By 2000, California saw the election of its first four out members of the Assembly. Jackie Goldberg, who was previously a two-term member of the Los Angeles City Council, won election in 2000 as did Chris Kehoe, who had been a San Diego City Council member. 

First elected in 1994, Sheila Kuehl was the first out LGBTQ member of the Assembly, and was joined by Assemblywoman and future state Senator Carole Migden in 1996.

The four women – featured in the 2016 documentary Political Animals – were successful in transforming then-Republican-leaning California into a national leader on LGBTQ rights. Bills authored by the four legislators led to the legal recognition of same-sex parents, the creation of domestic partnerships and expanded access to HIV medication. 

Karla Drenner was inspired to enter politics watching her mother, who held several government jobs. An environmental science expert, Drenner was the first out LGBTQ person elected to the Georgia state legislature in 2000, defeating a four-term incumbent. “I never got a single piece of hate mail or any derogatory phone calls from inside my district,” Drenner told The Advocate in 2005. “I attribute that to the fact that I never hid that I was gay, and I was literally and figuratively out and about.”

Wilton Manors is known as an LGBTQ haven in Florida, with the highest LGBTQ population of any town in the state. So it’s no surprise that the Fort Lauderdale suburb would be the second jurisdiction in the country to achieve a unique milestone: elect mostly LGBTQ leaders to its city council. (The first city council to achieve an LGBTQ majority was West Hollywood, California, upon its founding in 1984.) 

John Fiore, who became mayor after his service on the council said that sexual orientation wasn’t much of a factor in his race. “I’m sure some people voted for my opponent because I was gay, but a lot of people voted for me because of my past on the council,” Fiore told the Associated Press in 2000. “I didn’t run as a gay candidate for mayor. I ran as a candidate who happened to be gay.”

In 2018, Wilton Manors elected the country’s second all-LGBTQ council.

Bill Lippert spent the 1970s and 1980s building community spirit by organizing Vermont’s first LGBTQ pride rally in Burlington and launching supportive foundations. But he felt the tug of legislative politics after Gov. Howard Dean appointed him to a vacant seat in the Vermont House of Representatives in 1994 during a backlash against LGBTQ rights. By 2016, he served eleven full terms in office.

Central to Lippert’s legacy is his historic effort in 2000 to draft and pass Vermont’s landmark civil unions bill as vice chair of the House Judiciary Committee. In December 1999, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled in Baker v. State of Vermont that same-sex couples had the constitutional right to the rights and responsibilities of marriage but did not confer marriage itself. Instead the court told the legislature to either grant marriage or come up with a parallel structure.

After a series of ugly hearings and death threats that clearly excluded the possibility of passing marriage, they came up with “civil unions,” granting everything but the word “marriage.”

Lippert’s emotional speech on March 15, 2000, is widely credited with the bill’s passage. The House was silent as Vermont’s only openly LGBTQ legislator asked his colleagues to understand same-sex relationships as “miracles” amid unrelenting prejudice—a “triumph against discrimination and prejudice.” And he described the crucible of the AIDS epidemic. “Don’t tell me what a committed relationship is and isn’t,” he said.

The Rutland Herald reported on March 16, 2000, that Lippert felt it was strange to ask: “Should we get our rights now, or should we wait a little longer, or should we ask all the people whether we should get our rights?” 

The bill passed the House 79 to 68 and Governor Howard Dean signed it into law on April 26. When the law went into effect on July 1, 2000, Vermont became the first state to confer to couples in a civil union the same benefits as marriage in the eyes of state law 

Years later Lippert led the passage of a marriage equality bill, including overriding Gov. Jim Douglas’s veto, bringing marriage to same-sex couples on April 7, 2009. He subsequently married his partner of 26 years, Enrique S. Peredo Jr.