THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Dee Mosbacher, MD, PhD

“Not for a minute did I leave politics to the men in my family, as my father once asked me to do.”

Interviewed by Dr. Esther Rothblum, 2021

ER:  I am delighted to welcome Dr. Dee Mosbacher, who is going to talk about her life for the Smith College Archives. This is a real honor for me, so please go ahead, Dee.

DM:  Thank you so much, Esther. I really, really appreciate you’re letting me tell my story. It’s really nice to have somebody to start me off a little bit. So, thank you. I don’t know if you remember Ann Richards. She was my favorite governor of Texas. She famously said of George H.W. Bush, “Don’t blame George. He can’t help it if he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

Well, I hope I wasn’t born with a silver foot, but I was born with a silver spoon. And I say it because I think it’s really important to acknowledge class, which is such a profound determinant of the opportunities that we get. And I say it because my silver spoon family, and the Bush silver foot family, were friends. We played football together. I think Dad and I beat the silver foot and his son, but that could be a revisionist recollection.

As a child, I was a major tomboy. I played games with knives and spent time running around the bayous of Houston. A pal of mine and I would capture frogs, freeze them, and we would do various operations, and follow them up post-surgery. I really liked science, and at 12 years old, became interested in medicine. I was at times pugnacious. I got into a fight with a kid who was twice my size. I provoked my fifth-grade teacher to throw a book at me. And in the eighth-grade, I broke a classmate’s leg by tripping him. These behaviors were coupled with bad grades for most of school due to an inability to sit still and concentrate. It wasn’t until after I became a psychiatrist that I was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, and ADD and depression as an adult.

When I was 16, my mother told me that I’m Jewish. I guess when a Jewish man marries a Catholic woman, you get a Presbyterian because that’s how I was raised. My father was Jewish but reasoned that if he didn’t practice the religion, he didn’t have to acknowledge the culture. This was something we argued about later in my life, especially after I found references to my relatives who had been murdered in concentration camps.

I went to one of the Claremont Colleges – Pitzer. When my mother became ill in my junior year, I moved home to be near her. I took some classes at University of Houston while I was there, and it was there that I encountered my first revolutionary. She taught sociology. I fell madly in love with her. Fortunately, a couple of the men I was dating persuaded me not to join her group. Neither they, nor I, understood that only part of my attraction to her was political. She was later arrested for an armed robbery and spent many years in jail.

After my mother died, I moved to D.C. to finish my degree from Pitzer and to take some pre-med classes. While I was in D.C., I was very active in the anti-war movement. I went to one of the really large demos in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, When I got back, my father called. He was totally pissed off. He said, “Why can’t you just become a doctor and leave the politics to the men in the family?” Well, it seems I had inherited the Mosbacher gene for politics, but not the Republican gene. In D.C., I became a socialist and pro-choice activist.

After graduating from Pitzer with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, I worked for the Socialist Workers Party and held jobs as a construction worker and a garage mechanic. It was a rich time, and many of us thought we were fighting the good fight. But at the same time, I was struggling with my sexual orientation. Everything I had read pathologized, and/or criminalized homosexuality.

One day, I saw a notice about a pro-abortion speak-out. It said there would be a doctor, a lawyer, and a lesbian speaker. Well, I jumped at the chance to see a real-life lesbian. I went to the meeting where I saw three very articulate speakers but none identified herself as a lesbian. Several months later, I discovered that all three speakers were lesbians. I jumped out of the closet once I realized that these were normal, successful women, not at all the people I’d been led to believe they would be.

The most important thing that happened to me in D.C. was falling in love with my spouse of 45 years, Dr. Nanette Gartrell. When she finished medical school, we moved to Boston together. She for her psychiatry residency, and I to get my PhD at the Union Institute. I had become very interested in the topic of schizophrenia. My dissertation compared various models of schizophrenia, particularly the medical model and the psychoanalytic model.

I found the medical model much superior because it treated schizophrenia as a psychiatric disorder with serious chronic mental health consequences. Whereas the psychoanalytic model pathologized the patient and family as exemplified by the use of what I thought was a very odious term, “schizophrenogenic mother.” When I did my psychiatry residency at Harvard, beginning in 1983, I was surprised to find that the psychoanalytic model was still being utilized among the faculty at Cambridge Hospital.

My experience at the Union Institute was wonderful. I was happily and actively out during that period and that’s where I got a PhD in Social Psychology. Then I went to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, which was an altogether different experience. I knew medical school would be a challenge because of my difficulty concentrating. I had decided to retreat to the closet as I did my time at this conservative school, but I couldn’t stay there, especially when my friend Gary found a message on his locker door saying, “Kill the queers.”

We faced obvious as well as more subtle signs of homophobia in what we were taught. So, I decided to act. I joined the American Medical Student Association, soon becoming a trustee. In 1980, we made a slide-tape presentation called, Closets are Health Hazards: Gay and Lesbian Physicians Come Out. That slide-tape presentation could be used in schools all over the country by anyone wanting to educate about homophobia. Through the distribution of Closets, the efficiency of educating about homophobia without being there stayed with me until I began to make videos.

The magic of connecting an audience with LGBT people served two purposes: 1) to give courage and community to closeted individuals, and 2) to eliminate stereotypes harbored by straight people. My first actual video, not a slide-tape presentation, was filmed at the fifth Lesbian Physician Conference in 1989 with my friend Joan Biren, who had helped make Closets. In May of ’92, I was invited to become the first alum to give the commencement address at my alma mater, Pitzer College, which is, as I said before, one of the Claremont colleges. I was asked because I had begun to take on Karl Rove and the Republican Party.

Rove, who was moving the party ever rightward, had decided that promoting fear about LGBT folks would be a fantastic fundraising tool. So as the daughter of President Bush’s Commerce Secretary, I joined the battle against the Republican Party. Coincidentally or not, my dad was the commencement speaker right across the street at Claremont Men’s College. I opened my address with, “My father and I had breakfast this morning, and we took a look at each other’s speeches. He could have given mine, but he’s not a lesbian. I could have given his, but I’m not a Republican.” Dad and I both laughed about the press coverage of my remarks, but our relationship got very tense as the election approached.

ER:  I just want to interrupt and say that many years before I met you, I had that quote on my syllabus, teaching Psychology of Women, because it was in Time magazine.

DM:  Really? That’s very funny. Well, it was funny at the time. Unfortunately, our relationship devolved a bit, and it was made even worse by the fact that I was the subject of a Washington Post feature labeling me, “The lesbian in the GOP family.” I was also the only Democrat in the Mosbacher family. So, it was really a very tense time. As you recall, Clinton won that election, and my family was not happy at all.

As the ’90s continued, our opponents developed crasser but also more sophisticated tools, to battle our attempts to obtain LGBT rights in various states around the country. Gay bashing videos were developed and distributed in states where LGBT measures were on the ballot. A widely distributed video called, “Gay Rights, Special Rights” sought to drive a wedge between the African-American and LGBT communities by alleging we wanted special rights, not civil rights. A second video, The Gay Agenda, claimed that we could, and should, be changed from homosexuals into heterosexuals.

I was inspired if you will, by those videos. In response, I founded Woman Vision, a nonprofit with the goal of making educational videos about the LGBT community. I took a very different approach. I didn’t want to use the fear mongering methods of the Christian right. As a psychiatrist, I had learned to interview and listen well—skills that are highly desirable for both psychiatry and filmmaking. I had seen the possibilities of changing minds and hearts through education delivered on a very emotional level. My goal with these films was to model transformation. That is, to show how Christian parents, whose religion and culture had taught them to be homophobic, came to a new understanding of this kind of prejudice as they synthesized that with having a gay child of their own.

Straight from the Heart, our first film, was nominated for an Academy AwardTM in 1995. It was followed by All God’s Children and De Colores, which addressed themselves to the African-American community and the Latino-Latina communities, respectively. These films became a part of the Unlearning Homophobia series that we put out. In my next series of films, I began to examine discrimination in other parts of our culture.

When I was a kid, I loved sports and played a lot of them. I continued to follow women’s college basketball as an adult, and I was really distressed to see that I had never heard of a single coach or player who was out. Out for a Change, the first ever film on homophobia in sports, was finished in 1994. Training Rules, which came some years later, examined homophobia in women’s sports through the prism of Penn State University, which allowed its women’s basketball coach, Rene Portland, to bully lesbian players throughout her 27-year tenure at the university.

Portland was actually forced to retire as a result of the film. I was the first documentarian to examine the toxic environment in Penn State’s athletic Department, which blew apart two years later over the Sandusky case. The film premiered in Philadelphia in 2008, and the atmosphere was really tense. We were very aware that there were a lot of attorneys representing Penn State who were in the audience and ready to pounce on us to try to censor the film. Thank goodness that didn’t happen.

At home in San Francisco were two iconic and revered lesbians who were both getting up in years. Joan Biren proposed that we make a film about their lives. She directed, and we co-produced a film about Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon.

Although it wasn’t my last film, I have to say that Radical Harmonies is my emotional favorite because it really encapsulates the making of a movement. It contains songs that were the libretto of my lesbian youth. I envisioned it as the soundtrack of our liberation movement. In the early ’70s, we didn’t have the Internet. For us, particularly those in more rural areas, the performers and the whole infrastructure that grew up around them became our Internet. Traveling from town to town, creating community out of isolation, singing the songs of our lives, and showing us that we were not alone.

ER:  I still show that in my Lesbian Lives course.

DM:  Do you? That’s so great. It was very special when I think back on it. I don’t think there’s anything that both encapsulates my goals of modeling transformation, and showing how we were transformed from a group of lesbians who didn’t know that others existed, to coming together and having forms of communication that connected us long before the Internet happened.

On the psychiatry front, after we moved from Boston to San Francisco, I spent a few years as Medical Director for Mental Health in San Mateo County, which is just south of San Francisco. Then I worked in a nonprofit in San Francisco for many years. During that time, I also volunteered my psychiatric services to homeless mentally ill folks in the Tenderloin, in the city. As you know, in 2004, Mayor Gavin Newsom made it possible for LGBT folks to marry in San Francisco, and Nanette and I rushed to do so. In fact, we have been married three times to each other. The courts annulled our first marriage here, so we did it again when it became legal in San Francisco. And between those marriages, we tied the knot in Canada.

I have retired from psychiatry and filmmaking, but I continue to film and edit travel logs for my friends and family, which is fun and educational for me. It helps me keep my hands in filmmaking and learning how to make very short films. In this era of SARS-Covid-19, I am volunteering as a psychiatrist with the same nonprofit that I used to work for. I have also continued my political activism.

After the election in 2016, Nanette, a colleague of ours, and myself, co-authored a letter to President Obama calling for the immediate neuropsychiatric evaluation of the incoming president. Our letter went viral, spawning a movement of mental health professionals warning about Donald Trump. Nanette and I co-authored a chapter in the New York Times best-selling book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. Our chapter was about, among other things, invoking the 25th Amendment to remove that dangerous president from office.

I’ve had a dual career in psychiatry and filmmaking, but what I’ve tried to do in both is the same. To bring what solace can be gained by understanding something better. Be it schizophrenia and the treatments used for it, or homophobia and the actions that can be taken to remedy discrimination and prejudice. Of course, I know that understanding is often only a small piece of what we humans need to bend the arc toward wellness or justice. But it’s my part. It’s the part I feel I have played.

And after witnessing the injustices of the last four years culminating with Trump’s disastrous and dangerous response to COVID and to the election, we remain active. While Nanette and I are quarantined due to our age and medical issues, we do what we can by writing letters, funding justice seeking organizations, and volunteering. We feel so lucky that after 45 years, we are harmonious, and love each other so very deeply, especially in these challenging times. I want to thank you again so much, Esther, for giving me the opportunity to tell my story.

ER:  Well, thank you. It’s such an incredible story. I just wanted to add that you also founded a media center at Pitzer College, right? In your name?

DM:  That’s right. Yes, we did. We thought it was really important. And a media center that focuses on LGBT issues.

ER:  Yes, that is so great. I’m curious. It sounds like your life has been so amazing, and so many themes. Would you say there was some event where there was such a coincidence, that looking back really shaped your life but it was a happenstance or coincidence? Anything like that? Or has it always been sort of linear?

DM:  I would say it was the life of somebody with ADD. You know how we jump from thing to thing? Well, that’s been my life. Luckily, I think because people like Nanette have done their best to keep me focused on things long enough, I’ve been able to achieve some things. But really, no, you’re right. I would say I’ve had one adventure after another. Aside from being interested in medicine from a pretty early age and being interested in psychology, I would say it’s been a bit all over the place, but in a happy way. I’m not dissatisfied [with] it at all.

ER:  Right. In a very successful way. And also, for younger viewers or viewers who see this in the future, it’s hard to underscore how much courage it took to be out back then. To be out in Republican circles, to be out at your commencement address, to be out in medicine. That really being a forerunner, took so much courage.

DM: Well, thank you. It did. I’m not sure, because of the person I am, I don’t really talk about a lot of the painful part of it. But, yes, there was. It was not easy. I was back in the era when my mother had died, but my father was concerned that something was wrong with me and tried to shepherd me toward getting psychological evaluations and stuff like that. Not in a mean way, like, “I’ll disown you” or anything like that, but just not getting it. Just really not getting it, as none of us did, I think, back then.

I mean, only a relatively few people really got that all the literature about LGBT folks was taken from a sample of mental hospitals, or prisons, or things like that. It was a very clearly skewed sample of people they were studying. And that’s why it was just amazing to me how little it finally took. And what little it took, was seeing three lesbians who were a doctor, a lawyer, who were just so normal. And that’s what I think informed my work a lot, because just even having that experience of seeing one or two other people that were like you, or like you could be, was just amazing. It was transformative. I think it really colored my work later in life, too.

ER:  Yes. well, thanks to those lesbians.

DM:  Here, here. Here, here. Right.