So much has changed since I wrote the first edition of this book in 2002 and early 2003. At that time same-sex marriage was a subject very much at the margins of the mainstream legal and political debate. Then, in 2003, the United States Supreme Court struck down the sodomy laws of Texas and the highest court in Massachusetts ruled that there is a right to same-sex marriage. From a constitutional point of view, these cases represented a sea change in the debate over same-sex marriage. The U.S. Supreme Court case overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, the legal bête noire of gay men and lesbians. That 1986 decision, which upheld Georgia's antisodomy laws, had held that supposed millennia of civilized disapproval was a sufficient basis for criminal punishment of gays and lesbians for private sexual acts. In overruling that decision, the Court dramatically changed the tone of the legal debate.

The Massachusetts court took that ball and ran further with it than anyone would have imagined at that time. By holding, under the Massachusetts Constitution, that same-sex marriage is a legal right, the court turned something that had so recently seemed a distant possibility into a flesh-and-blood reality.

These legal decisions unleashed a previously (almost) invisible swelling of anger, hope, and longing in the mainstream gay and lesbian community. Committed same-sex couples flew to the marriage altar in numbers that astounded both progressive and conservative political elites. This fierce desire for marriage quickly swept over other parts of the country.