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Fathers Dan McCarthy, Bernárd Lynch, John McNeill, and Robert Carter marching with Dignity/ New York in an early 1980s “Gay” Pride Parade. |
In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association made the decision to delete homosexuality as a diagnostic category from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). This decision was not based on new scientific evidence, but the result of political pressure from activists, in particular from the newly formed National Gay Task Force, in and out of the Association; in 1973, the four founding leaders of the Task Force included Dr. Howard Brown, Dr. Bruce Voeller, Father Robert Carter, and Dr. Frank Kameny.
Dr. Howard Brown was chief health officer of New York City during the Lindsay administration. During his tenure, Brown described his horror when he first toured the Tombs, a notorious city prison: “Almost all the men in the crowded cells were demonstrably effeminate. I could not identify with them.” In 1969, after the Stonewall Riots, Brown said of the protesters: “[they] were like the homosexuals I had seen in the Tombs—most of them obviously poor, most of them the sort of limpwristed, shabby or gaudy gays that send a shiver of dread down the spines of homosexuals who hope to pass as straight. I could not have felt more remote from them.” He added that the composition of the crowds brought to mind “every civil rights struggle I had ever witnessed or participated in.” Today, according to the several published studies touted by “gay” rights groups, Brown would certainly qualify as a homophobic, or at the very least as transgender-phobic; perhaps, even a sufferer of a new mental disorder classified as “internalized homophobia.” Brown suffered a heart attack and died in 1975 at age fifty.
Bruce Voeller was a biologist and early AIDS researcher; Voeller pioneered and promoted the use of nonoxynol-9 as a spermicide specifically as a topical virus-transmission preventative method for us in the “gay” male community. In 2001, the World Health Organization (WHO) held a consultation on N-9 with researchers from around the world. These experts came to the following conclusions: “N-9 is not effective at preventing the transmission of HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases (STD). It shouldn't be used or promoted for disease prevention…Products with N-9 -- including condoms, lubes and birth control products -- should never be used for anal sex. The rectum is more fragile than the vagina. Even the small amount of N-9 in condoms and lubes can damage the rectum, raising HIV risk.” Voeller died of AIDS in 1994.
Robert Carter was an American Roman Catholic priest and LGBT rights activist; in 1972, he helped to found the New York chapter of DignityUSA; an organization that has since been officially condemned by the Vatican; he led blessing ceremonies for gay couples and saw no contradiction between homosexuality and Christianity; in an unpublished memoir, he wrote: “Since Jesus had table fellowship with social outcasts and sinners, those rejected by the religious establishment of his time, I consider myself to have been most fully a Jesuit, a ‘companion of Jesus,’ when I came out publicly as a gay man, one of the social rejects of my time. It was only by our coming out that society’s negative stereotypes would be overcome and we would gain social acceptance.” Although there were calls for his expulsion from the Jesuits, Carter was never disciplined; he died
Dr. Frank Kameny was an American astronomer who became a “gay” rights activist after he was dismissed from his position in the U.S. Army’s Army Map Service in Washington, D.C. because of his homosexuality. In 1961, Kameny and Jack Nichols, fellow co-founder of the Washington, D.C., branch of the Mattachine Society, launched some of the earliest public protests by gays and lesbians; Nichols, in an early interview said: “I had a very domineering mother, a tyrant. A very sweet tyrant, but a tyrant nonetheless. It was a love that I had that was kind of killing me.” He continued: “I know that inside now, I’m sick. I’m not sick just sexually, I’m sick in a lot of ways. Immature, childlike. And the sex part of it is a symptom, like a stomach ache is a symptom of who knows what.” Another member of the Mattachine Society was the infamous Harry Hay; Hay was an outspoken supporter of NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association.) When questioned on his support for NAMBLA in a 1983 New York University forum, Hay remarked “If the parents and friends of gays are truly friends of gays, they would know from their gay kids that the relationship with an older man is precisely what thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-old kids need more than anything else in the world.” According to the NAMBLA publication “A Way Forward,” Kameny spoke at a NAMBLA membership conference in Baltimore in 1981.