Dr. Richard Isay—a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who argued that being gay was normal and not an illness—has died at the age of 77 of cancer, On Top Magazine reported.
Isay himself was the father of two sons who came out gay later in life. He married his partner of 33 years, artist Gordon Harrell, last year in Manhattan.
Early in his career, Isay accepted the mainstream view about homosexuality, according to the New York Times. Pondering his own sexuality, he thought psychoanalysis might help, and had 10 years of therapy. In the early 1970s, soon after the analysis ended and he was supposedly "cured," he realized, he said, that he was gay. By then, he had a wife and two sons; he eventually told his wife about his sexuality in 1980.
Isay—who also wrote works such as Being Homosexual (1989), Becoming Gay (1997) and Commitment and Healing: Gay Men and the Need for Romantic Love (2006)—is survived by Harrell, his former wife, a brother, two sons and four grandchildren.
