NYC up & OUT! Blog

I hate needles. And the last time I had anesthesia I was sick for a week (okay, so it was 1964 and they gave me ether and anesthesia has come a long way since then — still, I was worried). So the parts of the colonoscopy procedure I feared most weren’t the usual ones people worry about. I hated the idea of getting stuck (with the needle) and I was dreading the anesthesia.

There was no question that I had to do this. My friend Janet McDonald died a year ago at age 53 from colon cancer. Janet was a fiercely alive women who overcame incredible challenges to build a life and career, first in law, then in print as a memoirist, and finally as the author of children’s books (www.projectgirl.com).

One final message that Janet conveyed to all of her friends was that we had to get scoped. I don’t believe in the afterlife, but Janet is not the kind of person you ignored in life and if there is an afterlife, she’s not the kind of person you want haunting you. Weeks after her death I asked my doctor for a referral to a gastro guy.

For most of the past year I’ve kept the referral card from my doctor taped to the mirror over my desk. The rule is to go for your first colonoscopy at age 50, unless you have a family history of colon cancer and then it’s 40 (or earlier if your doctor recommends it). I won’t be 50 until November, but I decided to mark the anniversary of Janet’s death by getting my test done last week.

Among my friends I’m one of the first to have had a colonoscopy and they all wanted to know what it was like. What they seemed to want to know most was that it wasn’t as bad as they feared. Telling them what it was really like seems to have helped some of them overcome their fear — at least enough to make an appointment.

So in honor of Janet’s life, and in the hope that those of you who have reached that age when a colonoscopy is recommended, I thought I’d share my experience. Of course every doctor does things a little differently, so your experience may not be exactly the same.

The prep. It’s really unpleasant. For the exam your colon needs to be perfectly clean so that means a liquid diet that starts 24 hours before the test and a purge of your digestive system that begins the afternoon or evening before. You have to drink several glasses (I lost count) of an unpleasant tasting liquid (the citrus flavoring helps), but it wasn’t the taste that I minded. It was having to drink so much and so quickly. By the end I couldn’t drink another drop, even though I had one more glass to go.

A couple of hours later all of that liquid starts pouring through your digestive system with a force that’s a little hard to imagine. As I said, they want you clean. And by 1:00 a.m., after repeated trips to the bathroom (I lost count), I was clean and exhausted. Unbelievably, I was thirsty, too, but you can’t drink anything after midnight.

The next morning at the doctor’s office, I met first with the anesthesiologist, who put a port in my arm for the IV anesthesia (less painful than getting a blood test — I don’t know what I was so worried about!). Then the doctor came in to explain the procedure and had me sign the release form (some doctors require an intake meeting a week prior to discuss the procedure and the potential complications).

The doctor asked me to roll onto my side and draw my knees up to my chest. The anesthesiologist placed one of those oxygen tubes under my nose and then administered the anesthetic. I’d been told that the anesthetic was the best part and it was. I barely had time to say “goodnight” before I was out. And I mean, out! No sound. No dreams. No sensations of any kind until about 45 minutes later when I heard the nurse ask me how I was feeling. I was feeling like I’d just been on vacation!

I opened my eyes and for a moment I took stock. I was on my back, dressed in the gown I’d put on for the procedure (and my socks, which the nurse had suggested I keep on). There was cotton taped over the spot where the needle had been. And I was happy. So happy! And I hadn’t even heard the exam’s results (all clear).

I got dressed (slowly) and walked out to the waiting room under my own steam. My partner was waiting for me (you’re required to have someone there to take you home). I sat for a moment and ate the banana I’d brought along (the best banana I’d ever eaten!) and then we went out for breakfast. I was a little loopy, but not at all tired.

The next day I felt perfectly normal, but I wasn’t. I discovered that my brain was still fuzzy from the anesthesia when I found myself on the “B” train instead of the “C” and would up at West 4th Street and 6th Avenue instead of 23rd and 8th. (For those of you not familiar with NYC, that’s not a huge mistake, but it’s not one a life-long New Yorker is likely to make.) I had no idea how that could have happened and stood on the platform at West 4th Street for a few moments to get my bearings and to figure out what I needed to do to get home.

The momentary confusion on the subway was more amusing than frightening and was a reminder that all drugs come with side effects. Or maybe my friend Janet was just playing with me. I wouldn’t put it past her.

Back when Bill Clinton was being hounded by Kenn Starr and the Republican Congress, I was one of those Clinton supporters who never once thought that President Clinton should resign. Even when it turned out that the affair was for real and that he’d lied under oath. In hindsight I was wrong.

For the good of the Democratic Party and for the future of the nation Bill Clinton should have stepped aside. (No question that what the Republicans were doing was despicable, but after all it was Clinton who gave them an opening to take him down.) Al Gore would have assumed the presidency and it’s hard to imagine a scenario where President Gore wouldn’t have wiped the floor with George W. Bush. Imagine eight years without Bush!

Instead, we had months of toxic wrangling as President Clinton stonewalled, lied, clung to power, fought back, and stayed in office—and in turn damaged his administration, Al Gore, and the Democrats. In the end, what was good for Bill Clinton was terrible for us.

I find myself thinking of the Clinton imbroglio all over again because now Hillary Clinton seems not to know the difference between what’s best for the Democratic Party and the America people and what’s best for Hillary and Bill Clinton (I’m sorry, but no fool believes that you get one without the other).

Even the Clinton camp has acknowledged at this point that all of the stars have to align just right and that the Obama campaign has to step in quicksand for Hillary Clinton to get the nomination. Is this a good reason to drag out the nominating process, so that the Clinton campaign can possibly triumph on the ashes of the Obama campaign? Or, alternatively, that Barack Obama can triumph only after a drawn out and bruising battle with Hillary Clinton? How do any of us benefit from either sorry scenario?

Back in the early 1990’s when Bill Clinton was campaigning against the Bush/Quayle incumbents, he introduced a slogan that became a rallying cry at campaign events: “It’s time for them to go!” And now that time has come again again. Unfortunately, the Clintons have given every indication that they’re following the same playbook all over again. And, just like the last time the Clintons failed to leave the national stage when they should have, it’s the Democratic Party and the American people who are going to pay the price.

It’s time for them to go.

Scott Schwartz had it in for me. I don’t know why. Maybe because I wore ugly corrective shoes. Glasses, too (black plastic frames purchased at a discount store on Jamaica Avenue in Queens). And I had a bad haircut. I was also small for my age, sat in the front row of our fifth grade class, and was always eager to answer questions. No one used the word then, but I was a fag and Scott knew it even if I didn’t.

But if Scott was going to kick my ass, like he’d threatened, he’d have to catch me first. Despite my shoes, he could never outrace me. Maybe that bothered him, too. Scott wasn’t fat, but he was chubby and slow moving. So he enlisted Richard Mennenger. A big guy by comparison. Athletic. Fast. Still, it took them the length of 82nd Road before they could pin me to a tree.
I didn’t struggle. With Richard pressed against me there was no getting away. I didn’t cry. I’d chew my lip off before I let them see me cry. “Just don’t break my new glasses,” I told them, because I knew that my hardworking mother hadn’t yet finished paying for them.

Scott took his time preparing for the kill, stroking one hand with the other, making and unmaking his fist. All the while, a smirk pasted on his round face. But my attacker was so focused on terrorizing me that he didn’t notice when a city bus pulled up a hundred feet away and disgorged its passengers. The last person to step off the bus was a cop in uniform.

The policeman locked eyes with me and headed our way. “What’s going on?” he asked, clearly knowing what was going on. With that simple question from the man with a gun on his hip, Scott and Richard were reduced to mute, meek eleven-year-old boys whose eyes were suddenly glued to the pavement.

The cop turned to me and said, “Leave them to me. Go home.” And I did, walking first at a studied, casual pace. But once I turned the corner and was certain they couldn’t see me anymore, I started to shake and then burst into tears. I cried most of the way home. Was it relief? Anger? The injustice of being singled out for reasons I didn’t yet understand? I had no idea.

I never told my mother what happened. I certainly didn’t tell anyone at school (and I knew Richard and Scott never would). I doubt I could have told you at the time that I despised the thought of anyone thinking of me as a victim, but that’s how I felt. I never wanted anyone to feel sorry for me. Then, or later—when my parents split up, when my father killed himself, when the kids at camp called me a fag. Mostly I kept my feelings to myself and just kept going.

Maybe that’s why I’ve reacted so viscerally and so negatively to Hillary Clinton’s use of the victim card as a campaign tactic. I’ve worked so hard to never feel like a victim—and to never let anyone know when I did—that I can’t imagine anyone, especially a presidential candidate, wanting us to think she is one.

I realize that the Clinton campaign’s complaints about the press (“You always ask me the first question! Poor me!”) and the campaign’s response to inquiries as to the whereabouts of the Clinton tax returns (“My tax returns? I feel like I’m being Ken Starred!”) are supposed to evoke sympathy among voters. But I find it repulsive.

I also find it inspiring, although not in the way that the Clinton campaign might have hoped. Just last week I made my first campaign contribution to the Democratic candidate for president who is asking for my vote, not my sympathy.

(I feel compelled to add that I’ll be voting for the Democratic nominee come November, no matter who it is.)

Back in the early 1990’s, the thought of a Clinton in the White House gave me the warm fuzzies. Bill Clinton was the first candidate for president to so openly embrace gay people and invite us to be a part of the process. I took him at his word. So after he was elected I bought a ticket to the Triangle Ball—the first-ever gay inaugural ball—and headed down to Washington to join the celebration.

I remember standing on the mall, listening to President Clinton’s inaugural speech and thinking we’d really turned a corner. But then I began to feel achy. This was long before I had chronic back trouble, so I just chalked it up to standing in the damp and the cold for several hours.

That night, as I was swept across the ballroom floor by a handsome champion swing dancer, I began to feel faint and feverish. It wasn’t love. It was the flu. I dragged myself back to NYC with a 103-degree fever and spent the next week in bed. I should have taken this as an omen of bad things to come.

I like to think I never look at anything from a purely gay perspective, but Bill Clinton gave us Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act. And in this regard at least, Clinton was clearly not good for the gays (to echo a phrase my grandfather used when weighing which candidates or policies were “good for the Jews”).

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has never affected me personally, but I’ve talked to gay people whose lives have been devastated by their expulsion from the military. And, when it comes to the Defense of Marriage Act, I take it very personally. Each time I fill out an immigration form and get to the line about how many family members I’m traveling with I’m reminded that Bill Clinton signed anti-gay legislation in the middle of the night that codifies discrimination against a relationship I hold dear. When I travel out of the country I’m almost always in the company of my partner, but because the federal government does not recognize our fourteen-year marriage, the only correct and legal answer on the immigration form is zero.

Maybe that’s why I’m not sorry to see the Hillary Clinton campaign in trouble. Sure I would have voted for Hillary if she got the nomination (and will, if she’s able to turn things around). But I don’t have any confidence that a Hillary Clinton administration would undo the damage done by the last Clinton in the White House. In fact, given how closely associated these two hot button issues are with Bill Clinton’s administration, it’s hard to imagine that a Hillary Clinton administration would want to revisit either battle if she were elected president.

The two boys, probably no more than ten or eleven, stood at the edge of the dance floor giggling to each other and pointing at the two guys in ties who were smiling like idiots, grooving to a medley of ‘70s disco. We had no choice. Once the DJ started playing that old bar mitzvah standard, “YMCA” by the Village People, our feet took over and we were propelled out of our seats.

The anti-gay rights movement has long railed about the dangers of letting us out of the closet. We would destroy the American family. We would undermine the moral fiber of our great nation. And perhaps worst of all, we would corrupt young minds, leading children down that slippery slope into temptation and sin. (You know, try it once and you’re hooked for life!)

Maybe that would explain why I’ve been reluctant in the past to dance with my partner at bar mitzvahs (you already know from a previous posting that we have no problem with dancing at weddings). But bar mitzvahs are another story because of the kids. How would the kids respond? How would the parents respond to the kids being “exposed” to such un-closeted behavior? And how would they feel about having to answer the inevitable questions, if not from the thirteen year olds, then from the younger children.

But this was the Upper West Side. The bar mitzvah boy’s mother had already made a splash by climbing on top one of the giant speakers and dancing her way through The Weather Girls. Judging from the cheers and laughter, I’m guessing that for a lot of us the go-go mother was a bar mitzvah first. How big a deal could we be in comparison to that!

The giggling ten-year-old boys soon turned to one of their dad’s and asked him about us (the very obvious pointing gave them away). We don’t know what the father said, but a few seconds later we spotted the two boys on the dance floor, with each other, and having a great time.
I don’t think this is the slippery slope that any of us imagined, but it’s one I really like. Barney and I take pride in knowing that we’ve helped set an example, one that smoothed the way for a couple of kids who just wanted to have fun.

January 16, 2008

The early 1990’s effort to re-brand “queer” always struck me as well-meaning, but misguided. (Okay, in the interest of straight talk, I thought it was stupid.)

In an era when newscasters were just beginning to get comfortable using “gay,” rather than “homosexual,” young activists (whom I admired for their audacity and energy) decided it was time for a change. Let’s embrace a word that’s been used against us, they said, thereby removing its sting and transform it into a powerful, positive all-purpose term that includes gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people, “queer straights,” etc.

Nearly twenty years later no major gay rights organization uses the word “queer” as part of its name. And even when LGBT is extended to include the letter “Q,” it most often stands for “questioning youth.” These days you’re most likely to see the word used at institutions of higher learning, as in “Queer Studies.” And it’s still used playfully on the margins (see www.queerballroom.com).

It turns out that taking a word whose definition is negative and turning it into a positive is a very steep, if not impossible, climb. That’s especially true when a majority of the people who are supposed to embrace the word don’t.

But how about taking a negative word that’s been hurled at us for decades—and still is—and modifying its definition to take the focus off us and place it on those who deserve public scorn?

A little background: When I was fourteen I went to a summer camp where baseball was a critical part of the daily activities. I was bad at baseball. I loved arts and crafts. That meant I was a faggot, at least by the standards of my fellow campers and that’s what they called me. They made me cry. I wished them dead. I hated the word. Still do.

My experience is hardly isolated. Few gay men have escaped the word’s sting and these days “faggot” is often used, especially by high-school students (and a certain conservative commentator), as an all-purpose put-down meant to suggest that the target of the epithet is weak, pathetic, and/or less than a man.

A few weeks back when I was reading about the unfolding baseball steroid scandal it occurred to me that the real faggots were the professional baseball players who injected steroids and so were the team owners who looked the other way. And by “faggot” I mean that they’re greedy, weak-willed liars and cheaters.

But if we’re going to shift the meaning of “faggot,” why stop at greedy, weak-willed liars and cheaters? Let’s also include bullies, torturers, and those who set government policy that allows torture. By my definition that means the President and Vice President are also faggots. And so is Ann Coulter (why limit “faggot” just to men?).

Can homosexuals still be faggots? Of course, but not by definition. They have to earn it just like everyone else. For example, an elected politician who is gay and closeted and votes for anti-gay legislation is a faggot. (I’m tempted to say that Larry Craig is a faggot, but he’s so pathetic that I feel sorry for him and for that reason see no reason to call him names.)

So at the start of this New Year, I’m taking nominations for potential inductees to my newly inaugurated Faggot Hall of Fame. It’s an annual award that will go to the one person who best embodies all of the lovely qualities I’ve ascribed to the word faggot. I nominate George W. Bush. I’ll post all the nominations (public figures only, please, and one nomination per person) in my next column. In addition to submitting your nomination, please explain the reasons for your choice (in no more than three lines).

December 10, 2008

Gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny branded the gay rights movement before most out gay people were born. He came up with the slogan “Gay is Good!” and carefully considered the marketing techniques that would work best in 1960’s America to challenge the status quo.

Have a look at the photograph below from one of the 1965 gay rights protests in front of the White House (that’s Frank Kameny in the middle). It was no accident that the men wore suits and ties and the women wore skirts and blouses. And the slogans were all carefully considered before the posters were drawn. Frank took the temperature of the times and responded with a precision that one would expect of the scientist he was.

So what happened on the way to the 21st century? In terms of our “brand,” we’ve progressed from “Gay is Good” to the GLBTQ rights movement. And I can’t say that I think our new brand is a good thing for any of us under the GLBTQ umbrella.

I was reminded of what I don’t like about our cumbersome moniker when I attended a GLBT (or was that LGBT?) youth conference last week in Westchester sponsored by GLSEN and PFLAG, among others. More than 600 people attended, including middle and high school students, parents, social workers, educators, and school counselors. (I was there to sell copies of my newly released book for teens, What If Someone I Know Is Gay?)

One of the young people I met had led a workshop earlier in the day called “LGBT 101.” I asked him what he talked about in his presentation and he said that he explained things like “what LGBT means.” That’s a good start. But you have to wonder if we’ve got a problem if we have to introduce ourselves and our cause by explaining that this mouthful of initials stands for the various subgroups within our movement.

We’re now so far along in the process of balkanized inclusion that we’ve been left without a simple way to explain who we are and what we’re fighting for. And it’s left some of us who don’t embrace the tongue-twisting LGBTQ label scratching our heads when asked why we aren’t more inclusive. That’s what’s happened to me on a couple of occasions in recent months because my of book’s title. (I don’t think What If Someone I Know is LGBTQ? would have had quite the same impact and, besides, it would have been false advertising because my book’s focus is on what I know best, which is same-gender sexual orientation).

I don’t have any suggestions or answers. I just have questions. Like, why do we have to enumerate every subgroup within our social/political movement? That may make some of us feel good about being inclusive in a very visible way, but what do we gain or lose as a movement by slicing and dicing ourselves into ever more categories? Why do some people say LGBT and others GLBT? (Am I risking my life by pointing out that if we were to consider the alphabet that “G” comes before “L”? And “B” comes before “G”? Although if we take into account population totals and list ourselves in descending order in terms of overall numbers, then “G”—assuming for argument’s sake that “G” stands for “gay male”—should come first because there are twice as many gay men as lesbians. Then again, there are probably more bisexuals—male and female combined—than gay men or lesbians, so maybe we should be the BGLTQ movement).

So I’m curious to hear what you think. Am I the only malcontent out on this limb? Am I just an old guy who can’t adjust to the LGBTQ new world order? If the alphabet is here to stay, what letter of the alphabet will we be adding next? And can anyone come up with a slogan for our current political and social movement that’s as straightforward, alliterative, and powerful as “Gay is Good!”?

No doubt about it, there were breadcrumbs on my dinner companion’s chin. As we discussed the unusually mild late fall evening that made it possible for us to sit under an open sky in the garden of a New York City restaurant, I hoped the crumbs would dislodge themselves. But they didn’t. So although we had only just met, I mentioned the crumbs in the nicest way possible. Given that my dinner companion was the reason that two dozen of us had gathered together to break bread, I thought she would want to know sooner rather than later about the food on her face.

Her two attempts to discreetly wipe away the errant crumbs with her fingers failed to do the job, so I volunteered and used my napkin. “It’s the neuropathy,” she explained. “I can’t always feel things with my fingertips.”

Elizabeth Edwards mentioned her neuropathy in the same offhand way that my friend Suzy, who also suffered from stage IV breast cancer, would have referred to it. It was the same way that my friends who had AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s talked about the side effects of the various toxic AIDS treatments then used to suppress the destructiveness of the disease. It was just a fact of life.

From a distance I had long admired Elizabeth Edwards, although this was my first occasion meeting her. Given that she’s incredibly articulate, smart, and passionate about issues that are important to me, I expected to be impressed. And I was. But up close she’s also warm and artifice-free. Elizabeth seemed like one of us, except that she started her day in North Carolina with another round of chemotherapy. And when the evening ended my partner and I would walk home and Elizabeth would go to a hotel, sleep for a few hours, and fly out (on a commercial airline) early the next morning to another campaign stop, just one more in a long series scheduled through the end of the year.

Elizabeth Edwards is not running for president. But as we all know, the person we choose to spend our life with says a lot about us. Elizabeth and John chose each other decades ago and now Elizabeth is spending some of the precious time she has left working with John to see that he’s elected president. We can only hope that when the time comes for the American people to choose a new president that we choose as wisely as John Edwards did when he chose Elizabeth.

November 13, 2007

From the first e-mail query that came in from my publisher, I knew that last week’s KNUS radio interview in Denver was not going to be about my new question and answer book for teens, What If Someone I Know Is Gay? It was going to be an old-fashioned talk-radio brawl, something that’s become increasingly rare for me in recent years.

The show’s conservative host, Trevor Carey, wrote: “I think it’s only fair to allow Mr. Marcus to know I am setting up a debate format with another author who feels the opposite. His name is Dr. David Berman. He is a Pastor, Speaker and Author. He is not a hateful man, and I feel he would be fair and respectful of Mr. Marcus’ views.”

Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I love debating the right-wingers. And not the reasonable ones. I much prefer the unreconstructed nut jobs who think the only choice for people like us is to embrace wholesome heterosexuality through repentance and prayer—and who also believe that by letting gay people marry, society will find itself on the slippery slope toward man-on-pet sex.

So in my heart of hearts I was hoping that Dr. Berman would not be fair and respectful. After nearly twenty years in the business of writing about and defending the gay agenda, being fair and respectful doesn’t interest me, except possibly as one weapon in my arsenal of verbal WMDs.

Dr. Berman didn’t disappoint. Within minutes he was warning of the dangers America faced if we granted “special rights” based on sexual orientation. If we passed laws to protect homosexuals, he cautioned, we’d have to grant legal protections for “all kinds of sexual orientations,” including people who wanted to have sex with animals. With that, we were off and running and kept running until the first commercial break. And despite my faux plea to the show’s host after the break that we move on to another topic, he came right back to bestiality.

One thing I’ve come to expect with these kinds of radio shows is that you can always count on the show’s host and the phone-in callers to come to the defense of someone like Dr. Berman (or they one-up him with threats of physical violence or express their concern for me along the lines of, “I’ll pray for your soul”). But that didn’t happen.

While the show’s host was eager to fan the flames of our roiling debate, he didn’t actually defend Dr. Berman’s most outrageous claims and the two callers who made it on the air were surprisingly reasonable despite their professed conservative religious beliefs. One of them even chided Dr. Berman, suggesting it was time to come up with a better argument against gay rights laws and gay marriage than bestiality.

From the KNUS interview and the fact that my opportunities to engage in these extreme on-air debates has dwindled in recent years, I sense that something has changed. During last week’s show, both callers made clear that they personally knew gay people and that the gay people they knew were no different from anyone else. And while the callers didn’t support gay marriage and don’t think schools should teach kids about homosexuals, they were very far from the flaming bigots of yore.

For decades now gay rights leaders have said that our visibility is key if we’re going to win full and equal rights. I think that’s true now more than ever. You can’t demonize us if you know us. And as we all know, when people get to know us they learn that we’re far more interested in marrying each other than having sex with our pets.

To mark the end of Gay History Month, I’ve decided to dip into my archives and write about a transformational event and some of the remarkable people who led the way.

Sometimes I think I’m crazy. I’m often anxious, occasionally hypochondriacal. And a deep sense of foreboding flows through my veins as it did through the veins of my great-grandparents, who fled Eastern Europe ahead of pogroms and the Nazis because they knew at a cellular level that bad things were going to happen (there are advantages to expecting the worst when it gets you out of harm’s way).

If this were 1967 instead of 2007, my suspicions about my sanity (or lack of it) could have easily been confirmed in the pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Right there in black and white the American Psychiatric Association (APA) said unequivocally that as a homosexual I was by nature mentally ill.

Kidding aside, I know that the kind of crazy I sometimes feel is no different from what a lot of perfectly normal people experience and it has nothing to do with the fact I’m gay. And by 1973 the APA came around to this idea, voting in that year to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. As one local Philadelphia newspaper archly proclaimed on its front page following the official change of heart: “20 Million Homosexuals Gain Instant Cure.”

It’s a little hard to imagine today the heavy burden of the “sickness” diagnosis. You could be fired from your job or not hired in the first place. After all, you couldn’t possibly employ someone who is mentally ill to teach children, care for the sick, or prepare your taxes. And pity the gay parent trying to hang on to her or his kids in a divorce proceeding.

The sickness diagnosis also meant there was something to cure, which gave rise to a whole industry whose purpose was to help homosexuals recover from their disorder. So in the name of science and the medical and mental health professions, untold numbers of gay men and women were subjected to everything from endless years of fruitless psychoanalysis and devastating electro-convulsive therapy to hormone treatments, aversion therapy (“Now why don’t you sit back and relax and watch this hot man-on-man porn film while I attach electrodes to your genitals and/or give you this liquid to drink that will induce vomiting…”), and on rare occasion, castration.

The majority of gay women and men were lucky enough to escape the clutches of the mostly well-intentioned professionals, but they were still condemned to the mental torture of living with the knowledge and stigma that they were classified as mentally ill. And for those who tried to cure themselves, the futile pursuit of banishing same-sex attraction was enough to drive even the most grounded gay person over the edge.

While the 1973 de-listing might in retrospect look like a common sense and easy decision, it was in reality a very contentious process and it was years in the making. The seeds of our sanity conversion were, in fact, planted more than six decades ago by a gay, part-time college student, named Sam Fromm. And it was nurtured by a small group of persistent, mostly straight, psychologists and psychiatrists.

Sam Fromm got the ball rolling in 1945 when, after befriending his UCLA psychology professor, Dr. Evelyn Hooker, he urged her to make a study of “people like us.” As Dr. Hooker explained to me in a 1989 interview for my book, Making History, “This bright young man, somewhere in his early thirties, had obviously been thinking about this for a long time. And by ‘people like us’ he meant, ‘We’re homosexual, but we don’t need psychiatrists. We don’t need psychologists. We’re not insane. We’re not any of those things they say we are.’”

Realizing that no one had ever thought to question the homosexual sickness label, Dr. Hooker decided to take up Sam’s challenge and began her pioneering— and for the time—extremely bold and professionally dangerous research.

When Dr. Hooker presented the results of her work at the 1956 American Psychological Association convention in Chicago, the hotel ballroom was filled to overflowing. She recalled, “The title of the paper was ‘The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual.’ In my paper I presented the evidence that gay men can be as well adjusted as straight men and that some are even better adjusted than some straight men…so far as the evidence was concerned, there was no difference between the two groups of [straight and gay] men in the study.”

Dr. Hooker’s conclusions set off a firestorm within the mental health profession and inspired others to continue her research in the years that followed. Then, beginning in 1970, veteran gay rights activists Dr. Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings started pushing for change from the outside (often coordinating with their allies within the American Psychiatric Association, including Dr. Judd Marmor, a leading psychiatrist who was very familiar with Dr. Hooker’s work).

Frank and Barbara’s campaign to banish the sickness label combined direct action protests with sophisticated marketing and targeted education. Their efforts culminated with a now legendary panel discussion at the 1972 American Psychiatric Association convention, entitled “Psychiatry, Friend or Foe to Homosexuals? A Dialogue.” Joining Barbara and Frank (and documented in photographs by Barbara’s partner Kay Lahusen), was a gay psychiatrist, “Dr. Henry Anonymous,” who spoke of his experience of having to live in the closet because of his fear of ruining his career.

“It went off marvelously!” Barbara recalled. “The house was packed. Naturally, I think the anonymous psychiatrist [who wore a mask to disguise his identity] was the main reason the house was packed… He made a very eloquent presentation. Than I read statements [we had gathered] from other [gay] psychiatrists, and that clinched it.” The official vote to remove homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses came just one year later.

Barbara recalled in a 1989 interview the impact that the de-listing had on the gay rights movement: “From 1967, when I made my first public lecture to a straight audience, I had to deal with people’s conviction that we were sick simply because they had heard some psychiatrist say so. The APA action took an enormous burden off our backs. We could stop throwing so many resources into fighting the sickness label and begin to devote some of that energy and money to other issues.”

So all these years later, the only ones who still need to have their heads examined are the few remaining mental health professionals, (and more than a few religious zealots) who continue to insist that our sexual orientation is curable (through therapy and/or prayer, among other discredited and less benign methods). I like what Dear Abby had to say about the unreconstructed counselors some years ago: “Any therapist who would take a gay person and try to change him or her should be in jail.” Amen.

As for the men and women who risked their careers and livelihoods to make the world safe and sane for us homosexuals, I say it’s time to erect a few statues in the public square honoring their courageous efforts. And let’s start where it began, with the young gay man who proclaimed his own sanity and the psychologist who proved he was right.

For a more complete account of how we gained our sanity, please read the excerpted interviews from my book, Making History, with Dr. Evelyn Hooker, Dr. Judd Marmor, and Barbara Gittings & Kaye Lahusen, which I’ve posted on my web site. Here’s a direct link: www.ericmarcus.com/content/bookdetail.php?recordID=3