On this day in 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, making it the first U.S. federal law to ever use the phrase 'sexual orientation.' What may sound like bureaucratic housekeeping was actually a seismic shift: for the first time in American history, the federal government officially recognized that gay and lesbian people exist, and that violence against us matters enough to count. The law required the Department of Justice to track and publish hate crime statistics based on race, religion, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. It passed in an era when AIDS had already killed tens of thousands and anti-gay violence was endemic, yet the government had no mechanism to even measure it. That one phrase, 'sexual orientation,' inserted into federal law over fierce opposition, became a crack in the wall that generations of advocates would widen into something far larger. Representation in law, even imperfect and partial, has always been a foothold.
What was the first moment you felt officially seen, in any context?