The moment I met the man who would be pope, I cringed inside. I shook his hand, chatted briefly with him as a crowd of admirers pulled at his vestments, hoping to get a word with him, a kiss on a new baby’s cheek. A friend, an Argentine veteran of the Falklands war, enamoured of him, snapped a photo. That image is now in my mother’s living room, a proud conversation piece allowing her to tell guests about her son who knows the pope.

That frozen moment took place on Christmas Eve 2010, inside Catedral Metropolitana, when Pope Francis was still Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio. At the time, he was a man who fought against progress when it came to LGBT issues and had definitively lost, presiding over an institution that was becoming increasingly irrelevant. Bergoglio had described Argentina’s 2010 same-sex marriage law, Latin America’s first, as the work of the devil. His cathedral overlooking Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo was for years the site of ugly clashes between Catholic protesters and gay rights activists, who had to be kept separate by a line of police at the start of the national gay pride parade every November. By 2010, the defeated Catholic protesters were finally gone. Still, the cathedral was often splattered by vulgar graffiti and red paint, representing blood on the church’s hands. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner openly taunted Bergoglio for his regressive attitudes.

This all changed on 13 March 2013, when he was selected as pope. I made my way to the cathedral that day, photographing jubilant worshippers flocking to the building, even if their now famous leader was in Rome, waving from a balcony. I myself was struck by the fact that I now knew the man in the Holy See, something I could never have dreamed possible. I assumed that Pope Francis would be the same as Bergoglio, backwards on LGBT and other progressive issues, his church sliding ever more into irrelevance. But was I wrong. Bergoglio as Francis fooled me. Indeed I believe, he fooled us all.

While not changing doctrine, the pope made his famous declaration: “Who am I to judge?” in reference to gay clergy. He has spoken of including the children of gay families and the divorced in communion. He met and embraced a transgender man, Diego Neria Lejarraga. I know through social networks that he has met with members of the Argentine LGBT community, though whether those were merely handshakes or more substantial occasions isn’t clear to me. What is clear is that we could never have imagined Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, doing the same. Yet nor could I have ever imagined Archbishop Bergoglio, the very same man in different vestments, doing the same either.

However, my own meetings with Italian politicians and gay activists for New York’s Gay City News have shown me they are more sceptical than the rest of the world. They’ve been through the church’s Machiavellian manoeuvres before. Andrea Maccarrone, head of Circolo Mario Mieli, Rome’s main gay rights group, told me the church will pretend to change with the times. “They are very good at this, to adapt to the situation,” he said, explaining that’s how they’ve lasted for more than 2,000 years. Sergio Lo Giudice, an openly gay senator of the Democratic party, thinks the rhetoric is merely image. “There has been no opening on the doctrinal, so homosexuality remains for the Catholic church a sin as well as a moral disorder.”

Whether or not doctrine changes in the future, a dialogue that never existed before has begun. During WorldPride 2000, held in Rome, an event that directly challenged the Vatican and Pope John Paul II, I tried writing about gay Italian issues for an Italian-American magazine. At the time, the editor said the topic was untouchable because of conservative “spaghetti pot-stirring grandmothers,” among her readers. I would argue that even without doctrinal change, under Pope Francis those same grandmothers are serving spaghetti and having conversations with gay relatives because of his words.

Yes, as Pope Francis of Rome, the Bergoglio I knew in Buenos Aires has fooled me. The pope still has his conservative leanings on longstanding doctrine, most notably on ordination of women, a particular issue in the United States as nuns take on expanding roles. Conservatives are also cautious, if not worried, about changes the Pope might enact; the New York Times writer Ross Douthat has warned of schisms in the church and how real doctrinal change contradicts the notion of papal infallibility.

I am not the only LGBT journalist who finds the new pope both refreshing and surprising. Philadelphia Gay News publisher Mark Segal, long aware of the damage the Catholic church has wreaked on the LGBT community, has written a column thanking Pope Francis for his stance, in contrast to “Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput [who] now seems to be leading a campaign of opposition,” against the pope’s progressive attitude. The pope’s views on these issues will become clearer when he visits the city of brotherly love this September for the World Meeting of Families, but perhaps this always was Bergoglio’s true self. There’s no one above him any more telling him how to behave, unless you believe in the big guy in the sky.