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“At the time, there were a bunch of us here in Toronto — strategists, lawyers and other professionals — who wanted equality, and we were tired of leaving the issue to the activist left,” he told me. “We started to convince people that this was an issue of Canadian values, that the lives of gay and lesbian people involve more than just what they do with their genitals — that they go to work, take care of children, that they are sons and daughters who care for aging parents. As strategists, we started doing for our [gay] community what we’d been doing for our clients.”

The second big factor Mr. Watt points to is that, in the 1990s, many older gay men and women started coming out of the closet — which had a strong influence on the attitudes of their straight peers: “If you go through life without knowing anyone who is gay, it’s easy to be homophobic. When it’s a friend or family member, not as much.”

Mitchel Raphael, who formerly edited Toronto-based gay magazine fab and reported on the Parliament Hill social circuit for Maclean’s, says that this sort of shift in attitude was apparent all over the federal Conservative party during their first few years in government. “A lot of these people who were elected as rookie MPs, they came from areas of the country where they might have never met a gay person, or very few,” he says. “Then, suddenly, you’re in Ottawa, and gay people are everywhere — and so your attitude changes.”

“In the Conservative party, gay staffers were especially prominent, because often it’s the young men, the ones without kids, who tend to work the longest hours that [this PMO] demands,” Mr. Raphael adds. “It went up to the top: There was a group of gay men who would arrive to set up before the Prime Minister’s events — the ‘beauty brigade,’ I’d call them. In 2012, when Mitt Romney fired a worker after Republicans were complaining that he was gay, there were all sorts of jokes about how if Harper had to fire every gay aide he had, half his workforce would be gone.”