ABSTRACT
Erik von Schmetterling and Jimmy Schrode decided to get married the day they were jailed in San Francisco for taking part in a disability rights demonstration shortly before the 1992 general election. They are a Philadelphia couple, and the idea of solemnizing their relationship in the midst of the nation’s most notorious nest of gays appealed to them. They were with hundreds of comrades from ADAPT, a militant disability rights organization whose acronym stands for American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today and before 1990 stood for American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation. The founder of ADAPT, Wade Blank, who occupies approximately the same place in the struggle for disability rights as Martin Luther King does in the struggle for African-American civil rights, was an ordained Presbyterian minister who was happy to perform the ceremony.
