That was Anchorage then (April 2012)...

Voters rejected by a wide margin on Tuesday an Anchorage, Alaska, ballot proposition that would have extended citywide anti-discrimination protections to sexual orientation and transgender identity. According to city returns with 97.5 percent of precincts reporting, Proposition 5 was failing by about a 58-42 margin.... The group One Anchorage released a statement Wednesday saying that the group was “disappointed at the interim election results” but “could not be prouder of the honest campaign we ran.” Jim Minnery, president of the Alaska Family Council, called the results “extremely gratifying” but said it was no time to “rest on our laurels.”

And this is Anchorage now (April 2018)...

Anchorage voters have rejected an initiative that would have regulated access to restrooms and locker rooms by a person's sex at birth instead of gender identity, a local version of what's known nationally as a "bathroom bill" that sparked massive spending by an opposition campaign. The latest election results released Friday show Proposition 1 was failing by a six-point margin, with 77,766 ballots counted. There are fewer than 1,000 ballots left to be counted, election officials said. Opponents of Prop. 1 declared victory Friday night. Lillian Lennon, an organizer with the Fair Anchorage campaign and a transgender woman, read the results aloud to a small group assembled at the city's election headquarters on Ship Creek.

In 2012 a basic anti-discrimination law was soundly defeated by Anchorage voters. Six years later, despite the best efforts of religious bigots and lying demagogues, those same voters overwhelmingly rejected an anti-trans bathroom bill. The struggle for LGBT civil rights protections in Anchorage has been long and heartbreaking. Securing the most basic protections for LGBT people in Alaska was such a slog—and Alaska was so behind the times—that a paragraph like this could be the lead of a news story as recently as August of 2015...

In the course of Alaska’s legislative history, there have been six bills to outlaw sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. In Anchorage, there have been at least three ordinances. They’ve all failed.

The Anchorage Assembly finally passed a law in September of 2016 making it illegal to discriminate against LGBT people in housing, employment, and public accommodations. Alaskan haters immediately began gathering signatures to force another vote—not to repeal the whole ordinance, but to compel trans women to use men's restrooms and trans men to use women's restrooms. The haters thought they could chip away at support for LGBT rights by attacking the most vulnerable members of the LGBT community. In all honesty, I thought they had a shot at winning. But Anchorage—the people of Anchorage—have obviously turned a corner.

There's so little good news out there that we really should take a moment to savor what happened last week in Anchorage. We should also send a huge congrats to all the tireless LGBT activists up in Anchorage who fought for decades and never gave up hope. They're an inspiration and an example.