San Francisco Supervisor Rafael Mandelman says his passion for politics goes back to age 5, and his passion for providing mental health services to combat homelessness stems from his mother spiraling into mental illness some years later.
Though he grew up in gay-friendly San Francisco from age 11 when he moved north to live with his grandmother he had to leave San Francisco to come out while a sophomore at Yale, which he called the gayest of the Ivies. (Mandelman said a motto that emerged at Yale following a 1980s Wall Street Journal article on the high number of lesbian and gay students there was: One in four, maybe more. )