LGBTQ Agenda: Philly set to honor Dr. John Fryer who spoke at 1972 psychiatric convention
It had to have been a surreal scene. A standing-room only audience packed the hall at the 1972 Dallas conference of the American Psychiatric Association, watching a man dressed in what many remember as a full-face rubber mask of then-President Richard Nixon, wearing a wig and an oversized tuxedo and, speaking through a voice modulator, tell the audience, "I am a homosexual.
I am a psychiatrist."Those were the first words of a short speech given by a figure named Dr. H. Anonymous that would set in motion a massive sea change for people regarded by the APA — and most Americans — as mentally ill at best, dangers to society at worst.
With that speech, and within a matter of just a few years, gays and lesbians would be able to seize opportunities that had been denied them based solely on medical claims with no merit, and which had already been debunked but ignored 20 years before.
And very few people before then would know just who the man in the mask was, before he came clean at that year's APA convention in Philadelphia.
