The Making of the Marriage Equality Revolution

If everything goes according to plan, Evan Wolfson and Marc Solomon will be unemployed some time later this year.

On Tuesday, both men will occupy coveted seats in the United States Supreme Court, as nine justices hear oral arguments in a consolidated case that will ultimately determine whether states have a constitutional right to bar same-sex couples from marrying.

For Wolfson, the founder and president of Freedom to Marry, a national organization that has been driving a strategy to win marriage equality nationwide, as well as a lead investor and organizer in more than 25 statewide marriage equality campaigns, this day has been more than three decades in the making. As a third-year law student at Harvard in 1983, Wolfson wrote a 77-page paper that laid out a comprehensive historical and legal argument for marriage equality. His thesis was more unusual than controversial; at the time, few if any reputable legal scholars or gay rights activists thought or cared a great deal about marriage.