‘A happy life’: Louisville couple on a decade of marriage equality
Republished from Kentucky Lantern
A decade ago, Kaila Adia Story and Missy Jackson were determined: Whether or not the United States government ever recognized them as a couple, they would marry.
The two, who live in Louisville, had dated for three years by the time the United States Supreme Court took up Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark case that ultimately led to nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage on June 26, 2015.
But before the nation’s highest court ruled 5-4 in favor of marriage equality, couples like the Story-Jacksons didn’t know where their futures stood.
“We knew that the Supreme Court at the time was talking about same sex marriage,” Kaila said. “I just really did not have a lot of faith in the court, just from growing up in a homophobic society.”
In May 2015, Kaila attended a conference in Florence, Italy, and Missy — the “woman out of my dreams” — went with her and proposed.
Missy proposed before knowing they could legally marry, she said, because all that mattered was Kaila and her. She is used to “living on my own terms,” she said, and the next step was a commitment ceremony with Kaila.
“I hit all the boxes of all the protected classes: Black, female, being a lesbian,” said Missy, 52. “Every day, we’re fighting to just exist. So I’m used to that. You either gotta be quiet, or you take up space. And then the way my mama raised me is: I belong in every room I go to.”
For Missy, legal marriage is a “piece of paper,” and “the real commitment is to each other.” Their marriage was going to be “valid, regardless” of the Supreme Court’s ruling, Missy said.
“By the time SCOTUS announces that same sex marriage is legal, I knew that I wanted to (have a) wedding, and I knew that we were going to have a wedding and get married,” Kaila said. “Because it wasn’t legal, I thought that it was going to be just something smaller and much more intimate, but it became huge.”
The day same-sex marriage was legalized, Kaila cried. She had never imagined that in her lifetime, she would be able to marry the woman she loved, legally, in Kentucky.
“I couldn’t believe how things had lined up, how I didn’t feel like I was going to fall in any kind of deep love when I moved here (from Michigan), and then to be surprised and joyous by that, and then to go even farther, and to get engaged in this really romantic place, and then to come back a month later and realize that we’ll actually be able to get married and it will be legal,” she remembered. “I was blown away.”
Kaila and Missy married April 9, 2016.
“It was a wonderful time to finally have a legal acknowledgement that our unions are true, deep, loving — and just like everyone else’s,” Kaila said.
‘A wonderful time,’ followed by ‘firestorm’
The Obergefell decision was immediately followed by a “firestorm” and “spotlight” on Kentucky, said Amber Duke, the executive director of the ACLU of Kentucky.
“When there is a victory, or when we do take a step forward in our civil rights and civil liberties, there’s often backlash to that,” Duke told the Lantern. “And the backlash here in Kentucky was almost immediate in terms of county clerk defiance.”
Duke was referring to former Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, who made national headlines for denying same-sex marriage licenses in 2015 over her religious beliefs. Davis was briefly jailed that year.
A decade after the Obergefell decision, political and religious conservatives still debate and challenge the landmark ruling.
Davis has kept her legal case alive since then. The Christian law firm representing Davis, Liberty Counsel, is now moving to use her case as a way to overturn Obergefell using the same legal logic that undid Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed the constitutional right to abortion.
And, at a national meeting in early June of thousands Southern Baptists, the nation’s top protestant denomination voted in favor of pushing for an overthrow of Obergefell.
When the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas said at the time that the court should overturn Obergefell.
Meanwhile, in 2024, the American Civil Liberties Union said it was tracking 588 bills it considers “anti LGBTQ.”
The 2015 decision was never going to end all opposition to the LGBTQ community, Duke said, but “it felt significant. I definitely could not have envisioned in 2015 that we would be where we are today, 10 years later.”
Kentucky doesn’t have a statewide fairness ordinance, which is “civil rights legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity and to dismantle systemic racism,” according to the Fairness Campaign. At least 24 Kentucky communities have their own fairness ordinances, though.
Conversion therapy still has a green light in the state. The discredited practice attempts to alter gender expression and sexual attraction that diverges from heterosexual normativity “with the specific aim to promote heterosexuality as a preferable outcome,” according to the The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
Work on both of these issues, and more, “still continues,” Duke said. “Certainly within the past couple of years, the transgender community has been singled out and targeted specifically. Those attacks have been very intense.”
Duke referenced the 2023 law passed in the Kentucky statehouse that banned certain medical care for transgender minors, such as hormone treatments.
“I do think that there are many ways that, especially within the Kentucky General Assembly, that LGBTQ folks, particularly trans folks, have unfortunately become a political pawn,” Duke said.
She takes issue, she said, with “culture war issues” being “prioritized as if they’re the most pressing issue in the commonwealth.”
A ‘disheartening, disconcerting and devastating” time
The ongoing pushback against their community doesn’t affect the Story-Jacksons’ day-to-day lives, though it’s an upsetting time.
“Both of us feel grateful to be with one another, to be married. We still celebrate and are excited about who we are,” Kaila said. “We’re in community with really, really great and supportive people who support our marriage, but … it’s really disheartening, disconcerting and then devastating right now, in certain ways, when it comes to watching the news, to seeing not only the attacks on same sex marriage, but the attacks specifically on trans communities, the attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion in work spaces.”
In 2024, the Kentucky General Assembly banned DEI offices and programs in public colleges and universities in line with a national trend of pushback against diversity, equity and inclusion.
In his second term, President Donald Trump has issued executive orders gutting DEI programs and activities across the federal government. The Trump administration also recently withdrew grant money promised to the University of Louisville’s Eating Anxiety Treatment (EAT) Lab, citing DEI issues in the withdrawal letter.
“This fixation on wanting to return to a time in which people were brutalized, dehumanized, not seen and felt as if they needed to be hidden — I’m not sure why anyone wants to return to that kind of political and social moment,” Kaila said. “It wasn’t good then. That’s why we left that moment.”
Missy, who works in a steel mill, is surrounded by people who are her opposites, she said, including some who’ve never met a gay person before.
Living open, she said, shows people that “we’re not that much different.”
“We’re the same; we’re no different. I have a dog, you have a dog,” Missy said. “I belong, and I’m supposed to love who I love, and I’m happy. We have a happy life. We have a healthy life.”
‘We’ve always fought back.’
Kaila is an author, an associate professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, with a joint appointment in the Department of Pan-African Studies, at the University of Louisville, and the Audre Lorde chair in Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In these roles, she finds herself guiding young people through a tough political moment.
Her students, she said, “are completely intolerant of the hate that they’re seeing directed at their friends and loved ones and people in their community.”
It’s making them “almost completely apathetic to the electoral process” and “completely despondent around politics in general.”
“I think all LGBTQ people know that in each decade, in each political moment, we have never, ever been safe as a community,” she said. “What we also recognize is that in each instance where we have always had such visceral and severe attacks on our communities — and this moment is probably the most severe — we have shown up for each other and for ourselves in each instance, fighting back and demanding for our communities to be treated in a different way.”
The message she works to leave her students with, she said, is “we’ve always fought back” and rejected “gender and sexual tyranny.”
“Even though this period, this moment, has been dehumanizing, disheartening and really, really depressing …. recognize that we have always responded, socially, politically, culturally,” Kaila said. “This time period should be no different.”
Still, fighting against homophobia is “exhausting,” she said.
“I saw this meme the other day that said, ‘if you’re tired of hearing about homophobia, imagine living through it.’ I’m tired of hearing about it; I’m tired of dealing with it,” she said. “I’m 45 years old. I’ve been gay in all these different cities and all these different places, and it’s so tiring and exhausting to keep having to defend your right to live as you are.”
‘Black, gay and free’
It’s unclear if the challenges to Obergefell have enough legal validity to be successful, Duke said, but pointed out that the Supreme Court has proven it’s “willing to roll back rights that people have enjoyed.”
Kaila Story-Jackson, meanwhile, said she has even less faith in the high court in 2025 than she did in 2015.
“I don’t have much faith in SCOTUS maintaining the Obergefell decision, just like they did not maintain the Roe v Wade decision,” she said. “It’s interesting, because my faith in the court in 2015 wasn’t top tier, but right now, in 2025, it’s way below. I will be thrilled and blown away if they are able to uphold this. I think it’s absurd that folks have only been allowed to be legally married and recognized for 10 years, and there’s already this kind of backlash and pushback in response to it.”
For now, she and Missy focus on what brings them joy: their dog, Denver, and traveling together — including a potential return to Italy next year.
“At dinner time, we’ll talk about what’s happened today, because every day is some event, but we don’t get completely mired down. Our life is still full of community and fun and joy,” Kaila said. “I still, every day, wake up feeling Black, gay and free.”
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