Every good fight needs an exit strategy, and that includes the battle for marriage equality.

We don’t want to wake up one year and find we’ve won the right to marry, yet have absolutely lost the ability to live peacefully among straight people without sorting them into the “good straight people” and the “H8ers.” Which brings to mind the point that we’ll also have to break ourselves of putting numbers inside words, as in str8 and h8.

Anyway, when the day finally arrives for our war weary GLBTQ community to walk off the same-sex battlefield and climb into our marriage beds, we don’t want to create an inequality vacuum. You know, like the way it was as recently as 1967 when bans on interracial marriage in the US were fully defeated, yet nationwide today, 2 out of 3 blacks oppose same-sex marriage. Who could have seen that coming? I’m really not even sure who’d be left for us to try to deny rights to (metrosexuals?), but it’s essential that we cobble together an exit strategy to avoid such a dangerous inequality vacuum.

Then there’s the fact that we’ve fought for this so long, the fight itself has become second nature to us, and no matter how blissfully we indulge in our new freedom to marry, we’re bound to miss waiting, keen-eyed and razor-tongued, for the likes of Larry Craig, Mark Sanford, David Vitter and John Ensign (apologies to the many politicians on both sides of the aisle whom I’ve left out) to screw up, handing us the opportunity to bludgeon traditional marriage and family values crusaders for being such hypocrites while withholding our civil rights. That’s going to be a tough one to give up, but let’s not turn this into a Pyrrhic victory by dwelling on what we’ll lose.

As we prepare to gracefully extricate ourselves from this war, even as we look ahead to the engagement parties, wedding showers, expensive gifts and endless decisions over who takes whose name, we also must remember that the triumph can never be absolute. Those gay-h8ing str8s have left us with scars that will take a long time to heal – countless relationships that have begun and ended without the option of marriage and subsequent remedy of divorce, lingering hesitation over how soon is too soon for us to start using the word ’sanctity’ in reference to marriage without feeling a little hypocritical, and for lesbians specifically, there’s the awkward question of whether asking for your lover’s ‘hand’ in marriage is just a little too explicit.

For the sake of a saner, more inclusive future, we also have to proactively begin to appreciate (without picturing any actual heterosexual acts) the many loving str8 marriages that thrive all around us.

Here’s a story about one traditional couple who won the battle for my heart and mind.

I was in my eye doctor’s waiting room a few weeks ago, just me and an opposite-sex couple in about their mid-eighties. They seemed very devoted. She listened attentively as he described his trip to the porch that morning to bring in the newspaper. Not once did she get exasperated with the incredible level of detail he went into. Then they got quiet as each of them read their magazines for a few minutes, until he leaned over and pointed to the page he was reading and asked her what those letters stood for. She patiently told him the G was for gay, the L was for lesbian, and the B was for bisexual. He nodded his head and asked her what the T stood for, and without skipping one beat, she said, “The T is for Trisexual.”

I’m all for an exit strategy that doesn’t leave disabling exit wounds, but hey, if our endgame fails and we get sucked into an inequality vacuum, maybe we can oppress the trisexuals.