John Ercel Fryer, M.D. (November 7, 1937 – February 21, 2003) was an American psychiatrist and gay rights activist 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 remove 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.
Early life
Fryer was born in Winchester, Kentucky, to Katherine Zempter Fryer and Ercel Ray Fryer. At the age of five years, he was already in the second grade of his elementary school. He graduated from high school at 15, and at 19 was awarded a bachelor's degree from Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where he became a member of Phi Kappa Tau fraternity. 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.
1972 speech
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."