“The case propelled Rekers to teaching positions at the University of Miami, Kansas State University, and other institutions, and he was awarded more than $1 million in grants from the NIMH and the National Science Foundation. He also became a sought-after speaker on the subject of treating sexual deviancy before committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. In 1983, he co-founded the Family Research Council, an influential Christian lobbying group that helped craft the plank in the 2012 Republican national platform calling for an amendment to the Constitution defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Rekers’s ubiquity in courtrooms coast to coast, furnishing expert testimony against gay marriage and gay adoption in pivotal cases, inspired the New York Times’ Frank Rich to call him “the Zelig of homophobia.” In the meantime, his star patient wasn’t faring nearly as well. Kirk hanged himself in 2003 at age thirty-eight, following decades of depression.”