“My mother liked to fix herself up so she looked just like Elizabeth Taylor,” says Nick Frausto, a recent arrival to San Francisco. “I wasn’t too sure how she’d react when I brought my lover home to meet her – I was pretty nervous.”

Nick, whose Latino heritage made coming out doubly hard for him, had brought his lover Raye, whom he’d met in 1978 in West Hollywood, home to meet his mother after dating him for about a year. “Raye took one look at my mother and said ‘Why, you look just like Elizabeth Taylor,’ which did the trick! She made us both sit down and she went into the kitchen to fix Raye a ton of food – even though we’d both already eaten.”