“I felt that I had to overachieve,” he told me, “as a way to show that I was OK.”

They have the serene look of people who know that, even though the battle was lost, the war will be won.

The knowledge is more than consolation, it is confirmation. It is a confirmation of all they have been through, of the changes they have seen, of the distance traveled. On a long journey, what is one more step?

The State Senate last week rejected a bill to legalize gay marriage. Larry Van Heusen and Bob Scharf see it as just another road marker. Each was once, in a sense, ashamed to be gay. Scharf as a young man prayed that his attraction for men was a phase; that one day he would see a sexy girl and feel an attraction.

“There still are people who think this is not an orientation, it is a preference,” he said. “Believe me, there was a time when I wished I could have chosen to be something else.”

Van Heusen remembers the days before the gay pride movement, when he internalized society’s condemnation with a misplaced self-loathing.

“I felt that I had to overachieve,” he told me, “as a way to show that I was OK.”

Discrimination bears different variations of bitter fruit. The men talk now about the emotional cost of their sexuality from the comfortable perspective of maturity and self-acceptance. Self-awareness is the happy product of the evolution through adulthood.

Society, too, has evolved. Openly gay couples these days do not usually prompt a second look. Gay pride parades march down the middle of Main Streets. Relatively few gay folks keep the closet door closed. Van Heusen said it was only a few years ago that he thought gay marriage might be seen in his lifetime.

I sat Thursday in the living room of the couple’s tidy house in Kenmore. A decorative straw scarecrow hangs on the front door of the brick ranch house. Van Heusen is 63 and stick-thin, a retired psychiatric social worker who speaks softly but carries a big IQ.

Scharf, a retired HSBC executive, peers through thick eyeglasses and chats easily. The presence of the couple, together for 34 years, has not cracked the bedrock upon which the conventional village stands. The thought that it might is amusing.

Years from now, too, I think most folks will look back in amusement and disbelief over the fuss about legalizing gay marriage. Although many people place a religious connotation on the word “marriage,” Van Heusen and Scharf see it as the law does—as a state-sanctioned confirmation of a commitment.

I am not sure of what threat gays present to an institution battered by the massive number of heterosexuals who do not—mostly for understandable reasons— fulfill the lifetime vow. All that Van Heusen, Scharf and thousands like them want is for society to acknowledge their full humanity and the practical benefits—from inheritence laws to hospital visitations—that come with it. They are, I think, in a similar place to where women were a century ago, and blacks more recently. But their time, too, is coming.

“The reason we are not letting go of [gay marriage] is the other side is so adamant that ‘We don’t want you to be at our level,’ ” Van Heusen said. “That is what really hurts. That is the moral connotation of this—to keep gays a little bit beneath everyone else.”

In the long run, in a healthy society, discrimination does not stand. This week’s vote failed. But I think that each battering at the door weakens the lock.

“Every time it is raised further desensitizes people to the idea,” said Van Heusen. “It makes it easier for the next time.”

Whether that next time is a year or two away does not much matter. Larry Van Heusen and Bob Scharf can wait. They have time and again seen what time can do.