Barack Obama’s legacy on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights will be front and center during his final State of the Union address on Tuesday evening: Jim Obergefell, the named plaintiff Obergefell v Hodges, the landmark supreme court case that legalized same-sex marriage across the country last year, will be joining first lady Michelle Obama in her personal box during the address. Obergefell is one of two dozen guests whom the White House says “represent the progress we have made since the president first delivered this speech seven years ago”.

After his prolonged “evolution” on the issue of same-sex marriage – he was for it before he was against it before he was for it – some exasperated gay men and lesbians speculated that Obama had lost the faith of a minority that had anticipated faster and more thorough action on its legislative priorities. But according to the activists, attorneys, plaintiffs and community leaders who helped make the dreams of gay and lesbian Americans a reality, Obama’s record on the expansion of LGBT liberties has been nothing short of miraculous.

“President Obama’s moral leadership and his smart, effective political and legal actions were hugely important and a shimmering part of his legacy, and I think he knows that as well,” said Evan Wolfson, founder and president of marriage advocacy organization Freedom to Marry. Wolfson, frequently described as the father of the same-sex marriage movement in the US, cites the president’s support of the movement both in public and private as crucial to its eventual success.

“Securing the support of the president, and his advocacy, not only through his actions but by his explanation to the American people, was a very important part of helping us build that critical mass of states – and even more, [to] build that critical mass of public support,” said Wolfson.

“The fight was a long fight for LGBT rights, but we struck while the iron was hot,” said Joe Vitale, who along with his husband Rob Talmas and their son Cooper Talmas-Vitale was one of the 31 plaintiffs in Obergefell v Hodges.

“This administration has worked harder and done more to advance LGBT rights than any other – and it should have, too, given where we are in our history,” said Susan Sommer, senior counsel and director of constitutional litigation at Lambda Legal, the nation’s oldest legal organization dedicated to expanding LGBT civil rights. Sommer, one of the Talmas-Vitale family’s attorneys, spearheaded the organization’s efforts in Obergefell v Hodges.

“This administration has really taken a lot of these issues to heart,” Sommer said, “and had a number of people within the administration who have treated LGBT issues as a high priority, and it has paid off in greater equality and liberty.”

Obama’s record has not been perfect, Mara Keisling, founding executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, told the Guardian, but his work on transgender rights was so strong that “you simply can’t compare it to any other administration”.

Gay marriage supporters flying balloons that spell ‘LOVE’ while waiting for supreme court’s decision on Obergefell v Hodges in June in Washington DC. Photograph: Evan Golub/Demotix/Corbis

“A lot of these principles are now cemented in place,” said Keisling. “Other [future] administrations will have to enforce protections for trans people. This president helped us blow it open. We’re in a whole different context now than we were eight years ago because of President Obama’s administration.”

Apart from gay marriage, LGBT advocates and activists see plenty of other advances to celebrate in the Obama administration’s accomplishments, from the successful passage of hate crimes legislation in 2009 to the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, the law that prohibited openly gay men and women from joining the US military.

Even the Affordable Care Act (ACA), perhaps the signature legislative accomplishment of the Obama administration, expanded protections for LGBT Americans in ways that, Sommer says, could not have happened under another administration.

“The rules that have been promulgated under [the ACA] – recommended rules, for example, that provide access to healthcare for transgender people – are going to save lives,” Sommer said. “It’s going to save lives for transgender people who have been previously barred from getting coverage from private insurers and Medicaid alike for critical transition-related healthcare, and in enacting the Affordable Care Act as its signature piece of legislation ... this administration has taken a very important step for those who are transgender.”

Administrative accomplishments regarding transgender protection, which have historically been sidelined in favor of protections for sexual orientation, have reached historic levels under the Obama administration, said Keisling. “We’ve been making policy arguments and legal arguments for decades that federal civil rights laws protect trans people. But now, we finally have an administration that gets it. They’re enforcing the laws that should be enforced and it has been really lifesaving and life changing trans people.”

It’s a record of which the White House is unquestionably pleased.



“President Obama is proud of the fact that after seven years, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans are freer and more secure in the pursuit of happiness than ever before,” Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to the president, told the Guardian. “Nothing demonstrates that point better than hearing from our young people – both LGBT and straight – who have grown up these past seven years in a country that has become dramatically more welcoming and supportive of LGBT Americans. We all have so much work left to do to make this a more equal and just nation, but the president is proud that when it comes to these and so many other issues, the arc of the moral universe has unquestionably bent a little closer towards justice.”

For many LGBT Americans, the long evolution of the president’s views on same-sex marriage indicated of a lack of interest on the issue. But for those who spent their entire careers in the service of expanding the right to marry to gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans in every state, the president’s prolonged journey to announcing his full support for same-sex marriage was regrettable, but, in the end, politically necessary.

“You can always say it should have happened sooner, but I don’t hold the president uniquely accountable for that,” said Wolfson. “It wasn’t just one person or one thing or one battle or one case – it was a movement.”

The president’s waiting game on publicly announcing support for same-sex marriage, according to Wolfson, was due more to strategy than uncertainty. “When the president did come out in support of the freedom to marry,” said Wolfson, “he did so after having taken some key, important steps, such as calling for heightened scrutiny in judicial review of sexual orientation discrimination cases including marriage, meaning that there would be a presumption of unconstitutionality rather than a rubber stamp.”

Sommer credits the Obama administration’s refusal to defend the Defense of Marriage Act (Doma) in court in 2011 as a major boost to the movement that stopped short of fully endorsing marriage rights for gays and lesbians. “Because of positions that the Justice Department took – ultimately refusing to defend Doma, going shoulder-to-shoulder with the side of equality for gay people – the DoJ’s participation made our job easier.”

Obama signs legislation to repeal ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ law in December 2010. Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

When the president did come out in favor of same-sex marriage in May 2012, “he did so in a way that helped explain to the American people why they should change their minds”, said Wolfson. “He talked about the journey, the ‘evolution’, in his word, and he talked not as a lawyer, not as a commander-in-chief, but as a dad.”

Obama’s framing of his conversion – personal, not political – was seen by Freedom to Marry as the most resonant and persuasive among people who had not yet joined their side. “[Obama] used the language that we had identified as the most effective at reaching the people who were not yet reached, and thereby gave millions more Americans permission to join him and the majority we had by then built, in moving to support the freedom to marry.”

That “permission” translated into a huge bump in national support for same-sex marriage. Support for the rights of gay and lesbian couples to wed had been in a statistical dead heat for years leading up to the president’s announcement, according to Gallup, peaking and dipping with nearly every new survey. But following the interview in which Obama discussed how his own daughters’ feelings on same-sex marriage helped prompt “a change in perspective”, support for full marriage rights increased to record highs – and has not fallen since.

“Everyone’s gonna complain” about his delay in supporting same-sex marriage, said Vitale, who said that he and his husband were more annoyed with what he saw as the gay community’s disinterest in activism than with any delays in support from the president. “I hold a grudge against a lot of people, but I don’t hold one against the president of the United States.”

Despite advances under Obama, however, advocates do see areas of concern.

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), proposed legislation that would prohibit discrimination in hiring and employment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, remains mired in Congress, as it has been for more than four decades. When Obama came out against so-called conversion therapy, the discredited practice whereby a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity is “changed” from gay to straight or from transgender to cisgender, he declined to explicitly call for a federal law banning the practice.



But for the most part, activists dissatisfied with the lack of progress in those and other areas consider Congress, rather than the president, the real obstacle to equality.

“While it [the administration] had a more hospitable Congress, it did repeal ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ [in 2010] - that was another major signature advancement,” said Sommer. “It’s a shame that the administration couldn’t accomplish more, in multiple ways.”

“You could argue that if Congress were a different kind of Congress, then it could have passed a law prohibiting discrimination in marriage throughout the country” long before the supreme court got involved, said Wolfson. “But there would be some question of whether that is within Congress’s purview, given that marriage is governed by the states.

“Having said that,” Wolfson added, “Congress certainly could pass, and should pass, a federal non-discrimination law that prohibits discrimination in other important areas of life, such as employment, housing, public accommodations, education and so on, akin to the Civil Rights Act.”

But when confronted with a recalcitrant legislature, the Obama administration’s executive actions, such as the signing of an executive order in 2014 prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, have been important “stop-gap” measures that expanded LGBT protections, Sommer said.

“That’s an example of the administration realistically seeing that it wasn’t going to be able to accomplish further goals in Congress and taking matters more into its own hands,” Sommer continued, emphasizing that there was still room for more action that did not require congressional approval.

Obama hosts a White House reception in honor of LBGT month in June 2012. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

“We’ve been advocating for – and wishing and waiting on - a federal directive to state and private federally funded providers of foster care services and child-welfare services that you can’t discriminate against LGBT children in the foster care system or prospective foster and adoptive parents,” she said. “That’s something that we think is sort of a no-brainer: federal dollars should not be used to discriminate against our nation’s most vulnerable children. There are children living a daily hell facing discrimination in the foster care system, and our federal funds are being used to support that discrimination.”

“But while we wait that clear directive,” Sommer said, “the responsible agency has done quite a bit at a lower level to advance non-discrimination principles and provide resources to make life better for LGBT people. We still have a ways to go, but it’s been taking steps that would have been unheard of in prior eras.”

Those who have benefitted most concretely from the president’s support and action on LGBT issues say that they are more than satisfied.

“I’m a supporter of Obama,” said Vitale. “I think I’m old enough now to understand that politics is politics. We went to his second inauguration, where he said that ‘our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters should be equal’, and that’s when I knew that he was gonna be on our side for the long haul. I understand that this was an eight-year process, and we needed him here for eight years to make this happen.”

“Obviously, any second-term president has the ability to have more of a voice,” said Talmas. “Clearly we’ve never seen this kind of movement from an administration – in our lifetimes or others. I’m totally excited that he lived up to his word. I, personally, would not have expected it in his first term. He’s absolutely set the standard.”

Additional reporting by Molly Redden in New York