50 Years Ago this Brave Psychiatrist Changed the World and Made Being Gay Okay
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Fifty years ago almost to the day, on the second day of the annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 1972, John Ercel Fryer, spoke and talked to the crowd about being a homosexual.
[A] disguised figure had been smuggled through the back corridors. At the last minute, he stepped through a side curtain and took his place at the front of the room.
There was an intake of breath in the audience. The man’s appearance was grotesque. His face was covered by a rubber Nixon mask, and he was wearing a garish, oversized tuxedo and a curly fright wig. But the outlandishness of his outfit diminished in importance once he began to speak.
“I am a homosexual,” he began. “I am a psychiatrist.”
Above: Credit…Transylvania University
For the next 10 minutes, Henry Anonymous, M.D. — this is what he had asked to be called — described the secret world of gay psychiatrists. Officially, they did not exist; homosexuality was categorized as a mental illness, so acknowledging it would result in the revocation of one’s medical license, and the loss of a career. In 42 states, sodomy was a crime.
The reality was that there were plenty of gay people in the A.P.A., psychiatry’s most influential professional body, the masked doctor explained. But they lived in hiding, concealing every trace of their private life from their colleagues.
“All of us have something to lose,” he said. “We may not be under consideration for a professorship; the analyst down the street may stop referring us his overflow; our supervisor may ask us to take a leave of absence.”
The following year, the A.P.A. announced that it would reverse its nearly century-old position, declaring that homosexuality was not a mental disorder.
It is rare for psychiatrists to transform the culture that surrounds them, but that is what happened in 1973.
Above: Credit…Historical Society of Pennsylvania
By removing the diagnosis from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or D.S.M., psychiatry removed the legal basis for a wide range of discriminatory practices: for denying gay people the right to employment, citizenship, housing and the custody of children; for excluding them from the clergy and the military and the institution of marriage. The long process of rolling back those practices could begin.
When referred to psychiatrists, gay people would no longer be sent to be “cured” — injected with hormones, subjected to aversion therapy or pored over by analysts — but instead told that, from the point of view of science, there was nothing intrinsically wrong with them.
