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current organizations, and as a student of Harvey Milk, I will tell you they are not just the same ‘kind’ of people who told Milk it was too soon for a gay elected official back in 1977—some of them are the very same people.”
    The movement was at a critical juncture, he continued, and “as Martin Luther King said on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, ‘This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.’” Full equality, he said, could only happen at the federal level.
    “The strategy of the past decade has failed,” he declared, a direct rebuke to many in the audience. “We have lost state and local fights time and again.
    “It has been thirty years since Harvey Milk gave his life in our struggle for equality, and we will not wait thirty years more. It is time for us to stop asking for crumbs and demand the real thing.”
    If there was applause, Black didn’t remember any. Instead, he recalled an ocean of pursed lips and crossed arms, and that he was literally trembling as he walked off the stage. Wolfson was silently seething. The idea that this newcomer thought his strategy timid and incremental infuriated him; no one wanted full federal equality more than him, but national change required more than wishful thinking.
    “Harvey Milk didn’t start by running for president,” he later grumbled. “He ran for city supervisor, and he ran and lost twice before he won.”
    Tim Gill, whose foundation was the largest funder of gay rights causes in the country, denounced Black outright, telling the crowd he was naïve and misguided. Chad, who was standing in the wings with Bruce Cohen, was shocked at the level of open hostility. After all, Black hadn’t even specifically mentioned marriage or a federal lawsuit.
    “Chad was saying, ‘Oh my God, we are going to be loathed and hated. How are we going to sell this?’” Black recalled.
    And things were about to get worse.

    On May 14, 2009, Chad, Kristina, and Cohen once again assembled for lunch at the Reiners’. It was time to talk to the lawyers who had been fighting this battle for years—and ask for their support.
    Jenny Pizer, the law and policy director of Lambda Legal, was there, as was Jon Davidson, the group’s legal director. Lambda was the oldest and largest legal organization devoted to fighting for the rights of gays and lesbians. Ramona Ripston, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Southern California office, had also come with her chief counsel, Mark Rosenbaum. Both Lambda and the ACLU had been deeply involved in the effort to win the freedom to marry at the California State Supreme Court.
    Since Olson’s involvement in a potential lawsuit was sure to be the subjectof controversy, it would not do to have him present the group’s still confidential plans. Instead, he sent an emissary: Ted Boutrous, a liberal forty-eight-year-old managing partner in the firm’s Los Angeles office with thick silver hair and a perpetual California tan.
    Rob Reiner gave a quick synopsis of their discussions to date. Then he turned it over to Boutrous.
    Boutrous and Olson had worked on numerous high-profile Supreme Court cases together, across a broad swath of the legal landscape. They had won limits on excessive punitive damages on behalf of corporate clients, worked with John Roberts before he became a Supreme Court justice on a case involving complex securities law, and litigated a major federal separation-of-powers case that constrained Congress’s ability to pass laws aimed at undermining Supreme Court decisions.
    “Someone is going to bring a federal marriage lawsuit,” Boutrous said. “And you won’t find a better advocate than Ted Olson.”
    But he hadn’t gotten far before the invited lawyers all seemed to pile on at once, a cacophony of criticism that grew increasingly heated. How dare they entrust something so important to someone who wasn’t one of them? They