Biography:

John Ercel Fryer was born in Kentucky in 1937 and attended Winchester High School, where he was very active in the school’s music program. He attended Transylvania College in Lexington, Kentucky graduating in 1957, and was later accepted in Vanderbilt University's Medical School. Fryer did his medical residency at the Ohio State Hospital and, being forced to leave the psychiatry residency program at University of Pennsylvania after it was discovered that he was gay, completed his psychiatry residency at Norristown State Hospital in Philadelphia.

After his residency Dr. Fryer stayed in Philadelphia, joined Temple University’s faculty, obtained tenure and full professorships in psychiatry and family and community medicine, and taught for more than thirty years until his retirement in 2000. He also established a private practice at his home office, offering both individual and group therapy, mostly to gay men and lesbians, persons with alcohol and drug addictions, patients with AIDS/HIV, and people coping with death.

Fryer was the protagonist of one of the most important moments in the history of the American gay rights movement.  In 1964 Dr. Franklin E. Kameny publicly criticized the listing of homosexuality as a disease in medical literature. As part of their activism to create awareness on this issue, he and other gay activists confronted psychiatrists attending the annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 1971. As a result of this incident Kameny and Barbara Gittings, another gay advocate, were invited to the 1972 meeting of the APA to make a presentation to help educate its members about homosexuality. Originally a panel was planned composed of Kameny, Gittings and two psychiatrists but Gittings felt that they needed a person both a psychiatrist and gay. After making inquiries among people they knew, they invited Fryer who accepted on the condition of keeping his participation anonymous.

Fryer did not yet have tenure at Temple, and had been fired from several jobs after discovered that he was gay. Insisting on keeping his identity a secret during the panel, Fryer called himself Dr. Henry Anonymous and wore a baggy suit and a mask, and used a microphone that distorted his voice. Starting his speech with the words “I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist,” Fryer electrified an audience that found itself listening to a gay psychiatrist speak in a public forum for the first time. Fryer’s appearance had a galvanizing effect, playing a crucial role in prompting the APA in 1973 to remove homosexuality from its lists of mental disorders. Fryer did not reveal he was the man behind the mask until the 1994 APA annual meeting in Philadelphia. In recognition, the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists (AGLP) honored Fryer with its Distinguished Service Award in 2002.

Throughout his life John Fryer was very active with several organizations, some of which he helped found. Among the most notable ones are the International Working Group on Death, Dying, and Bereavement; the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force; Physicians in Transition; Temple’s Family Life Development Center; and the Institute of Religion and Science.

Fryer also took a keen interest in the hospice movement, particularly its connection to palliative care and his research on death and bereavement. He spent a sabbatical year in England working at the St. Christopher Hospice, having been invited by its founder Dame Cicely M. Saunders, pioneer of the hospice movement. Fryer also travelled extensively both for business and pleasure; he attended conferences in Uganda, England, Germany, and Australia among others. He visited China, Greece, several countries in Europe, and multiple cities in the United States. At the time of his death in 2003 due to sarcoidosis, Fryer was making arrangements to move to Australia. He had received a job offer from a government agency in Darwin (Northern Territory) to be in charge of developing programs to help patients cope with drug and alcohol addiction and comorbidity.

Fryer was also very involved in his church and with church music in particular. An accomplished keyboard player, Fryer was for more than three decades the organ player and choirmaster at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church of Germantown, the Philadelphia neighborhood where he lived most of his life.