betrayed. Even so, in 2008, according to polls at the time, LGBT voters in Democratic primaries preferred Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, who at that juncture didn’t support marriage equality, either.

And in late 2008, when Clinton returned to the Senate after conceding the race to Obama, her staff urged her to voice full support for marriage equality. Polling was showing rapidly increasing acceptance, and they wanted her to get out in front of that movement. That didn’t happen, obviously—Obama asked Clinton to be Secretary of State, and she accepted.

When Clinton started as Secretary of State, in January of 2009, she inherited a department that LGBT staffers had seen as indifferent to their rights during the George W. Bush administration. They grumbled that the department would pay for theirservice officer who in 2007 had quit to protest the situation at the State Department in the Bush administration. Obama then put him on the department’s transition team. “It was, like, the first thing she did, so I gained a lot of respect for her.”

Clinton also was the first Secretary of State to give a speech at the State Department’s annual event marking gay pride month. And in 2011, in Geneva, in remarks for International Human Rights Day, and to an audience that included diplomats from countries in Africa and the Middle East with retrograde LGBT rights records, she said, “Some have suggested that gay rights and human rights are separate and distinct; but, in fact, they are one and the same.”

Judging from back-and-forth in the released emails,