
The definition of love is, “an intense feeling of deep affection.” Love doesn’t have a rule book to follow that give guidelines on who or what to love. In the popular British TV series, Black Mirror, there was an episode tiled “San Junipero”. San Junipero is a virtual reality world where people who are about to pass over visit. The entire town is a fun loving beach town full of drunken nights and love affairs. Two of the users, Yorkie and Kelly, run into each other one night. They are complete opposites. Yorkie was a shy and timid girl while Kelly was a fun seeking partier. They were both in San Junipero for a reason. Kelly had a form of cancer that spread throughout her body. Yorkie was there because she was a secret lesbian. One day Yorkie tried to come out to her parents, but they didn’t accept it, so she ran away in her car and crashed, leaving her a quadriplegic. When Yorkie met Kelly it was hard at first because she didn’t think that two women being together was socially acceptable. The love between two people shouldn’t be judged just because they are the same sex. Love is love. Love doesn’t have a race, religion, or gender. It doesn’t matter who loves who. Everyone is out in life looking for that one person that completes them. One of the biggest issues in America is gay marriage. In most states gay marriage is now legal, but even with it being legal gay marriage is still a problem with the citizens of the states. 

In the last couple of years, the LGBT movement has sky rocketed. When Obama was running for president a big point of his campaign was legalizing gay marriage. Gay marriage is a great part of the two major parties. Republicans are against gay marriage while democrats are for it. Gays are constantly criticized because they like a person of their own sex. In August of 1982, Michael Hardwick, was living in Georgia when he was put on trial for having sex with another man in the privacy of his own bedroom. In 1982 Georgia still had a sodomy law which banned “any sexual act involving sex organs of one person and the mouth or anus of another."(Gay Rights Laws, Andryszweski). The charges were dropped but Hardwick was tired of all the hate he was getting from the state and peers. Hardwick turned the trial around and sued the state stating the sodomy law was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court decided against it saying,” is whether the Federal Constitution confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy and hence invalidates the laws of the many States that still make such conduct illegal and have done so for a very long time.... [Hardwick] would have us announce...a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy. This we are quite unwilling to do."(Andryszweski). For the Supreme Court to say that the country is unwilling to give citizens the right to engage in homosexual sodomy is very harsh. In the US Constitution there are three unalienable rights, life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If being a homosexual makes people happy and the Supreme Court says they cannot be homosexual, it is taking away their happiness. Kelly and Yorkie were “living” in the 80’s and during that decade being gay was still frowned upon. Yorkie was hesitant to act on her feelings towards Yorkie due to the sole fact that she did not want to be judged by their peers. She even said in the episode that she was not comfortable dancing with Kelly at the club because it was two girls dancing together. While Kelly was dancing freely, Yorkie saw how free Kelly’s lifestyle was and started to awkwardly dance with her while slowly falling in love with this woman that she had just met. 

Yorkie was only in San Junipero because when she was a teen she decided to come out to her parents. Her parents were strongly against her being a lesbian and wouldn’t accept it. Yorkie was so upset that she went to drive her car and got into a crippling wreck. She was a quadriplegic and was on life support for many years. Coming out is one of the hardest parts for homosexual people. In the 30’s and 40’s the word lesbian and gay emerged. A woman named Barbara Grier was born in 1933 in Cincinnati, Ohio. She realized at a young age that she was not like other girls. She had to relive her younger years just to get a grip on her life. When she was doing this the only thing that kept popping into her mind was when she was eight years old and she was madly in love with her babysitter, Susan Stevens. She came out to her mom when she was twelve years old. At the time she didn’t know the word lesbian or homosexual. After she came out she started researching her behavior and while she was at the library she came across the multi-syllabic word “homosexual”. The definition at the time wasn’t exactly what it is today. The definition was so off that she said, “I didn’t feel that I fit any of the descriptions given in the textbook-type things that I was finding. I could tell that there was enough similarity so that there was no question in my mind, that it did describe me…”(The Original Coming Out Stories, Penelope and Wolfe). Being a lesbian during this time was confusing for many women because little people knew what it was and what the technical definition was. When she was 15 years old she was talking to a woman that was about eight years older than her. She told the girl that she was a lesbian and the woman went back and told her mother. The next day Barbara was called to the counselor’s office and was then met by two police officers. She was taken to the police station and was badgered with questions about what she does with women. At the time she didn’t know that she was telling the cops was highly illegal during the 40’s. Once this happened to her she realized that she could use her being a lesbian as a weapon. She would go around telling people that she was a lesbian and the sheer shock in people’s faces would make her laugh. Just being a lesbian during the 30’s and 40’s would be tough enough but not knowing what it is called and having to explain what being gay is like would be a challenging life.

In the episode Yorkie and Kelly ended up getting married to each other. Yorkie finally had her dream come true of being a lesbian and free. For all these years she was unhappy and afraid of how she felt because of how others would look at her as a monster. Love is a feeling that people cannot control. No one should be judged by who they love. If there is a connection between two people who has the right to tell them that they cannot be together? Everyone is going through this life side by side just trying to be happy and find their one true love. In all of the Disney movies they end with the prince and princess finally finding each other and falling madly in love then they get married and live happily ever after. Now picture an alternate ending where two princesses get married or two princes get married and instead of ending on happily ever after it ends with the people of the town badgering them because it’s “against the bible”, “that’s just not right”, or “you can’t even have a baby”. If the movies were like this, then no one would watch them because people want to have the fairy tale life. Who cares who someone else loves. Their love does not affect anyone around them besides going against their beliefs. In the end we’re all looking for our own prince or princess charming. It is just not fair that human beings treat other human beings like trash just because they are trying to be happy. 
