JOHN ERCEL FRYER, M.D. an American psychiatrist and gay rights activist, born on this day. He is best known for his anonymous speech at the 1972 American Psychiatric Association (APA) annual conference, where he appeared in disguise and under the name Dr. Henry Anonymous. That event has been cited as a key factor in the decision to de-list homosexuality as a mental illness from the APA Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The APA “John E. Fryer, M.D., Award” is named in his honor.
He received his medical degree from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1962 and did his medical internship at Ohio State University. He began his psychiatric residency at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, but left – on the advice of a psychoanalyst – due to depression caused by having to hide his homosexuality. He later described the foundation as having “a lot of homophobia”. He then moved to Philadelphia, where he held a residency at the University of Pennsylvania, but he was forced to leave there because of his homosexuality. He completed his residency at Norristown State Hospital in 1967.
Around the mid-1960s, Fryer began to receive referrals from Alfred A. Gross, the Executive Secretary of the George W. Henry Foundation – co-founded by Gross and Henry in 1948 to help those “who by reason of sexual deviation are in trouble with themselves, the law, or society” – to treat homosexual men who had run afoul of the law, and to testify on their behalf in court cases.
In 1967, Fryer joined the medical faculty of Temple University in Philadelphia. As of January 1969, he was an instructor in psychiatry there. He worked in the community health center in North Philadelphia and became active in the Health Care and Human Values Task Force, using a $5,000 grant to that organization to create a group he called “Ars Moriendi” to deal with matters concerning professional reactions to death and dying. This later became the International Work Group on Death, Dying, and Bereavement.
Fryer was the first gay American psychiatrist to speak publicly about his sexuality at a time when homosexuality was still listed as a mental illness, a sociopathic personality disturbance according to the second edition of the APA Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II), that was published in 1968. In 1970, a protest at an APA event in San Francisco on aversion therapy, the message of which, according to lesbian activist Barbara Gittings, was “Stop talking about us and starting talking with us”, earned gay and lesbian activists a voice in the association. The next year at the 1971 convention in Washington, Gittings organized a panel discussion on “Lifestyles of Non-patient Homosexuals”, which was chaired by gay Harvard University astronomer Dr. Franklin E. Kameny, who previously had lost a job with the federal government due to his homosexuality.
In a planned protest, members of the APA Gay Liberation and the Radical Caucus seized the microphone. Kameny denounced the APA “oppression” of homosexuals by psychiatry, calling it “the enemy incarnate”. This was part of Kameny’s long-standing protest about the diagnosis of homosexuality, a fight that he had been waging since at least 1964, when he appeared on television to declare that being gay was “not a disease, a pathology, a sickness, a malfunction, or a disorder of any sort”. Kameny wrote in Psychiatric News: “[W]e object to the sickness theory of homosexuality tenaciously held with utter disregard for the disastrous consequences of this theory to the homosexual, based as it is on poor science.”
This protest led to a session the next year, at the association’s 1972 annual meeting, on homosexuality and mental illness. Entitled “Psychiatry: Friend or Foe to the Homosexual?; A Dialogue”, it included Kameny and Gittings on the panel. Gittings’ partner, Kay Lahusen, had noted that the panel had on it homosexuals who were not psychiatrists, and psychiatrists who were not homosexuals, but no homosexual psychiatrists, so Gittings set out to find one who would be willing to be a panel member. After numerous contacts, she was unable to find a gay psychiatrist who would speak, so she had decided that she would read letters from gay psychiatrists without revealing their names. She then contacted Fryer and convinced him to appear. Later, Fryer said that the recent death of his father was one factor in his decision to accept the invitation, but his experiences at losing positions because of his homosexuality were the reasons that he did so, only after Gittings suggested that he could be disguised.
Listed only as “Dr. H. Anonymous”, later expanded to “Dr. Henry Anonymous”, Fryer appeared on stage wearing a rubber joke-shop face mask – that sometimes was described as a mask of Richard M. Nixon, but which probably was altered from its original state, – a wig, and a baggy tuxedo, and he spoke through a microphone that distorted his voice. In 2002, Dr. Jack Drescher, then the head of the APA Committee on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Issues pointed out “[t]he irony … that an openly homosexual psychiatrist had to wear a mask to protect his career. So the fact that someone would get up on stage, even in disguise, at the risk of professional denunciation or loss of job, it was not a small thing. Even in disguise, it was a very, very brave thing to do.”
At the time of his speaking, Fryer was on the faculty of Temple University, but did not have the security of tenure, so he was in real danger of losing his position if he had been identified – he had already lost a residency at the University of Pennsylvania, and was later forced to leave a position on the staff of Friends Hospital because of his flamboyance. According to Fryer, he found it to be ironic that the Friends administrator who had told him, “If you were gay and not flamboyant, we would keep you. If you were flamboyant and not gay we would keep you. But since you are both gay and flamboyant, we cannot keep you” was in the front row at his 1972 appearance as Dr. Anonymous and never realized that “Anonymous” was Fryer.
Fryer’s speech began: “I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist”, and he went on to describe the lives of the many gay psychiatrists in the APA who had to hide their sexuality from their colleagues for fear of discrimination, as well as from fellow homosexuals owing to the disdain in which the psychiatric profession was held among the gay community. Fryer’s speech suggested ways in which gay psychiatrists could subtly and “creatively” challenge prejudice in their profession without disclosing their sexuality, and how they could help gay patients adjust to a society that considered their sexual preferences a sign of psychopathology. Reportedly, there were more than 100 gay psychiatrists at the convention.
Homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973, a year after Fryer’s speech – leading the now-defunct Philadelphia Bulletin to print the headline “Homosexuals gain instant cure” – and Fryer’s speech has been cited as a key factor in persuading the psychiatric community to reach this decision. Gittings later said of it: “His speech shook up psychiatry. He was the right person at the right time.” Fryer later wrote in a 1985 newsletter of the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists, that it was “something that had to be done” and “the central event in my career… I had been thrown out of a residency because I was gay. I lost a job because I was gay… It had to be said, but I couldn’t do it as me… I was not yet full time on the [Temple] faculty. I am now tenured, and tenured by a chairman who knows I’m gay. That’s how things have changed.”
Fryer became a professor at Temple, both of psychiatry, and of family and community medicine. He specialized in the treatment of drug and alcohol addiction as well as in death and bereavement. Later in his career, he began treating gay men with AIDS who were dying, seeing them in his home office rather than in his practice at Temple, for reasons of patient confidentiality. He was involved in setting up Physicians in Transition, Temple’s Family Life Development Center, the APA International Work Group on Death, Dying, and Bereavement, and the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force. In 1980, at the behest of Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of London’s St. Christopher’s Hospice, he took a sabbatical from Temple and helped to restructure the education department of the hospice. Fryer retired from Temple in 2000. In 2002, it was reported that Fryer had accepted a position at a hospital in the Northern Territory of Australia, but he never took up that post.
Fryer also was a musician, playing the organ. For thirty years he was the choirmaster of St. Peter’s Church in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia where he lived. He also played the organ for Temple University graduations.
Fryer died from gastrointestinal bleeding and aspiration pneumonia in 2003. Fryer’s papers are archived at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in more than 200 boxes, and are available to the public. Some documents have been digitized and are available online.