Last Saturday night, I poked my partner in the ribs to wake him up. Listen to this, I said.

We sat there as President Obama talked about the LGBT community. The word "homosexual" spoken in Obama's voice rolled around the room like a beach ball.

It was a strange and surreal moment.

Much of the criticism of Obama's Human Rights Campaign speech has come not from Limbaugh, O'Reilly or Hannity - but from the LGBT community.

Obama, they say, was extremely sympathetic to issues important to gay-rights activists during his campaign. But once he was elected, his silence has been deafening.

What happened to repealing "Don't ask, don't tell"?

What about same-sex marriage, and stronger anti-discrimination and hate-crime legislation?

Obama made several comparisons between the gay-rights movement and the civil-rights movement - a link that some in the African-American community would rather he didn't make. But the similarities are there. And, like the civil-rights movement, change is a step-by-step, brick-by-brick process that takes years.

It wasn't so long ago that most films depicted gays as little more than shadowy, effeminate figures whose lives usually ended tragically.

I remember standing next to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company based in San Francisco as he announced he was going to "clean the executive floor of all the damn queers." I watched family members of a deceased gay friend literally grab his personal possessions out of the hands of his grieving lover.

I remember how his face went pale with humiliation.

Gay men in other parts of the world have it much, much harder. They're routinely imprisoned, tortured, and killed in many Middle Eastern countries, including some we call our allies.

It's hard to say what's worse - the unjust institutional policies we've learned to cope with, or the thousands of little indignities that come daily with being a suppressed class.

This is what Obama was getting at - the raw emotion of discrimination can't be whisked away by a single act.

Its roots go deep and span generations.

But change has to begin somewhere. And last Saturday, young LGBT people heard a sitting US president say the words, start the conversation, and invite them into the White House.

My partner, an eternal optimist, is always reminding me of how much things have changed since we first met more than 30 years ago.

He's right. Christmas came early this year.

Thanks, Mr. President.