Among the few vivid memories I have from school was studying the cruel experiment by psychologists researching “learned helplessness.” A researcher shocked a restrained dog while chiming a tone. The dog learned that it was helpless to escape the shock accompanying the tone. Later, when unrestrained and free to escape, the dog would passively await the shock when it heard the tone. It had learned to be helpless.

Decades of oppression have certainly taught lesbian and gay people to be helpless. In 1999 I was working with other volunteers to create a domestic partner registry for the City of Milwaukee as part of the Domestic Partnership Task Force (later folded into Center Advocates). At that point, nothing much positive on LGBT public policy had happened since the 1982 passage of Wisconsin’s gay rights law. In fact, in the intervening years, the scope of that law had been eroded with the so-called “Rawhide” amendment undermining protections for youth workers. Also, Milwaukee Public Schools had rejected an initiative to make it more gay-inclusive, Milwaukee police were disastrously late in detecting the Dahmer murders, AIDS had decimated leaders, Mayor Norquist had vetoed a grant to PrideFest, the Milwaukee County Board had rescinded a simple pride resolution, and the Milwaukee Common Council had overwhelmingly rejected domestic partner benefits for its employees just two years earlier.

LGBT people had learned to accept that the police might not adequately charge a hate crime, that their boss could fire them with apparent impunity, and that their elected officials could ignore them, because it seemed that nothing could be done.

It was in that context that the volunteers working to establish the registry fanned out to garner support in the community. I remember approaching a player at Milwaukee’s gay softball league to ask him to sign a postcard in support of the registry. He was acquainted with me, so it was hard for him to refuse, but while he signed the card with a sigh, he told me “this will never go anywhere. They’ll never pass this.” It is one of my proudest accomplishments to have proved him wrong, when we won the creation of the registry just weeks later by a 10-7 vote. Even today, nearly a decade later, when I’m invited into people’s homes, couples often point out their certificate from the domestic partner registry, not because it conveyed any rights, but because it was finally an acknowledgement from their government that their lives mattered. The years since have seen many victories statewide, perhaps most notably in expanded capacity as our community has grown from virtually all-volunteer kitchen table efforts to growing non-profits with paid staff providing services, advocacy and research.

Last month marked the one-year anniversary of the vote in Wisconsin to ban marriage for gay couples. The very real setback could easily return our community to its state of learned helplessness. That would be a mistake.

When our community has asserted itself in 2007, very real progress for gay, lesbian, and transgender citizens was made. La Crosse County extended health care benefits to the families of its employees with domestic partners, as did Milwaukee Area Technical College. The Milwaukee Common Council, previously the scene for contentious standing room only debates on gay rights, passed new employment and housing protections in August for transgender people unanimously, without a whisper of controversy. Center Advocates secured $168,000 in the recently concluded state budget to address LGBT health disparities. Domestic partner benefits may soon be available to the 10,000 employees of Milwaukee Public Schools. An LGBT issues in the workplace seminar was held at Deloitte in Milwaukee that attracted more than 20 senior HR executives from leading corporations, some of which have since added domestic partner benefits or are actively considering it.

Some would have us wait to press our demands for equality until the political environment is just so, and victory is assured. But positive change doesn’t happen in tidy two-year election cycles, it happens over decades, with more losses than victories. It happens when people forget that sometimes what they undertake will fail, and remember that sometimes, just sometimes, when they seek to do what is right, they prevail.