When asked the most effective tool for implementing LGBT rights — what the LGBT and allied community has working in its favor more than any other variable — Colorado State Senator Pat Steadman put it simply with one word: “Time.” “As time goes on, things are going to change,” he said. “The older generations are going to be gone, and younger people are more open and have less hang-ups about sexuality.”

It’s something many advocates express — a feeling so pervasive and deep that it weaves its way as a given into everything we assume about the future. Between the dramatic shifts in media representations of LGBT people, the increasing public outcry against high-profile anti-LGBT statements, the gradual expansion of marriage equality in more and more states and the recent Supreme Court decisions abolishing DOMA and Prop. 8, young people today are growing up in a gay-friendly world that would’ve been unimaginable generations ago. This group of pro-gay millennials — who show overwhelming support for marriage equality and LGBT rights in polls — will continue to expand their proportion among the country’s voters and will eventually become its leaders, to presumably enact the laws and policies that today’s LGBT advocates refer to as full equality.