The Resistance Brief: Two Years In: What This Work Has Taught Me

Blog by Ricardo Martinez (he/him), Executive Director

A few weeks ago, I was on a long contemplative walk while on vacation. Working out, long walks, and hikes usually help me sort out complex issues and regulate my nervous system. The trip happened to fall right on my two-year anniversary leading GLAD Law. My body took a minute to catch up – that strange, physical adjustment of easing into a slower rhythm, of finally having room to feel things I’d been carrying without much space to unpack. So, I decided to go on a walk with the intention of paying extra attention to what my body needed and the thoughts surfaced. And what surfaced, underneath everything, was gratitude. Gratitude for the honor of leading this organization at one of the most consequential moments in its history. 

New England is home now, and it has been extraordinarily good to me. Like every place I’ve lived, it’s given me people I can’t imagine my life without. That feels like a blessing. And the work feels like the greatest responsibility I’ve ever carried: to help steward GLAD Law through an attack on our community that echoes ones we’ve survived before, at a scale and speed that demands everything we have – not just defending what we’ve won, but finding where we can create change, where we can move first, where we can win. There is a future waiting for us, held in trust, for the day we build enough power and enough public will to make it real. 

Two years have taught me more than I expected. Here’s what I’m carrying forward. 

Progress is fragile everywhere, not just where it’s threatened.  
I spent a decade in the Southwest championing LGBTQ+ issues, and in that time, I saw two theories drive how our movement approached the states. The first held that the states passing the most anti-LGBTQ+ laws were also the ones with the most opportunity: with enough people mobilized there, we could shift the whole country. The second said the opposite: defend the gains we’ve already made in friendlier states, and stop investing in the hostile ones as lost causes. What I learned is that progress is fragile everywhere, and it needs the same fervor and generosity we give our hardest fights, in every state, all the time. Our opponents treat every state as a laboratory for the next attack on our freedom. We have to meet that with the same seriousness, everywhere, without exception. 

Listen to history – it can tell you what’s coming next.
Our history – recent and distant – is a predictor of what’s ahead, and a source of tactics and strategy that, evolved for this moment, can still be effective now. Reading that history well means watching actions and words together: believe anti-LGBTQ+ forces when they state a goal, because the plans are usually stated plainly, somewhere. And notice what they leave out – the bill that never names the population it will actually harm, the talking point that carefully avoids the next target. Those patterns, stated and unstated, show where the system is breaking down, and where the levers are that we can use to our advantage. 

Choose collaboration.
This moment is a stress test for organizations championing civil rights, and it takes resisting the pull toward scarcity and silos to keep making progress.  

Fear pushes institutions toward secrecy and self-protection. What’s carried GLAD Law through is staying anchored in what has always defined us, and leaning further into innovation, daring leadership, humility, collaboration, and strategy rooted in love, not fear. 

Trust your gut. 
Leadership, at its core, is a series of judgment calls made with incomplete information. The data matters. So does the instinct built from years of doing this work. 
Emotional dysregulation is everywhere right now. It’s in our social media feeds, our news cycles, our families, our workplaces, our own minds. Compassion and understanding carry us through it. And I’ve had to keep relearning that I’m not exempt from needing that same grace. 

Believe the impossible is possible. 
If we can’t picture a way through this moment, we won’t find one. Living in the fullness of what’s possible isn’t naive – it’s a discipline. It’s how we keep building toward something better than what we have proof of yet. 

Two years in, I know this: the work ahead of us is not smaller than the work behind us. But I’ve watched what this community can do when we hold history, strategy, and love together at the same time. So here is my commitment, to all of you — our staff, our board, our donors, our plaintiffs, our community: I will keep working, without letting up, toward a future where every LGBTQ+ person and every person living with HIV can exist openly and fully, free from legal and social barriers, in every part of life. Not someday. Every day. Not in the states where it’s easier. Everywhere. 

That future is held in trust for us. Our job is to go get it. 

What to know, what to do:

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