At a Pride Month dinner thrown by the Justice Department in 2014—something of a victory lap for the LGBT legal movement after the prior year’s victory in Windsor v. United States—the lawyer Pamela Karlan, an out lesbian and, at the time the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Obama DOJ—told a story that illustrates this point. She was describing a moment at the Supreme Court in 2003, just after the oral arguments in Lawrence v. Texas. “I was standing in the well of the court with Walter Dellinger,” Karlan told the dinner guests. “Linda Greenhouse, who was then the New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter, came over. ‘What did you think was the most interesting part of the argument?’ Walter asked. Without missing a beat, Linda replied, ‘The bar section.’ What she meant was this. A huge proportion of the gay, lesbian and bisexual former clerks and of LGBT members of the Supreme Court bar had showed up. And when the Justices came out from behind the velvet curtain, you could actually see them reacting to our presence as their eyes swept across the courtroom.”