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broken up with my long-term girlfriend, and Amy had a sense that Rachel and I would like each other, so she tried to get us both to go to services with her.
    I did not sit next to Rachel at the service, but walking out afterward, we bonded over the fact that we both thought the sermon (which had focused on Judy Garland) did not have the depth we expected for one of the most important Jewish holidays. Or as Rachel said, to the bemusement of the rest of the group, “Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean that I can’t think about nongay things.” I was intrigued by Rachel’s intelligence and candor, and by the time we arrived at the dinner Amy had arranged, I was angling to sit next to her. Rachel and I talked a lot that night, and I was impressed by how smart and funny she was, not to mention beautiful and warm. I wanted to see her again, but apparently Rachel had come away from our evening with a different thought: she wanted to set me up with a friend of hers. Amy would have none of it. When Rachel called her to suggest the idea, Amy said, “You know, I think Robbie would rather go out with you.” So that is how it started, with Amy the crazy genius yenta matchmaker plotting to get us together.
    On one of our early dates, Rachel, who was extremely active in local politics, took me to a political fund-raiser, which is when I began to understand just how deeply involved she was. She was on a first-name basis with all the elected officials there, people I had only read about in the newspapers. It soon became clear that Rachel had been walking the walk for a very long time, devoting herself to the causes that she cared about.
    And Rachel cared passionately not just about social change but also about the history of social change—one of my fascinations as well. Unsurprisingly, we often had different interpretations of key moments of history. For example, later that year we went out for dinner at a small, charming bistro in Chelsea and spent a romantic evening heatedly arguing about the relative political power of the Mensheviks versus the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution and whether peaceful revolution was ever possible.
    At one point Rachel (who had studied Russian history in graduate school) told me that had we both been alive in Russia at the time, I surely would have been a Bolshevik since I always like “to be on the winning side.” Horribly offended, I told Rachel that was the most insulting thing anyone had ever said to me. As the other people in the restaurant looked on as if we were completely nuts (which, perhaps, we were), I told Rachel that she was completely wrong: I too would have been killed because I would have remained loyal to her and would have been dragged along when she and all the other overly idealistic Mensheviks were murdered in the Bolshevik-led purges that followed. And yes, in case you are curious, Rachel and I still have debates like this to the present day.
    When I was ten, I was busy planning my legal career. By contrast, when Rachel was ten, she had long been involved in her father’s campaigns to get reelected to the Connecticut state legislature. After getting into an argument with her parents one summer morning about rules and chores, Rachel staged her first political protest: she drew three big posters saying “Children Are People Too” and recruited her little brother and sister to march around the living room, protesting with her. In the 1980s, when I was a freaked-out, closeted college student, Rachel was protesting the shutdown of the lesbian co-op at Smith College and getting quoted as the movement’s leader in the New York Post.
    Rachel has always been, in her own words, someone who believes that the world should—and could—be a fairer place. From her participation in New York’s Gay & Lesbian Independent Democrats to her work helping some of the first openly gay New York candidates like Deborah Glick, Tom Duane,