Gay rights advocate Richard Isay dies

Via NYT:

Dr. Richard A. Isay, a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and gay-rights advocate who did not admit to himself that he was gay until he was 40, married and a father, and who won a pitched battle to persuade his own profession to stop treating homosexuality as a disease, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 77.

The cause was cancer, said his son, David, the founder of StoryCorps, an oral-history project.

At his death, Dr. Isay (pronounced EYE-say) was a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and a faculty member at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.

"He changed the way the psychoanalytic world viewed the subject of homosexuality," said Dr. Jack Drescher, a training and supervising analyst at the William Alanson White Institute in New York and the author of "Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man." "He was a pioneer, a very brave man. He was attacked by psychoanalysts. He took a lot of flak."