After graduating from there he let his passion take him to the big city, Washington, D.C., where he got a job with a Republican House member, an old fraternity brother of his dad's. McCoy then started graduate school at George Washington University.

Over the next years McCoy advanced in many ways, he said — he learned the nuts and bolts of Congress and lawmaking, switched jobs to another Republican congressman, this time as part of the new "Newt Gingrich majority of 1994," and he finished a master's degree in international affairs.

But he was still a dyed-in-the-wool Republican. By 1996 he had become a staff expert on agriculture issues and made many good political contacts.

Through various friends, in the summer of 1996 he was asked to be a lead staff member on the campaign of the newly picked vice presidential nominee, Jack Kemp. He accepted. "It was exciting. As executive assistant to the two co-campaign directors, I worked mostly out of Washington, organizing all the logistics" of Kemp's intense but short, run. "I may have been a flunky but a pretty high-up flunky."

After the Dole-Kemp ticket went down in defeat, McCoy was kicking around for a job. Because of his knowledge of U.S. farm issues, he was hired as the staff legislative director for a ranking GOP House member, overseeing two House appropriation subcommittees. He helped with the drafting of a huge farm appropriations bill, a signed copy of which still hangs on his wall.

"All that time, in the campaign and working for the appropriations committee, I was in the process of coming out" as a gay man, recalls McCoy. And his political thinking was evolving, as well.

By 1997 he had decided to get out — out of the GOP halls of Congress, out of Washington, out of the life he was living. He got accepted to the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School, part of Yeshiva University — a Manhattan, New York City, college where a large percent of the student body is orthodox Jew.

That's right, a former-Republican, becoming-openly-gay-guy in a conservative religious school in New York City.

"It was pretty intense," McCoy says, adding that it was in New York that he finally came out to his friends and family.

He met Barr and started down a new road, one that would lead him to a civil marriage in Vermont and becoming a civil rights activist in Utah.

Upon graduation from law school, McCoy got a job at a big Wall Street law firm. When he'd had enough of those long hours after a year, he got a clerking job with former Utah Supreme Court Associate Justice Leonard H. Russon. And he and Barr moved to Salt Lake City.

"After law school I was through with the Republican Party, basically because of their social views."