Evelyn Hooker was a University of California, Los Angeles, psychologist whose groundbreaking research in the 1950s debunked the belief that homosexuality was a mental illness, ultimately leading to its removal from the American Psychiatric Association’s handbook of disorders in 1973. Thanking her for her work, one man wrote to her, “I think you did it because you knew what love was when you saw it, and you knew that gay love was like all other love.”

Courtesy of University of California