I’m not really that into public displays of affection. To me, that’s the stuff of private moments, when kissing can involve just you and your significant other, not you two and all of State Street.

Yet this last Saturday found my girlfriend and me lip-locked among a small gathering of people in Isla Vista, all of us engaged in the same simple act of kissing.

This was not spontaneous happenstance, and we had not all sipped some love potion. Rather, we were participating in the Great Nationwide Kiss-In, a coordinated, very public display of affection to show solidarity with gay couples, who, in the past few months, have been harassed for kissing in public.

Hatched by bloggers David Badash and David Mailloux, with Join the Impact and Willow Witte, the Kiss-In was a response to two different, but equally disturbing, incidents in El Paso, Texas, and Salt Lake City, Utah. In late June in Texas, while waiting in line at a restaurant, two men who shared a quick kiss were told to leave by security guards, with police reiterating the command once they arrived, adding that public same-sex kissing is illegal. However, in 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court (in Lawrence v. Texas) overturned laws that banned homosexual conduct. That same year in El Paso, the city passed an ordinance that forbade, in public places, discrimination based on sexual orientation, meaning two laws protected the couple. A few days later, in Utah, two men walked hand-in-hand through Salt Lake City Plaza, land technically owned by the Mormon Church but which contains a path that was a public easement until 2003 and is still a popular pedestrian walkway. After one of the men kissed his boyfriend on the cheek, they promptly were reprimanded for inappropriate behavior and told to leave. The couple protested, saying they’d seen heterosexual couples kiss while in the same area and not receive such treatment. Ultimately, police officers were called to the scene and they issued the two men citations for trespassing.

These two occurrences really shine a light on how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go. While there are laws on the books protecting gays and lesbians (good), the realities are that many people still treat homosexuals like second-class citizens and law enforcement officials sometimes don’t enforce those protective laws (double bad). These are big hurdles to overcome, and surpassing them means being vocal in our demands to be treated equally and remaining a prominent presence in our communities. It means always being ready to engage someone in dialogue about gay rights, it means donating time and money to HIV/AIDS resource centers, it means taking part in protest marches and calling your political representatives. And on Saturday, it meant kissing. A lot of it.

I think sometimes people wonder how effective actions like this really are—how does me smooching my girlfriend actually further the gay rights movement? In my mind, it’s about being visible and about showing camaraderie with gays and lesbians who aren’t blessed with the welcoming, accepting environment we enjoy here in Santa Barbara. It’s easy to grow complacent in this town, where worries about our lack of a gay club or district permeate. But Santa Barbara gays are part of a larger homosexual community, one that’s still discriminated against and regarded as inferior in many parts of the country and world.

Moreover, it’s important to remember that these general attitudes do in fact impact our everyday lives. Although I’ve never been chastised for holding my girlfriend’s hand in public like that Salt Lake City couple, members of the Utah-based Mormon Church donated millions of dollars to the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign, whose passage eliminated marriage equality in my home state. And even though I’m eternally grateful to the Central Coasters who defeated Prop. 8 in Santa Barbara County, I’m also aware that the discriminatory attitudes of California voters in other parts of the state mean I can’t tie the knot—even in Santa Barbara.

No matter how accepting this area is, what happens in the rest of the state and country still affects us in very real and practical ways, which makes depictions of solidarity important. So while there are plenty of good reasons for me to kiss my girlfriend, that’s the real reason we kissed on Saturday morning.

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