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Dr. John Fryer was a man of uncommon brilliance.  As a child, he learned so quickly and completely that his teachers called him a prodigy.  He was just five years old when he started second grade, 15 when he graduated from high school, and 19 when he graduated college and enrolled at Vanderbilt University Medical School where he became one of the youngest students ever to study psychiatry.  He graduated in 1962.

Dr. John Fryer was also gay.  Back then, homophobia was codified and enshrined by the medical world and criminalized by law, a legally sanctioned form of hate. It was legal to fire someone or refuse to rent to someone based on their sexual orientation.  It was even legal to arrest someone simply for the “crime” of holding a lover’s hand or for being served alcohol at a gay bar.  Fryer was taunted on the playground and in the classroom, and even in medical school, he found no reprieve.  The foundational diagnostic text used by all psychiatrists, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM, listed homosexuality as a mental illness.  In other words, Fryer was literally taught that the way he felt, who he was attracted to, was a disease.

Fryer wanted to be seen and loved for who he was.