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Ronald "Ron" Gold (April 22, 1930 – May 1, 2017) played an important role in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness. A member of the Gay Activists Alliance and, later, a cofounder of the National Gay Task Force, he fought for positive representation of gays and lesbians in the media.
Gold was born in Brooklyn, New York. When he turned 13, his parents began shuffling him to psychiatrists to address his homosexuality. He eventually developed a heroin addiction. At age 24, he approached a psychiatric hospital for treatment and was turned away. He spent several years at a Kansas clinic, where they helped him get clean, but failed to “cure” his homosexuality. His experiences with conversion therapy fueled his commitment to “eliminate the ’sickness’ label branded upon gays and lesbians.” Gold spent his early career as a magazine writer and a reporter for Variety, before dedicating himself to activism. In 1970 he created the seminal, later-expanded booklet “20 Questions About Homosexuality,” which, at the time, was one of only two publications that spoke positively about gay identity. As the media director of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), Gold played a pivotal role in the pressure campaign to remove homosexuality from the APA’s index of mental disorders. In the fall of 1972 — after a disguised gay psychiatrist, John Fryer, appeared at the APA Annual Meeting in May and provided historic testimony on the issue — Gold and GAA protesters infiltrated a behavioral therapy conference in New York. Railing against the speakers, Gold broke up the meeting. As the conferees disassembled, Gold talked to a psychiatrist there who helped give him a forum for debate at the next APA convention.
At the 1973 APA Annual Meeting in Honolulu, Gold delivered his now-famous “Stop It, You’re Making Me Sick” speech, asserting, “Your profession of psychiatry — dedicated to making sick people well — is the cornerstone of oppression that makes people sick.” The same year, the APA removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders.
The Task Force was the first national gay and lesbian rights group, and Gold was a co-founder of it in 1973 with Dr. Howard Brown (who came out after serving as New York City’s health commissioner), Barbara Gittings, Bruce Voeller, Martin Duberman, Father Robert Carter, SJ, Frank Kameny, and Nathalie Rockhill.
In 1986 Gold wrote the first media guide for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. He persuaded producers of major television networks to edit episodes of shows that presented negative gay and lesbian stereotypes. Gold appears in the award-winning documentary, “Cured” (2020), about the crusade to delist homosexuality from the DSM. He died at his East Village home at age 87, shortly after filming. Gold died in the arms of his husband, Ali Akbar, his partner of 17 years. Lesbian activist Chris Marchitello, his friend of more than 40 years, said the cause was heart failure.
Dr. Charles Silverstein, founder in 1973 of the Institute for Human Identity, said Gold was chair of the group that agitated for the change at the APA. While it grew out of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), it was called The Ad Hoc Committee because GAA itself had a policy of “not cooperating or negotiating with the oppressor.” At the APA’s nomenclature committee on February 8, 1973, Silverstein recalled, “I gave the professional presentation, Jean O’Leary gave the civil rights presentation,” and Gold got Dr. Robert Spitzer, a member of the committee, to let him give his famous “Stop It!” speech at the APA’s Honolulu convention later that year.
Sue Hyde, a lesbian activist since 1973 and director, since 1986, of the Creating Change conference at what is now the National LGBTQ Task Force and, said, “Ron Gold was a visionary leader of our movement and his role in the de-pathologizing of homosexuality was key and pivotal to that victory. In my mind, that particular victory stands as the most important one for our movement because the lifting of the label of mental illness as it relates to homosexuality opened the door to many other victories. It aligned the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association and other professional organizations with the notion that LGBTQ people could be and are mentally healthy.” Hyde added, “He started as a reporter at Variety and knew the ways of Hollywood,” leading to his 1974 interaction with producers of Robert Young’s “Marcus Welby, MD” on ABC about an episode called “Outrage” about a male teacher raping a boy, which conflated being gay with pedophilia. “His advocacy to get attention to the homophobia of that episode set a fire around the country for our movement to pay more attention to media representations of us.” In ‘74, Gold was also successful in getting NBC to edit an episode of “Police Woman” with Angie Dickinson that included a negative depiction of lesbians.
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