Evan and Cheng

When Cheng went on his first date with Evan in 2002, he had no idea he was meeting the founder of Freedom to Marry and one of the National Law Journal’s “100 Most Influential Lawyers in America.” “On our date,” says Cheng, “he asked me a question that wasn’t a typical first date question: ‘what are the major issues for LGBT rights today?’ Marriage wasn’t even on my mind. I talked about ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell' and about employment discrimination, but he brought up marriage. The day after, I was thinking ‘wait a minute, I thought I saw him in The Advocate. … Didn't I just see that guy's picture?’” Cheng flipped through the latest issue of the magazine, and sure enough, there was Evan.

Evan describes his advocacy for gay marriage as not necessarily being rooted in personal motivations: “the thing that drove me in my work was never about my wanting to get married. It was always a matter of, first and foremost, justice and the right answer legally, constitutionally, and morally.” Additionally, Evan believed legalizing gay marriage would gain same-sex couples more than marriage equality alone: “I believed that marriage was an engine of transformation, that claiming the freedom to marry would claim more rights than just marriage.”

"What [marriage] means for me is I’m going to be able to take this ring off my right hand and move it to my left hand, as I get legally married to the person I love.” —Evan Wolfson

Since he and Cheng have become a couple, there have been numerous occasions when the fight for marriage equality became personal. At airports, Cheng would have to enter a separate line for immigration—“he wasn’t considered my family,” Evan explains. Later on, when Anderson Cooper was interviewing Evan in June 2011, as votes were being counted on Marriage Equality Act in New York, Cooper asked “but what about you? How do you actually feel about this vote?” Evan describes this moment: “I had to think about it … get out of role and think about ‘what was I feeling?’ And what I said was, ‘well, what it means for me is I’m going to be be able to take this ring off my right hand and move it to my left hand, as I get legally married to the person I love.”