When Evan Wolfson bought his Greenwich Village apartment in 1996, he had barely enough time to move in before catching a plane to Hawaii to serve as co-counsel on Baehr v Miike. That case is now considered a watershed in the marriage equality movement, of which the charismatic lawyer is considered the prime architect. It was the first time a court ruled that excluding gay and lesbian couples from marriage was discrimination. It was also the catalyst in bringing about the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act, which was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013 — Wolfson’s campaign, Freedom to Marry, played an instrumental role.

In the past two years, he’s helped win 65 state and federal court rulings. The Supreme Court is set to rule imminently on whether same-sex marriages deserve federal protection. In the past two years, he has also completely renovated his apartment, which he now shares with his husband, Cheng He, 40, who uses his PhD in molecular biology to consult for pharmaceutical and healthcare companies. When they met online in 2002, there was an “instant connection”, says Wolfson, and they’ve been together ever since, marrying in 2011 when New York joined a growing number of states to legalise same-sex marriage.

After the couple gave up on a long-running fantasy to buy the studio next to their one-bedroom flat, they decided to renovate instead. “I wanted to make it his too, not just mine,” Wolfson explains. They found an extra room hiding in the “dead space of the entry hall and walk-in closet”, he says. “I thought if we pulled the kitchen forward and out, we’d be able to carve something into that dead space. It worked out better than we thought; it really feels like a little room instead of just an alcove,” Wolfson says excitedly of the newly created media room that is accessed by a large sliding door off the entry hall. Guests sleep on an elegant futon he found online, above which hangs a poster from the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Cabaret, the classic Kander and Ebb musical that shows the chilling consequences of inaction.