Originally appeared June 21, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.
Destructive religious and psychiatric doctrines have far less power to hurt us now than they did fifty years ago. Here's a list of some of the people to thank for that progress.
EVERY YEAR DURING Gay Pride Week, there is an upsurge of exhortations to exhibit pride, demonstrate pride, feel pride.
Fair enough. Only I would add this. We should temper our pride with gratitude - a deep sense that we as individuals and as a community owe a great deal to the people who made it possible for us to feel proud.
If there are now an unprecedented number of gays and lesbians who are comfortable with themselves, open about their lives and prepared to assert their full moral legitimacy and legal equality, all this we owe to the people who gave us the tools to work with.
By "tools" I mean the ideas and images we use to create a positive self-concept, the language we speak about ourselves with and the arguments we use to immunize ourselves against destructive religious and psychiatric doctrines.
If gratitude is the proper response when someone does something for you, think of them with gratitude. When you are celebrating your pride, whether you realize it or not, you are exhibiting the results of their work.
There is no room for a complete list, but here are a few of the people who promoted these ideas or helped give them institutional structure.
Alfred C. Kinsey was a pioneer sex researcher and author of "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" (1948) and a companion volume on women (1953). Kinsey startled postwar America with his finding that large numbers of men engaged in homosexuality.
Just as important, the books also conducted a running critique of sex-phobic psychiatric (especially Freudian) doctrines from psychiatry never really recovered.
The book was a best seller. Tens of thousands of gay men read Kinsey and took heart that they were essentially normal. It would be fair to say the modern gay liberation movement found its impetus, its bearings and its energy directly from Kinsey.
Mary Renault was an English novelist who emigrated to South Africa in 1948 with her lifelong lover Julie Mullard and began writing a series of highly regarded, exhaustively researched novels set in ancient Greece.
The novels often focused on gay men and their relationships, making the point that gay men were accepted as an ordinary part of the social landscape in Greece. That seemed an almost utopian vision for gay men in the 1950s and 1960s, but it gave visible form and encouragement to gay men's aspirations.
Rev. Troy Perry was one of the first people to assert that his Christian God loves and accepts gays and lesbians and fully accepts their sexual behavior. As Perry put it in his book title, "The Lord Is My Shepherd and He Knows I'm Gay."
That thought was wildly implausible in 1968 when Perry founded his Metropolitan Community Church. If it is more widely accepted now, that is a measure of Perry's work and his example which resonated far beyond his own denomination.
Ron Gold is one of the unsung heroes of the gay movement. As a leader in the effort to change psychiatrists' view of homosexuality as a disease, Gold drafted statements, conducted negotiations, managed demonstrations and argued with psychiatrists. One important speech was titled, "Stop It! You're Making Me Sick!"
The resulting 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association to reverse itself not only meant that gays and lesbians did not have to wonder if they were somehow mentally ill, it also meant that no one could ever again use that argument to deny us legal, social or moral equality.
"Tom of Finland" was the pen name of a real Finnish graphic artist named Touko Laaksonen. In a world and an era when most of the visible gay men were effeminate (think of Liberace), Tom's high quality drawings of well-muscled, extravagantly endowed, masculine men cruising or engaging in sex was a revelation for many gays.
For men wracked with guilt or shame about their homosexuality, Tom's drawings of handsome men enjoying one another presented an alternative model of how to think about themselves and their sexuality. Any one of Tom's drawings is worth 1,000 words of argument or 100 hours of psychotherapy.
Barbara Gittings was one of the most important leaders in the effort to move the conservative American Library Association to a pro-gay position - banning discrimination against gays, fighting anti-gay censorship, and encouraging libraries to stock gay-related books.
Gittings lobbied ALA officials, compiled booklists for libraries to use, helped set up an award for the best gay books of the year, even sponsored a gay kissing booth at ALA conventions to get attention for the gay demands. As a result, the ALA is now one of the most gay-affirmative professional organizations in the country.
There are many heterosexuals who also deserve our gratitude for their efforts on our behalf. To choose just one: Psychotherapist and author George Weinberg, best known to gays and lesbians for his little book "Society and the Healthy Homosexual" (1972).
In less than 150 pages, Weinberg set out the reasons why psychoanalysis is biased, conversion therapy does not work, gays are healthy, and homosexuality is not a problem.
Even more important, Weinberg explained why the real problem is homophobia because homophobic people have irrational fears and beliefs that are inconsistent with mental health. Weinberg, in fact, seems to have invented the term "homophobia" and put it into general use.
So when you think about gay pride, keep in mind your debt, direct or indirect, to some of these people who made it possible.