GLAAD President on His Divorce

Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation president Jarrett Barrios says that while the main focus on gay rights may be marriage, it also includes the right to divorce.

Barrios, who was once a Massachusetts state legislator, said he lobbied hard to get the state to recognize marriage equality. When it did, he and his partner of 11 years went to the altar in 2004. However, Barrios and his husband separated last year, and he has been enduring a tough divorce.

"Just as gay and lesbian couples share the joys of marriage, we will share the pain of divorce, something for which we have no template," he wrote in theBoston GlobeThursday. "Divorce plumbs impossible depths of sadness. It involves separating the dishes and the books and all the other things you acquired back when you both still felt the lightness of love, asserting to a judge at a public trial that, yes, your marriage has broken down irretrievably, and telling your parents whose marriage of 47 years hangs heavy over your anemic explanations to them."