John E Fryer

Early life

Fryer was born in Winchester, Kentucky to Ercel Ray Fryer and Katherine Zempter Fryer. He was in the second grade of his elementary school at 5 years old, graduated from high school at 15, and earned a bachelors degree from Transylvania College in Lexington, Kentucky when he was 19. 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 psychoanalyist – due to the depression caused by having to hide his homosexuality; he later described Menninger as having "a lot of homophobia." He moved to Philadelphia, where he held a residency at the University of Pennsylvania, but was forced to leave because of his homosexuality; he completed his residency in 1967 at Norristown State Hospital.

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.

Fryer joined the medical faculty of Philadelphia's Temple University in 1967. 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 matter concerning the professional reaction to death and dying. This later became the International Work Group on Death, Dying, and Bereavement.

1972 speech

At a time when homosexuality was still listed as a mental illness, a sociopathic personality disturbance according to second edition of the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II), published in 1968, Fryer was the first gay American psychiatrist to speak publicly about his sexuality. 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 had previously lost a job with the federal government due to his homosexuality.

In a planned protest, members of the APA's Gay Liberation and the Radical Caucus seized the microphone. Kameny denounced the APA's "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 that "[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 Homosexuals: 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 decided that she would read letters from gay psychiatrists without revealing their names. She then contacted Fryer, and convinced him to appear. Fryer later said that the recent death of his father was one factor that caused him to accept the invitation, but his experiences at losing positions because of his homosexuality meant 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 – which was sometimes described as a mask of Richard M. Nixon, but which was probably altered from its original state – a wig, and a baggy tuxedo and spoke through a microphone which distorted his voice. In 2002, Dr. Jack Drescher, then the head of the APA’s Committee on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Issues pointed out "The 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 in Philadelphia, but did not have the security of tenure, so 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; ironically the administrator who 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, according to Fryer, in the front row at his 1972 appearance as Dr. Anonymous, never realizing that Anonymous was Fryer.

Dr. Fryer's speech began "I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist", and continued on to describe the lives of the many gay psychiatrists among the APA who had to hide their sexuality from their colleagues for fear of discrimination, and from fellow homosexuals owing to the disdain in which the psychiatric profession was held among the gay community. Fryer's speech also suggested ways in which gay psychiatrists could subtly and "creatively" challenge prejudice in their profession without disclosing their sexuality, and help gay patients adjust to a society that considered their sexual preferences a sign of psychopathology. There were reportedly more than 100 gay psychiatrists at the convention.

At least one other panelist agreed with Fryer and Kameny that the stance of the psychiatric establishment toward homosexuality was wrong. The APA's Vice President at the time, Dr. Judd Marmor – who would later become the association's president – said "I must concede that psychiatry is prejudiced as has been charged. Psychiatric mores reflect the predominant social mores of the culture." He later wrote "In a democratic society we recognize the rights of such individuals to have widely divergent religious preferences, as long as they do not attempt to force their beliefs on others who do not share them. Our attitudes toward divergent sexual preferences, however, are quite different, obviously because moral values – couched in 'medical' and 'scientific' rationalizations – are involved."

Also appearing on the panel were Dr. Kent Robinson, from Shepherd Pratt Psychiatric Hospital, and Robert Seidenberg.

After the panel discussion, Fryer appeared for two hours on a local radio talk show as Dr. Anonymous with his voice disguised, broadcast, Fryer later said, from one of the gay bars in the area. Although some of his colleagues knew who he was, at the time of his speech and later, Fryer did not formally acknowledge having been Dr. Anonymous until the APA's 1994 convention in Philadelphia.

Homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 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 himself later wrote in 1985, in the 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."

Ironically, since the removal of homosexuality from the DSM, APA meetings have been disrupted by "ex-gay" activists seeking to have homosexuality classified as a mental disorder again. According to Drescher: "Every year, we get a group of people who ... ask for homosexuality to be put back in the manual. ... They’re, interestingly, the only group who does it. Every other group wants their diagnoses taken out; they want theirs back in."

Later life and death

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. Sometime after 1973, 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's 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 hospice's education department. He 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 was also a musician, playing the organ. For 30 years 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 was being treated for diabetes and pulmonary sarcoidosis, and eventually died from gastrointestinal bleeding and aspiration pneumonia in 2003.

Awards and honors

Fryer received a "Distinguished Alumnus" aware from Vanderbilt University in 2002, and in that same year was awarded a Distinguished Service Award from the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists (AGLP), now the Association of LGBTQ Psychiatrists. After his death, the AGLP, along with the American Psychiatric Association, endowed the APA's "John E. Fryer, M.D., Award" in his memory, to honor a person whose work has contributed to the mental health of sexual minorities, and includes both a lecture at the Fall conference of the ALGP and an honorarium. The first two recipients of the award were Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameny.

Fryer's papers are archived at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in over 200 boxes, and are available to the public. Some documents have been digitized and are available online.

In popular culture

In May 2016, a play by Ain Gordon, 217 Boxes of Dr. Henry Anonymous – based on Gordon's research as an "embedded artist" at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP), where Fryer's papers are archived – premiered at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia. The play explores Fryer and the circumstances around his 1972 appearance at the APA convention through monologues by three people who knew him: Alfred A. Gross, the New York-based head of the George W. Henry Foundation, a social charity which helped homosexual men who had gotten into trouble with the law; Katherine Luder, Fryer's long-time secretary; and Fryer's father, Ercel Ray Fryer. Gordon's entire project – including video of all the public events prior to the presentation of the play, the play's script and video of a performance – will be added to the Fryer archive at HSP.