Sublime

know they’re all right. Find ways to counter the attitudes toward homosexuality that your profession has inculcated in both heterosexuals and homosexuals.”37 He was given a standing ovation.

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.

There were a few follow-up meetings—with the Federal Bureau of Prisons director, who promised to appoint a staff person to deal directly with homosexual complaints and to cease to call prison rape “homosexual,” when it was really an act of violence;

A particular form of sexual desire and expression has little effect on personality and emotional development.

Barney Frank called it a “bittersweet day.” It was the first law in American history, he said, “that begins the job of protecting LGBT people against prejudice,” but, he added, it came “too late to save countless victims.”39

With so much ignorance coming from a left-leaning public intellectual in Washington, DC, in 1977, what could gays of Dade County expect from their run-of-the-mill Florida neighbors?

A thousand gays—many of them more willing to come out for a party than they’d been to come out for campaign work—dressed formally in suits and ties despite the South Florida weather, now stood stunned and tearful, looking up at the screens that told them that most of their neighbors loathed them.

The appearance of hundreds of lesbians of means at a public event was not the only first that day of the Beverly Hills luncheon. It was also the first time that Hollywood celebrities had let themselves be seen at a fund-raiser whose express purpose was to support a lesbian and gay cause; and it was the start of a series of such celebrity events in

Milton Shapp