“I never wanted to be the gay town administrator; I never wanted to be the gay leader; I just wanted to be the leader,” Easton Town Administrator David Colton tells The Boston Globe this morning. “You have to risk being defined that way in order to shed the label. How do you dispel that rumor until you speak it?”

On the eve of his wedding to longtime partner Brian Khoo, to be attended by the five town selectmen and state Sen. Brian A. Joyce, Colton sees his wedding as a recognition of his accomplishments as an openly gay elected official. Colton, 50, says that the wedding speaks to the importance why marriage equality is so important, stating that it’s “like a validation of all the effort, of maintaining a relationship.”

The spirit will be a far cry from the days a decade or so ago when, Colton said, discrimination was still evident. He said he perceived it when he worked as a department head in Quincy, a job he left in 2002. And he perceived it when he and Khoo would walk in Boston’s theater district.

Things improved, but slowly. Colton said that, for him, the shift is marked by a phone call he received a few years ago from a Milton selectman, who called to express support for an opinion piece Colton penned on same-sex marriage for a local newspaper. “He was so warm, so sincere about it, that it wasn’t about work,” Colton said. “It was a friendly gesture, not a political gesture.”

Khoo saw things change, too, and he said it’s not simply “the fact that gays are able to get married in Massachusetts.” “It’s got to be something else. It’s got to be the mentality of people changing, beyond acceptance, beyond tolerance.”