Gay activists vs. Barack Obama: how a minority movement pushed a reluctant president to act.

• Author: Shackford, Scott
• Position: Book review

Don't Tell Me to Wait: How the Fight for Gay Rights Changed America and Transformed Obama's Presidency, by Kerry Eleveld, Basic Books, 368 pages, $27.99.

IT'S HARD TO BELIEVE how much the political and cultural environment for America's gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender citizens has transformed during the presidency of Barack Obama. In 2009, the U.S. military was still requiring members of the armed forces to remain in the closet if they were anything but heterosexual. Only Massachusetts and Connecticut legally recognized same-sex marriages. (California had briefly joined them, but Proposition 8 put a stop to new weddings the same night Obama was elected.)

In 2015, gay and lesbian members of the military may serve openly, and the Pentagon is putting together plans to accommodate transgender troops by 2016. Same-sex marriage is now the law of the land, both on the federal level and in each state. Federal hate crime laws were expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Federal contractors are forbidden by executive order from discriminating against gays. And during Obama's presidency, polls showed American support for recognizing same-sex marriage passing and staying beyond the 50 percent threshold, a broad signifier of cultural shifts. When Obama leaves office, he will surely hold up this legal and cultural sea change as one of his administration's major successes.

But how much credit does he deserve? In Don't Tell Me to Wait, Kerry Eleveld, a former political reporter for the gay magazine The Advocate, argues that it was relentless pressure from activists that forced the administration to take actions it might otherwise have tabled. Her account depicts a president and party establishment struggling to catch up with the pressure to change, not leading it.

Eleveld, who covered Obama's first term in Washington, is known for landing the gay press's first campaign interview with the future president. That interview, significantly, had its origins in gay frustrations. While Obama had been calling for equal rights for gays and lesbians, he objected to same-sex marriage, advocating separate-but-equal "civil unions" and for letting individual states dictate their own terms.

Candidate Obama vacillated between appealing to gays and lesbians, a traditional if small Democratic constituency, and religious voters, a much more sizeable bloc that went heavily Republican in 2004. When his campaign put together a gospel tour to appeal to...