Lorri  Jean, the CEO of the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center, was in Alaska celebrating her brother’s 50th birthday when she heard the news: on Friday, June 24, New York became the seventh state to allow same-sex couples to marry. Furtively checking her cell phone for updates, Jean was overcome with mixed emotions.

“I’m thrilled for New York,” she said, “but it makes me even sadder for California that hundreds of thousands of same-sex couples are still being denied their basic human rights.”

Jean and her partner were one of the estimated 11,000 same-sex couples that got married during the “window” of time that gay marriages were legal in California. In 2008, same-sex couples were allowed to marry between June and November, when Prop. 8 was passed. Those marriages are still considered valid by the state, but domestic partnership remains their only option for the rest of California’s same-sex couples.

“Right now, I don’t have the same rights, privileges or obligations as my neighbors, who are a heterosexual couple, do,” Ronnie Scott, president of L.A. Pride said. “I’m not asking for anything extraordinary: I’m asking for the same rights as everyone else.”

Meanwhile, California’s Supreme Court continues to mull over Prop. 8, which defines marriage as between one man and one woman. The community is holding its collective breath, bracing themselves for either a favorable decision from the courts or another fight to win voters at the ballot box.

“There is certainly a bittersweet component to this,” Jean said. “California was the leader. Our supreme court legalized marriage. We were the largest state to be able to do that, and then the right wing swooped in and took it away.”

However, New York’s Marriage Equality Act has brought hope to many leaders and activists within L.A.’s LGBT community that same-sex marriage will one day come again to California. Sky Johnson, a senior policy councilmember with the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, called the New York bill a landmark.

“It’s probably the most significant legislative victory that the movement’s ever had, certainly at the state level,” Johnson said.  “I look forward to the weddings starting later this month, and of course the effect it will have in the debate and across the country.”

With the passing of the bill, the country’s third most populous state joined Iowa, Vermont, District of Columbia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut in allowing gay marriage. New York’s Marriage Equality Act more than doubles the percentage of gay couples able to marry in the United States, from 6.9 to 14.3 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey by the Williams Institute of UCLA.

California’s LGBT activists are sitting tight, waiting for a court decision on Prop. 8. Torie Osborne, the chief of civic engagement for United Way Los Angeles and a former CEO of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, said that she is confident that gay marriage will one day be legal in California, as well nationally.

“I think it’s going to pass through the courts,” Osborne said. “ The justice department’s decision of the Defense of Marriage Act shows that there are cracks in the glass. There’s no question about it that this wall is coming down.”

Many LGBT activists and leaders have echoed the sentiment that same-sex marriage remains inevitable despite Prop. 8. Those interviewed reiterated the sense of hope and possibility that the New York bill gave them.

Scott, who was on the phone with his partner as he watched the results of the New York bill online, said he actually stood up, applauded, and cried as he saw the decision unfold.

He has memories of his grandparents sitting together drinking coffee every morning at a coffee shop and discussing their family together, and said that he gave up on ever being able to have a life like that when he came out, until now.

“When you see experiences like New York happen, young LGBT people who are just coming out, or who are questioning, can say ‘I don’t have to give up that dream of getting married and sharing my life with somebody like my grandparents or my parents,’” Scott said. “I think younger LGBT people are seeing [their futures] in ways that I could never see mine.”

Laura Sreebny, 22, is part of the younger generation, and she hopes that one day, she can call her significant other a wife.

“I like to think that California will figure this out,” Sreebny, a coordinator at Nickelodeon, said. “Just the fact that [my relationships] have to be different feels so segregated. It’s like the government is telling me how I can or can’t be with someone.”

For many in the LGBT community, New York’s bill is also a sign of a sea change in public opinion about homosexuality. “I know that no civil rights movement has ever failed, and we won’t be the first,” Scott added. “I know that it is going to happen. Because what this country is really founded is on the premise that all people are treated equally.”