Work of a Gay Rights Pioneer Is Never Done

It is the second half of the century and a UCLA biologist named Omar has discovered a test to identify the sexual orientation of newborns. When he goes public with his test, he consults a gay research assistant, who leads him to Artemis, a grass-roots gay leader. Together, they create an institute to study gay life and launch a network of after-school programs for gay children where they learn to be happy and well-adjusted.

As adults, they will be open about who they are--and politically powerful. And, oh yes, with an assist from the new president, legislation legalizing same-sex marriages will soon pass in the Congress.

“I just fix everything that’s wrong with the gay rights movement. It’s a wonderful experience,” says Betty Berzon, co-founder of the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center and, now, with this work in progress, first-time novelist. Berzon, a psychotherapist who for 30 years has specialized in counseling gays, has written five nonfiction books dealing with gay and family issues and, most recently, her memoir, “Surviving Madness: A Therapist’s Own Story” (University of Wisconsin, 2002).

While the social fixes in her novel--with the working title “Queer Babies”--are fictional, she is quick to point out those things that need fixing within the gay movement are very real. Among these: What she sees as a paucity of political leadership. “Most of the people who think of themselves as gay leaders in this country, other [gays] never heard of.” And an overemphasis on fund-raising. “Too often that’s what gets talked about in gay and lesbian organizations, rather than the work they’re doing and the people being helped.”

Her book, which does not yet have a publisher, fixes that too. “There’s a unification of all gay organizations into one federation” that fund-raises through tithing. “If every gay person in America tithed one dollar a month, there would be enough money,” Berzon says.

On a recent afternoon in the book-lined den of the Studio City home she shares with longtime partner Teresa DeCrescenzo, a social worker and founder and director of Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services, Berzon, 74, reflected on her path from denial to self-acceptance, contentment and activism.

She describes that tortuous journey in her memoir. As the story begins, she is 23 and, having just botched a wrist slashing, is tethered to a bed in an L.A. psychiatric hospital. As a teenager, she’d battled strange romantic feelings toward women. “I’d heard of homosexuality ... heard that it was a sickness, and I wondered if I had caught it.”

Later, at Stanford University, a female dorm-mate’s sexual advances so alarmed and confused her that she left school. She smiles and says, “I left college because I thought I might be homosexual. Now people go to college to do that.”

Berzon’s subsequent road took some amazing turns. She dated a young Si Newhouse (of the Conde Nast empire), made an awkward stab at the Greenwich Village lesbian bar scene, spent 20 years in therapy, had several lesbian affairs, ran her own bookstore in Hollywood, had an affair with one of Anais Nin’s two husbands, suffered a serious depression and had an abortion in Tijuana after a fling in Rome with an Iraqi banker.

Found Her True Calling

Luckily, an administrator at one of the mental hospitals she stayed in saw in her the potential to help other troubled souls. While working as a psychiatric aide, she earned a degree in psychology from UCLA. One of her professors was Evelyn Hooker, a social psychologist and groundbreaking researcher on the mental health of gay men.

Berzon later added a doctorate, worked with Carl Rogers, the father of encounter groups, at La Jolla’s Western Behavioral Sciences Institute and was involved in the human-potential movement at Esalen, a human potential institute in Big Sur. And she dated men.

On her 40th birthday, she finally faced facts: She was a lesbian.

She began conducting Quest for Love workshops for gays and lesbians (where she met DeCrescenzo), helped found the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center and in 1971 co-founded the first gay group within the American Psychiatric Assn. Two years later the association deleted homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses and the American Psychological Assn. soon followed suit.

Berzon was a pioneer, says Bonnie Strickland, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and past president of the American Psychological Assn. “It took great courage for her to do what she did,” considering that among psychologists and psychiatrists homosexuality was a taboo subject until the late ‘70s, Strickland says. “No question about it, she was well ahead of the times. When I was growing up, and when she was growing up, for us to even mention any lesbian interests, we’d be rushed off to a psychiatric hospital.”

To Strickland, 65, who came out as a lesbian in her late teens, Berzon has been a kind of Dear Abby. “There are some wonderful lesbian therapists, but they weren’t necessarily as public as Betty was. They were writing more for the profession than for the public.”

Berzon stays on top of current issues with her advice column, “Love Letters,” on Planet- Out.com. With young people today “much, much less conflicted” about their homosexuality, their issues have moved beyond coming out. “Probably the hottest issue in the gay rights movement is freedom to marry. Most gays want family life, not the bar life that was once their lot.”

No state has legalized same-sex marriage but Berzon thinks it will happen “in about 20 years,” even though some gays oppose legalization, saying “it’s too much about being like the straights.”

Berzon considers herself married to DeCrescenzo and wears a gold band. “We’re registered in California as domestic partners,” which gives them some rights of the legally married, such as legal, financial and medical decision making if one partner is incapacitated--as well as the right to be a legal adoptive parent of a partner’s child. But, says Berzon, “That doesn’t mean you are married in the eyes of the IRS, or can automatically inherit.” Even in Vermont, which has legalized “civil unions,” federal laws are not affected.

As a Californian, Berzon says, it’s easy to think things are pretty much OK for gays. But on a visit to St. Louis, her hometown, earlier this summer, “Suddenly, I was transported back to the world at large.” The Southern Baptist Convention was meeting and Berzon joined a peaceful protest staged by Soulforce, an interfaith group opposing anti-gay religious policies and teachings. At issue: What Soulforce says is the convention president’s refusal to refute the words of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, a Southern Baptist. He said in a ruling against a lesbian mother trying to get custody of her three children that “confinement and even execution” were perhaps appropriate to prevent homosexuals from parenting.

Concerned With Legacy

The Rev. Malcolm Boyd, a retired Episcopal priest and noted writer, was a founding member with Berzon of the now-defunct Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Writers Circle. “I think Betty’s always been a pioneer,” he says. “Betty and I are elders. I see her in that role,” concerned with legacy and trying to help some boomer types learn to be elders.

When Berzon began writing about gay and lesbian issues in the ‘70s, Boyd says, homosexual writers were decidedly “on the fringe, quite separate. Nobody was interested in the books anyway, and people couldn’t be ‘out’ to write them, for the most part.” The L.A. writers’ circle, which included the late Paul Monette, brought these writers together to share ideas “and a few triumphs.”

Now semi-retired, Berzon sees some gay male patients. Most seek counseling about relationships or workplace issues. If a man’s family refuses to accept that he is gay, she advises giving them time to get used to the idea, bringing them books, taking them to a meeting of Parents, Friends and Families of Gays. Above all, she counsels, “Keep the subject alive. You must not withdraw.”

Berzon says, “There has been a tendency to sexualize being gay. Parents don’t like to think about the sex life of their children. You counter it by talking about different parts of your life. I like to say, ‘If you never had sex again, you’d be just as gay as you are now.’

“There’s an overarching sense of identity that all gay people have. We have something very profound in common and we know it--who we choose to socialize with, what we choose to do with our lives, what occupations we enter.”

She finds that her “Love Letters” correspondents are distrustful because they have bought into long-standing, largely outmoded, beliefs that gay relationships don’t endure. Male-male and female-female partnerships each present unique challenges, says Berzon. Men are “socialized to be competitive, strong and not vulnerable” and this can create a power struggle between partners. In lesbian relationships, “Women will simply over-identify with one another. And I think women become much more dependent on one another for a sense of feeling OK.”

Another issue for gays is aging. “We don’t socialize intergenerationally,” Berzon says. “Older people are isolated in the gay community. But that is changing.” A few retirement communities for gays have opened. New York-based Senior Action in a Gay Environment, with a network of affiliates, is working to meet the needs of the “gay and gray” who are alone and lonely, with no spousal Social Security benefits or pensions.

Still an Activist

She is still doing her bit as an activist. Checking into Cedars-Sinai in March last year for a mastectomy, Berzon confronted an admissions clerk who asked whether she was single, married or divorced. “I said, ‘None of the above. I’ve lived with a woman for 29 years.’ ” Not an option allowed by the computer, said the clerk, entering “single.” Berzon protested in a letter to the top and, ultimately, “domestic partner” was programmed into the admissions system. “I’m kind of proud of that. I just badgered them.”

She and DeCrescenzo will reaffirm their commitment to each other next year in a 30th anniversary ceremony. Of the relationship, she says, “It seems pretty permanent. We have our crypts bought and paid for” at Westwood Village Memorial Park.

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Berzon will read from “Surviving Madness” at 7 p.m. Aug. 11 at Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Ave.