The revered senior rabbi of the reform Temple Israel, Joseph Narot, who’d been a champion of black civil rights and a strong opponent of the war in Vietnam, spoke in favor of the amendment: “If God is love, then let it be the love for all mankind,” he said.

Homosexuality as a “clinical entity” simply does not exist, she told her fellow psychologists, because the homosexual population is as varied as the heterosexual population.

As the attorney general was walking up the grand staircase to the baroque rotunda to meet them, she tweeted her followers: “About to marry the Prop 8 plaintiffs, Kristin Perry and Sandy Stier. Wedding bells are ringing.”41

Attorney General Gale Norton appealed to the Colorado State Supreme Court to get the injunction lifted. (The issue was so heated that the proceedings were broadcast live on Court TV.)78 That august body backed Judge Bayless: Amendment 2 was dubious, the judges said. “Fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote,” one judge argued. Amendment 2

The referendum was held in 1974 by mail. Of the 17,905 APA members eligible to cast a vote, only 10,555 bothered to send in a ballot. Fifty-eight percent of them voted to uphold the board of trustees’s decision. The seventh printing of the DSM-II, which would be published later that year, would not include “homosexuality per se.”61

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Thompson, tireless and unrelenting, brought her case to the Minnesota Court of Appeals. There her lawyers argued eloquently that it was “astonishing” that a judge would issue an order that would “have the effect of limiting Sharon Kowalski’s contact with Thompson and the love Karen feels for her.” The lawyers demanded to know, “In what moral framew

Later, at the mortuary, the director told Strong that though she was paying for the funeral, she had no right to make decisions, “a family member must do it.” Fleming’s death certificate stated she was unmarried.3 Charlene Strong, who hadn’t been a gay rights activist before, became one.

Gay men stared their mortality in the face, concluded they had little to lose, that silence equaled death, and they made a giant collective leap out of the closet.