorious social movements are often compelled to evaluate and make sense of what they have just won, both immediately after the fact and continuously over years. Questions like what did we actually win, how much did it cost, and above all - was it worth it?, continue to shape social movement trajectories even decades after victory. Despite growing scholarly attention to both memory work in movements and post-victory dynamics, we understand relatively little about the evaluative processes through which activists make retrospective sense of major wins. Existing frameworks tend to treat such assessments as primarily strategic, evaluating victories based on their utility for future mobilization, missing the moral, affective, and temporal complexity of how activists determine whether past victories were "worth it." Drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ activists conducted nearly a decade after the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage, I examine how activists retrospectively assess this movement milestone. I find that activists' evaluations are structured around four dimensions: temporal (outcomes in hindsight), strategic (appropriateness of tactics and costs), moral (whether the goal should have been pursued), and affective (emotional responses to victory). Each dimension carries both positive and negative valences, and critically, these valences do not align neatly. Activists simultaneously celebrate benefits while mourning costs, or oppose the goal morally yet acknowledge unexpected positive outcomes. This reveals that post-victory trajectories are shaped not just by strategic calculation but by contested memorial and affective processes that existing frameworks have not fully theorized.

Author

• Tom Einhorn, University of British Columbia