Fifteen years ago today, at one minute past midnight on 20 September 2011, a policy that had governed seventeen years of American military life simply stopped being in force. "Don't ask, don't tell" had taken effect in February 1994; it ended not with a dramatic scene but with a clock.

The procedure is worth pausing over, because procedure is where most of the waiting happens. Congress passed the repeal in December 2010, but the law did not switch anything off by itself. It required certification from the President, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs that the armed forces were ready, and then a further sixty days. Certification came in July 2011. So the calendar did the last stretch of the work, the way calendars do: quietly, and at its own pace.

What I remember from the reporting of that week is smaller than any of that. Phone calls. Service members ringing parents and partners and old friends and, for the first time in uniform, using their own names and the names of the people they loved, without arranging the sentence carefully first. Seventeen years of careful sentences, and then an ordinary Tuesday, and someone saying plainly who was waiting for them at home.