"He explained his position to Log Cabin club members early on," Mr. Spampinato remembered, "by saying, 'Regardless of what you call it, if you look at the benefits I support and the benefits Shannon supports, there's probably a hair of difference.' "

Calling Mr. Romney a flip-flopper on gay rights would be overly simplistic, Mr. Spampinato said. But he conceded that his old boss had promised the Log Cabin members that he would not champion a fight against same-sex marriage.

"It's definitely a shift in political priorities and strategy," he said.

Recollections by gay Republicans whom Mr. Romney courted and worked with during his campaign for governor, and in his unsuccessful run for the Senate in 1994, produce a portrait of a man they genuinely saw as their partner in their fight for broader acceptance.

After the breakfast meeting in 2002, where the Log Cabin board unanimously decided to endorse him, he said in an interview with Bay Windows, a gay newspaper, that he would use his bully pulpit as governor to lobby legislators for domestic partnership benefits.

"Those kinds of things I think I can generate a great deal of public support for," he said, "and therefore create pressure for legislators that otherwise might not think in those terms."

And, in the aftermath of the Massachusetts court decision, Mr. Romney, though aligning himself with the supporters of a constitutional amendment [ban], did order town clerks to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Some members of Log Cabin Republicans say that in doing so, he ultimately fulfilled his promise to them despite his own moral objections.

But far more express a sense of outrage at what they deem a betrayal in his current positioning.

"I didn't see him necessarily carrying the flag with missionary zeal" for gay rights back in 2002, said Richard Babson, a Log Cabin member who was at the breakfast meeting. "But I also didn't see him carrying the flag with missionary zeal for the other side."

Mr. Romney's eldest son, Tagg, 37, says that back in the early 1990s, he told his father privately that he was thinking about becoming a Democrat.

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I wrote it before, and I'll write it here again... if Mitt Romney somehow manages to become the GOP nomination, I get to sleep in on November 6, 2012.