give me a lever and a place to stand

50 years ago: Dr. John Fryer, in perhaps the most courageous and definitely the most consequential act of his life, sat down in a hotel conference room, looking like a clown in a rubber mask and curly wig. Every part of him was covered. He was terrified.

“I am a homosexual,” he said. “I am a psychiatrist.”

The New York Times covered the anniversary of his speech today. I believe we all should honour him. His willingness to speak the truth when it could have ruined his life (again) changed the world.

Dr. Fryer only spoke up because he knew that time, at that place, could have made a difference. He knew the American Psychiatric Association had a dusty little committee that oversaw the list of diagnoses and disorders the profession used, and the new committee chairman was fiercely committed to science. He was willing to overturn old Freudian dogmas if the empirical evidence said that homosexuals were not actually the disordered, perverted fiends psychiatry thought they were.

There is so much wrong with the world. It is natural to feel frenzied with the desire to set all of it right, everywhere. It is also natural to feel overwhelmed and powerless, because almost none of us possess the power to make changes on a scale equal to what’s wrong.

Two years before Dr. Fryer’s speech, gay and lesbian protestors picketed the APA’s general meeting. They stormed into conference panels, demanding that the APA take homosexuality off their list of mental disorders. It was a miserable failure. These midcentury Freudian psychiatrists naturally considered themselves as a cut above the unenlightened mass of common society; this ✨destructive and antisocial✨behaviour just proved that gays and lesbians had something wrong with them. Even members of the GayPA, the unofficial association of homosexual psychiatrists, disapproved of their behaviour.

So one of the activists, Barbara Gittings, realized they needed to switch tactics. If psychiatrists would only listen to another psychiatrist, they needed an inside man. So she campaigned relentlessly among the GayPA, asking psychiatrist after psychiatrist to put their reputations, careers, and medical licenses on the line to speak up for them. Doctor after doctor turned her down. No wonder; at the time, “sodomy”, meaning almost any non-PIV sex, was still a crime in 42 states. Who would put themselves out there like that?

Hence Dr. Fryer’s disguise. Hence his subsequent retreat from public gay activism. The following year, he lost another job for being too obviously gay. He dedicated the rest of his career to geriatric psychiatry, focusing on the spiritual and emotional needs of the dying and the bereaved they left in their wake. He threw large and fabulous parties, but always felt himself to be on the fringes of the LGBT movement. Only at the end of his life did people begin to realize just how profound his weird, secretive, clown-suited moment had been in their history. It doesn’t seem to have brought him much peace or healing, after a lifetime of silence and oppression.

We’re taught all these triumphant narratives where someone is the hero of a movement; when they are tirelessly committed to a goal and get to celebrate its accomplishment. When there is something wrong in the world, we’re given images of being pivotal to its solution. There’s almost an element of self-punishment; if we are not constantly anguished about something, if we do not constantly push beyond our own limits, are we really trying?

And consequently as a society we ignore or downplay the work that gets shit done. Not a heroic narrative, but someone stepping up once during a life where they have very little spare time or energy for activism. Not a complete change, but the small push of one tiny decision that looks like it might be important. Not halting a war halfway across the world, but showing up to the boring committee meeting you get invited to every year, and speaking for ten minutes.

And then years of friends, of renting rooms to med students to stay financially afloat, of providing what comfort and kindness you can to people you can’t really help at all. It is hard sometimes to understand how much it matters to be humane and decent to the world around you, but it’s easier to imagine when you think about the world around you being humane and decent to you.

I’m not saying we should stop watching the news or stop caring about events we cannot control. I am saying that we need to feed our own capacities to be loving and courageous and thoughtful—to survive, and do more than survive—and then we need to see what opportunities to change things are within our grasp, and what we would need to feel able to take part.

It’s possible the decisions we can actually influence will in the end be meaningless. But then again, it’s possible they won’tbe.