How did we pull this historic victory off? Fresh from this triumph, and with lessons from my work in marriage battles from Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut and California to draw on, I want to share my best thinking on the components that enabled us to win and what this means for the freedom to marry campaign moving forward.

First and foremost, this victory came about as a result of years of work and myriad conversations making the case for the freedom to marry. The Empire State Pride Agenda has been leading the way in New York, helping elevate the voices of same-sex couples in every part of the state, engaging hundreds of clergy through their Pride in the Pulpit effort, enlisting organized labor and business leaders to speak up for marriage, cultivating relationships with electeds at every level of government. It's that persistent, hard work that moves hearts and minds over time, and in New York it had been well-executed.

New York also benefited from the work of advocates in neighboring states to secure the freedom to marry - Connecticut and Massachusetts in particular. New Yorkers saw that marriage supported loving and committed couples and families in those states and hurt no one at all. As a result, by this year, a full 58 percent of New Yorkers supported the freedom to marry.

Demonstrating Electoral Strength

The Fight Back New York effort in the 2010 State Senate elections was a definitive game-changer. After the gut-wrenching 2009 loss in the Senate, Fight Back New York - an independent entity led by Gill Action Fund donors and staff - took on both Democrats and Republicans who voted against the freedom to marry. The levels of funds invested ($800,000), the strategic approach used to identify targets and capitalize on their vulnerabilities, and the success in unseating three incumbents, demonstrated that we would be relentless until we had a pro-marriage majority in the Senate. While anti-gay opponents like the National Organization for Marriage and the Conservative Party threaten, our side produced real results - results that we've demonstrated we will replicate until the job is done.

Governor Cuomo's Leadership

Andrew Cuomo's leadership in advancing this legislation was nothing short of masterful. Never before has a governor taken charge of marriage legislation and steered it through a legislature with such determination, conviction and political skill. During the final intensive two-week period, we met with Governor Cuomo multiple times. Every time, I walked away feeling that we'd win - he was at once a calming force, and a determined leader who developed plans, back-up plans, and contingencies to the back-ups to give us the best shot at ensuring victory.

It's been especially heartening to read in these past few days that Governor Cuomo's leadership on this issue has bolstered him as a Democratic frontrunner for the presidency in 2016 in the eyes of pundits - we've sure come a long way. Yet embracing this cause was clearly important to the Governor at a deeper level than the political. To me, nothing demonstrated that more than the fact that he invited his two daughters to the Capitol to witness the history that he was championing.

Quite simply, had the governor not taken this cause on as his own or worked it so skillfully, we would not be celebrating right now.

Executing a Republican Strategy

When the Republicans regained control of the Senate in the 2010 elections, the conventional wisdom was that the marriage bill stood no chance. LGBT advocates led by Gill Action assembled a top-notch Republican advocacy team, hiring Jeff Cook - a veteran GOP strategist - to manage the effort, as well as Mike Avella, former chief counsel to the Senate Republicans, to mount the Republican lobbying effort. Freedom to Marry partnered in this effort by, first, engaging John McArtle, the former top adviser to Senate Majority Leaders Bruno and Skelos, to supplement the communications effort and, second, conducting in-district polling using the Republican conference's main pollster to help show certain Republicans that a pro-marriage vote would not be harmful.

Additionally, our coalition enlisted prominent Republican business and political leaders including former Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman, financier Paul Singer, and New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg (who though an Independent is a strong supporter of the Republican conference), to make the moral and political case for marriage to Republican senators. We worked overtime to enlist Republican supporters at the local level to make the case to their own lawmakers. In the end, we together convinced enough Senate Republicans that allowing a vote on the bill and ultimately advancing the bill was both right and politically strategic - the first time ever that a Republican-controlled legislative chamber has voted for the freedom to marry.

New Yorkers United for Marriage Coalition

Freedom to Marry, the Empire State Pride Agenda, and the Human Rights Campaign, along with Marriage Equality New York and Log Cabin Republicans of New York, joined forces to integrate the work each organization was doing on its own. We each agreed to largely subsume our organizational identities to the coalition and combine activities for the greater good of winning marriage in New York. We jointly hired a talented communications firm, SKD Knickerbocker, to coordinate our media efforts; we war-roomed together with the governor's senior team; and we began true integration of all of the work - lobbying, field, media, "grasstops" mobilization, outreach to electeds and allies. For the last few weeks of the campaign, a core group of us spoke on the phone every morning at 8:30 AM and our communications staff spoke daily for the final month of the campaign. We dealt honestly with organizational interests and did our best to ensure they did not get in the way of the bigger goal of winning.

Engaging Lawmakers in the Field

Our field effort needed to have two outcomes: First, we needed to demonstrate to senators who had not voted with us that large numbers of their constituents supported the freedom to marry. Second, we needed to get couples, parents, and families to sit down with lawmakers and make personal appeals about why marriage matters to them. Our coalition did both tasks powerfully.

Led by the Human Rights Campaign's field team, our coalition of organizations worked together to generate those contacts, ultimately ensuring that lawmakers heard directly from more than 125,000 New Yorkers. This was accomplished through boots-on-the-ground organizing, with close to 40 organizers spread out across the state, from Eastern Long Island to Buffalo and everywhere in between, collecting post cards, organizing phone banks and getting people to call their lawmakers from shopping centers, festivals and churches - wherever people congregated. Several lawmakers pointed directly to the quantity of constituent contacts as a primary reason for changing their vote.

In addition, we ensured that each of the lawmakers on our list had sit-down, heartfelt conversations with same-sex couples and their families - a task that Freedom to Marry organizers took on intensively in the last couple of weeks. We prepped family members to ensure they were ready to share their own story with their lawmaker. And as is always the case, these conversations had profound effects on lawmakers as they learned first-hand why marriage is so important to same-sex couples and their families, including those who live in their own communities.

Enlisting Unusual Suspects

New Yorkers United for Marriage made a special effort to demonstrate how mainstream supporting the freedom to marry had become by enlisting some real unusual suspects. From businesses including Xerox, Alcoa, and McGraw-Hill, and the heads of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup, to an unprecedented number of pro athletes including NBA star Steve Nash, New York Rangers star Sean Avery, and New York Giants great Michael Strahan, our coalition was able to put forward counter-intuitive voices, showing how mainstream the issue had become and giving greater license to moderate senators to change their positions.

Creating the Communications Drumbeat

New Yorkers United for Marriage set a very high bar - to have an announcement every day of the campaign - a key endorsement, a new poll, success in the field work - that we would roll out to newspapers and television stations across the state. In doing so, we literally built our own momentum over the course of several months.

We also trained couples in key parts of the state to become media spokespeople so that we could generate human interest stories highlighting the importance of marriage to those couples. We engaged bloggers together and coordinated and shared use of new media tools. In all of this work and our multi-million dollar paid media campaign (consisting of an effective and serious television buy, direct mail into targeted districts, and newspaper ads), the coalition adopted the messaging framework that Freedom to Marry developed based on extensive national research on how to making the case effectively to the "moveable middle" on marriage - messaging that Freedom to Marry is putting into action nationwide through our Why Marriage Matters public education campaign, now shared by partners organizations around the country.

Raising Dollars Locally

New Yorkers United for Marriage expended approximately $2 million on its media and direct mail campaign (not counting the funds that coalition partners put into the push). The vast majority of those dollars came from local, New York sources. New York-based philanthropists observed the governor's commitment and the advocates' coordinated efforts, and rose to the occasion in a big way. While out-of-state funds from our movement's familiar funders were a key part of the effort, they were a relatively small percentage of the total.

Moving Forward in the States

From my own experience on multiple state-level marriage campaigns, I've found that there is no 'one size fits all' campaign model; each campaign must take into account the political context as well as the relative strengths and weaknesses of the parties involved. What is clear, though, is that that successful campaigns need to incorporate most (if not each) of the above components.

A tight-knit coalition capable of building on what the marriage movement has done right and not just reinventing the wheel, consisting of players that are adding real value in accomplishing the crucial elements of the campaign, has proven effective. It's what Freedom to Marry and our partners achieved in New York, what national and local partners built in Massachusetts, and it's proving successful in our collective efforts to fend off a repeal of the freedom to marry in New Hampshire.

At Freedom to Marry, alongside our federal campaign to overturn so-called DOMA and our national public education and persuasion campaigns, we have built (and are still growing) the central capacities needed to elevate and assist state-wide campaigns in each of the crucial areas, from strategy development to new media, lobbying to field. We don't seek to run state-based campaigns ourselves. Instead, we look for state-based and national partners who will join together with us in adding crucial elements to the mix, and work to form tightly knit coalitions to coordinate and manage the battles on each battlefield.

New Yorkers United for Marriage is a terrifically successful model of what that can look like. And while we cannot always control who the governor is, we do know how to put forth our best effort and run smart and winning campaigns. We at Freedom to Marry are eager to carry the New York momentum forward and partner up in the next round of states to bring home more victories. So....let's go!

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I am especially proud of our focus and success building support in communities of color. With our community partners, we've demonstrated that, through real engagement, Latinos and African-Americans will move our way on the freedom to marry, and at rates higher than Anglos. And we've partnered with our colleagues working in the Asian-Pacific Islander communities to launch groundbreaking research on messaging in Chinese and Filipino communities.

As we all know, the landscape has shifted dramatically.

However, in the present economic climate, where there's a real sense that Prop 8 could be overturned in the courts in the next two years, the funding is simply not available for EQCA to maintain the program it has put in place.

This means EQCA needs to make some changes, and it is. EQCA is maintaining a solid marriage program, with the Let California Ring public education campaign at the center working to devise and disseminate messaging that will continue to grow support, both across the board and in target communities. My colleague Andrea Shorter, deputy director of marriage and coalitions, will lead the efforts to grow support through coalitional outreach and our speaker's bureau. At the same time, after the November elections, EQCA is significantly reducing its field staff and is closing some of its offices.

There are so many deserving of thanks for the work we've undertaken. I want to thank our team of dedicated organizers for rising to the challenge of building a campaign focused on persuading Californians in the places where the work needed to happen most--places like the Central Valley, the Inland Empire, Orange County, East and South Los Angeles, and more. Their work, and that of the thousands of dedicated volunteers, has made a tremendous, measurable and permanent difference. I want to thank Geoff Kors and the EQCA staff and Boards of Directors for creating the opportunity to build this effort, and for supporting it so strongly. I want to thank the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force for loaning senior staff to the effort. Most of all, I want to thank my long-time colleague Amy Mello, who came with me from Massachusetts to serve as field director, for her wisdom and dedication in putting in place the most sophisticated field program our movement has known. Amy, with whom I have worked for six years, will be joining Equality Maine to head up its field efforts and prepare for a return to the ballot. She is simply the best, and this movement owes this straight woman educated in the Catholic schools of southern Massachusetts and Rhode Island a huge debt of gratitude.

As for me, I am joining forces with the national organization Freedom to Marry to serve as a senior consultant and a member of their senior team (you can check out the press release here). Freedom to Marry's exclusive mission is to win the right of same-sex couples to marry nationwide, and I am privileged to be joining its founder who is also a long-time mentor, Evan Wolfson, and the tremendous team he has assembled to help carry out this crucial mission.

In my work with Freedom to Marry, a substantial portion of my time will be dedicated to continuing to build and strengthen the marriage education campaign on the ground in California, working closely with the Let California Ring coalition, of which Freedom to Marry is a key partner. I will continue to be based out of Los Angeles.

The majority of my work will be helping Freedom to Marry seize this unique moment in history to expand the national marriage movement. With the federal court cases on the advance, a nationwide majority for marriage (we've come a long way!), and the freedom to marry within reach in several more states in 2011, we have an unprecedented opportunity to seize right now. In short, we have momentum and we must grow it.

As part of the Freedom to Marry senior team, I will be taking on several signature projects, including expanding our Voices for Equality effort to demonstrate that it is out of the mainstream to not support the freedom to marry, by getting business and civic leaders, Republicans and conservatives, professional athletes, and other unexpected noteworthy people to voice support; and through securing additional tangible wins by growing the number of states that allow the freedom to marry.

It's now been a decade since I began working as a volunteer to secure the freedom to marry in Massachusetts. In those early days, I knew the freedom to marry was right but I didn't know if we'd prevail. I think back upon the years in Massachusetts, after I'd joined the effort full-time, when we were the only state in the country with marriage, and how it sometimes felt like our hold on that right was teetering while so many powerful forces--from the president to the Vatican--were gunning for us. Now, as we approach 2011, I am confident that we will prevail, and know that we can make tremendous, groundbreaking strides in the months ahead.

Most of all, I feel tremendous gratitude that I've had the opportunity to do this work over the past decade. I of course love the politics of it all but what's been most inspirational has been getting to help same-sex couples and LGBT individuals, their family members and friends, find their voice and their power, step out of their comfort zone, and tell their stories about why they should have the right to marry the person who they love. It is they who keep me focused ahead in this work (you can see what I'm talking about here).

Here's to working together on many more victories!

This means that marriage is marriage, plain and simple--no marriage with limited benefits for same-sex couples and with full benefits for straight couples. If this decision holds, all couples who marry in states where marriage equality is the law of the land will be eligible for the many supports and protections offered by the federal government--from the right to take leave to care for one's spouse, to the right to inherit without paying burdensome taxes.

As I contemplate this ruling, two thoughts come to mind. First, I am reminded of how lucky we are to have Mary Bonauto, the lead attorney in this case, fighting for us. When the history books of our fight for justice are written, Mary deserves a very prominent role. Director of the civil rights practice for Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, Bonauto co-led the legal effort in Vermont that led to the first-ever civil unions victory, and spearheaded the challenge to Massachusetts law that led to marriage rights for same-sex couples for the first time in our country's history.

In my years in Massachusetts, I had what I consider the truest honor of working alongside Bonauto and the amazing team at GLAD. There's no one I'd rather join in battle--she is brilliant and relentless, and exudes integrity.

In May of 2009 on my first trip back to Massachusetts, I ran into Coakley, and she greeted me with a hug with a giant smile. I had a feeling of what might be coming out of the AG's office, and very shortly thereafter, the state filed suit.

Secondly, in this world of lawsuits, judges, appeals and the like, it is so important for us to remember what we are fighting for. Our opponents argue this is all about activist judges. In fact, it's not--it's about real people who are committed to one another and simply want their government to treat them fairly.

It's about couples like Ron and Tom from Indio, who have been together for 57 years and married for one. Both served their country, have taken care of one another in sickness and in health, and finally feel like fuller citizens now that they are legally married.

Even in court, while judges rely upon constitutions for their rulings, it's our personal stories that we share with them that cause them to understand why marriage for same-sex couples is a requirement for equality in our society.

Have you shared your story with everyone who is important to you about why you cherish the freedom to marry? Please do--it's the only way we will prevail. You can share your story with those in your community as well, by joining up and canvassing with Equality California.

Step by step, day by day, we make progress. My fingers are crossed about the Prop 8 case--stay tuned!

More than any other, Harvey Milk lit the spark in me to fight, and gave me a vision and understanding of what that fight should look like.

Not any more. The masterful film Milk changed all that and helped Equality California, Senator Mark Leno and so many others pass a bill to honor Harvey Milk and create an official California Day of Recognition in his memory. We celebrate the first ever Harvey Milk Day this Saturday May 22, on what would have been Harvey Milk's 80th birthday.

What would Harvey Milk tell us to do today? No question he'd want us to all come out. But I think he'd go a step further by telling us that coming out is no longer enough. One of the things I love so much about Harvey Milk is how he held a profoundly idealistic vision while embracing the use of the political process to achieve the vision. He knew that the way to bring about change was by changing hearts and minds so that we could win the votes of judges, electeds, and the public.

I can almost hear what I think Harvey would tell us if he could be here for his 80th birthday:

Brothers and sisters, 30 years ago, I called on all LGBT people to come out in order to break down the myths and destroy the lies and distortions. But today, as we fight for the right to marry the person we love, to be free from the fear that we'll be fired from our jobs, and to serve our country in the military openly and proudly, I tell you that coming out is no longer enough.

I implore you, don't sit quietly by while your family, neighbors and elected officials vote against your rights, satisfied that you've already come out. You need to tell them why it's important to you personally that you have that right, and ask them for their support. I know it's not easy, but losing our freedoms at the ballot box and having our elected leaders stand by while we face discrimination isn't easy either.

The belief in the power of our stories is why Equality California has embarked, over the past year, on perhaps the largest state-wide educational campaign for LGBT rights our movement has ever seen, one that embraces a strategy of face-to-face conversations. In the past year, we've opened nine field offices staffed by full-time organizers whose primary purpose is to get LGBT people and our allies to make the direct case to people who do not yet support the freedom to marry.

Going door-to-door in the heat of Fresno or Riverside and engaging in conversations with those who are not yet with us is challenging. But it works, transforming those to whom we are speaking and even transforming ourselves in the process. Our volunteers see that many people who aren't yet with us aren't hateful. Instead, they are conflicted and are sorting their way through an issue that is difficult for them. That's why 80 percent of our volunteers sign up to go door-to-door again and again.

We are having a great impact on the people with whom we speak. Of those we engage who are not with us, more than a quarter move to become significantly more supportive (our highest persuasion rate is with Latinos and African-Americans). And we find, in follow-up conversations several months later, the majority of these shifts in position hold over time. People tell our researchers that the conversation was respectful and that they appreciated someone taking the time to come to their door and engage them. Through our door-to-door work, as well as through engaging people at festivals, fairs, shopping areas, and wherever else people congregate, we've had 850,000 conversations in the past 12 months. These conversations have been with supporters who we've turned into volunteers and donors, as well as with opponents who have moved much closer to our position.

Polling shows that this work is making a real difference. According to the annual Public Policy Institute of California poll, support for the freedom to marry in California--which had stagnated between 44 and 45 percent between 2004 and 2009--jumped to 50 percent in 2010. And opposition--which had hovered between 48 and 50 percent--dropped to 45 percent. While we don't attribute all these gains to our work, there's no question that these conversations, and the conversations that they in turn have spawned, have had a significant impact in humanizing the issue and building support.

In the end, how quickly we grow support is up to you. Harvey was right--we are here to recruit you! We will train you, we will support you, we will give you reminder calls, but we will only be successful if you join us. If you've never done this work before, make the commitment to try it once--this Saturday, on Harvey Milk Day. Join Equality California, along with more than 100 partner organizations, dozens of elected officials, Dustin Lance Black, Cleve Jones, Dolores Huerta, and hundreds (hopefully thousands!) of volunteers. Help us make the first Harvey Milk Day the largest day of action in California LGBT history, a day that befits this giant of a person.