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and Christine Quinn get elected to public office, she has always been at the forefront of LGBT political activism. By the time we met, in 1999, I was out of the closet at Paul, Weiss, but only in that tiptoeing, nothing-to-see-here, don’t-ask-don’t-tell kind of way. I had brought my former girlfriend to a firm dinner, but otherwise did not really talk about her or our relationship. Being involved in a relationship with Rachel, I soon realized, would require stepping further outside the closet. In fact, it would mean burning down the closet door altogether.
    I was drawn to Rachel’s fearless, outspoken nature, but it also made me anxious—especially when it brushed up against my own lingering internalized homophobia. The first time Rachel met my parents was a classic example.
    For months after the head-banging incident, my mother and I did not speak at all. Gradually, with the help of my father and Grandma Belle, we were able to bridge that gap, and eventually we resumed our old habit of talking almost daily. My parents had made a lot of progress since that time in tolerating the idea that I was a lesbian, though we still had our rough spots.
    I first introduced my parents to Rachel over dinner at a steakhouse in Grand Central Station. Right from the start we had a culture clash, with Rachel’s directness and strong sense of fairness bumping up against my parents’ Midwestern sense of reticence and stoicism. During the course of dinner, my mother asked me about an old law school friend, a woman who had had a disconcerting response to my breakup with my girlfriend of seven years. I had been pouring my heart out about the split to this friend, and she had responded by completely ignoring what I was saying, oddly changing the subject to the topic of a lace tablecloth her mother had recently given her. And this was a close friend, a well-educated woman who had gay friends besides me and who had known my ex-girlfriend. She was either unable or unwilling to discuss the end of my relationship, much less give me any comfort, since she clearly thought the subject was either trivial or something best kept quiet about, and that had hurt me still further.
    After I finished telling this story, my mother said that she did not see what my friend had done wrong and that I should not be so touchy.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” Rachel responded. “Robbie and her girlfriend were together seven years. This was like a divorce. It’s really homophobic that her friend did not acknowledge that.”
    My parents were shocked. This was not the way they communicated with me or with anybody in their social circle, much less with someone they had just met. But that is Rachel’s way. She believes in being a truth-teller. At that moment, I was simultaneously freaked out and a little bit thrilled. Rachel was sticking up for me. No one had done that for me in that way before. But Rachel was and would always be on my side, and if she saw me being the victim of any kind of unfair or unkind treatment, including homophobia, she was going to speak up even if I was afraid to. Or perhaps especially when I was afraid to. (I should also add that my parents eventually came not only to accept Rachel’s approach but to embrace it. When the woman in question encountered my mother years later while putting together her wedding registry, she pretended that she had invited me and that the invitation had been returned with a bad address! Since the wedding had yet to occur, my mother whipped out a piece of paper and wrote down my home address—with Rachel’s full name on it. “Try again,” my mom advised. Needless to say, we never received that invitation.)
    It was not always easy for me to get used to Rachel’s fearlessness and her willingness to challenge what she saw as wrong, no matter what. She, in turn, had a hard time with what she saw as my more diplomatic—or perhaps conciliatory—need to defer to