THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Nanette Gartrell, MD
“As I talk about all of these battles in which I’ve been engaged to bring about social justice, and improve lives for LGBTQ people everywhere, I feel quite happy about the contributions I’ve made, and I hope to continue to be able to do so for the remainder of my life.”
Interviewed by Dr. Esther Rothblum, 2021
ER: So here I am interviewing Nanette Gartrell for the Smith College archives.
NG: Hello, Esther, and thank you very much for your willingness to do this interview with me. I thought I would start by saying I was born a lesbian. I’m going to backtrack and say a little about my parents, the family I came from, and talk about my childhood before saying something about my adult life, the latter of which is fairly well documented in terms of my research and publications and writings.
I actually had a very sad, very painful childhood, and it’s a painful process for me to give an account of it. But I also feel that it’s important for people who might watch this, who may have had their own struggles, to hear about the struggles of others, and also the ways that, to the extent that it’s useful, I was able to work through them and get past them and have a beautiful life as an adult.
I was born and raised in Santa Barbara, California, U.S.A. My parents were 20 years old when I was born. They were hastily married when my mother became pregnant with me. My grandparents moved to Santa Barbara before they raised their respective families. My mother was the youngest of four children in her family. My father was the youngest of three children in his family.
The grandparents were middle class. They strongly disapproved of my parents’ unplanned pregnancy. My father was a college student at UCSB, working as a janitor to support his education, in a lumber company. My grandparents gave them no money. They didn’t really have much to give, but they gave them no money to help once my mother became pregnant, or after I was born.
I have two younger siblings – a brother, who was born two years later, named Greg, and a sister, Yvonne, who was born four years later. My maternal grandparents were Herb and Lucille Weyler, and my maternal grandfather at one time had been mayor of Santa Barbara. My paternal grandparents were Charles and Kathryn Gartrell, and that grandfather was postmaster of Santa Barbara most of the time that I was growing up. I have a very clear memory from the time that I was two years old all the way up to adulthood. I know that there are a lot of adults who don’t remember details about their early childhood, but I actually do for some strange reason. I actually remember attending my father’s UCSB graduation at the age of two.
My father wanted to go to medical school, but unfortunately, he suffered from a very severe panic disorder, which he inherited from his mother, and subsequently transmitted genetically to my sister. Severe panic disorder ran in my family, and it was very incapacitating for those who suffered from it. There were no medical schools in Santa Barbara, and he was so afraid of change that he didn’t apply elsewhere.
Instead of continuing his education, he continued to work as a janitor in the lumber company, and over a period of years worked his way up to assistant manager, where he remained for the next 18 years, never receiving a raise, being paid a very low salary. He was afraid of everything, and he instilled those fears in us. After he died, I learned that among his anxieties was a fear that the gravitational field of the earth was not strong enough to keep him tethered. That’s how severe his anxiety was. And I, even as a psychiatrist, can’t imagine that level of fear—being afraid that you’re going to somehow go spinning off into space.
My mother was frustrated, angry, and punitive. When she was a young child at the age of three, she taught herself to read and was considered very bright by her family. She was also described as very beautiful, and she was considered very beautiful throughout her life. But at the age of four, her brother was wielding a baseball bat, and she was standing behind him. He accidentally smashed the bat into her nose. She burst out crying. Her mother slapped her for crying. She was never seen by a doctor. She immediately developed double vision, became severely dyslexic, and lost her ability to read.
These were lifelong afflictions for her. She was never able to write coherent sentences without considerable effort and editing by everyone, including me. She did become a talented artist, specializing in watercolor, but she struggled to complete high school and never went on with her education. Years later, it was discovered that her ethmoid sinuses, which are the sinuses right behind the nose, had been shattered by the baseball bat. She had multiple episodes of meningitis in her childhood. She developed a spinal fluid leak from her nose when I was a medical student, that I diagnosed. It was fortunately repaired neuro-surgically, the sixth such procedure ever done in the world, after the first five people died. That was a successful intervention for a problem that had been ongoing since her face injury as a child.
In some respects, I have always wondered if her violent temper may have been contributed to by her head trauma and her repeated meningococcal infections. Anything is possible with those kinds of injuries and infections. So, I grew up with a rageful mother and a severely anxious father. Both were actually quite seriously mentally ill, and our household was tumultuous. It was frightening.
When I was six years old, teenage boys living next door lured me up into their tree fort. I’d never been in a tree fort, and they said, “Oh, we want to show you our tree fort. It’s really fun up there.” When I got up there, they pointed a 22-caliber rifle at me and sexually assaulted me. Subsequently, I lived in a constant state of fear. I had fears that came from my father, many of his anxieties that he passed on to us. After the assault, I was just terrified. I was terrified throughout my childhood, throughout my adolescence, into my adulthood.
Also, when I was seven years old, my maternal grandmother, the only person to whom I actually had been close, drove off a cliff near Big Sur on Hwy 1, dying by accident or intention. We never had any way of knowing. A few years after that, a man tried to kidnap me when I was walking home from school. So, it was daily traumas with my mother, and the anxiety of my father, and then these external events that happened, plus my grandmother’s traumatic death, that characterized my life when I was a pre-adolescent.
In addition, I was severely shy. Maybe that was the part of the anxiety chromosome that came to me from my father, I don’t know. But I was severely shy. In fact, even though at this point in my life I seem like an incredible extrovert, still, underneath, there’s a very shy person. I was so shy that I was terrified to speak in school. When I was asked to speak, my words were jumbled. I didn’t have a stutter, but it was like I had a stutter. I couldn’t even put together coherent sentences. When I was asked to read in class, I was so petrified that I could not read a sentence coherently.
How my teachers figured out that I had some cognitive abilities or had some intellect, I really have no idea, because I could not perform orally in school. I lived in fear of being called on every single day of class. And I was ashamed. I’d stand up and try to read, when every other student could read and could read well, but I just couldn’t. It was so embarrassing. Just so terribly embarrassing.
Also, I didn’t have any friends. I wanted friends. I was desperate for friends. I read books about girls who had friends. I really wanted to have friends and allies. But I was so shy. I didn’t know how to make friends, and I probably wasn’t much fun. I wouldn’t have been much fun as a friend because I didn’t really know how to socialize in a decent way. I mean, I had my siblings and some neighbor kids. We played with neighbor kids, and I played with my siblings, or fought with them, but I didn’t know how to form positive, connected relationships that translated into friendships. As a child or as an adolescent.
When I was eleven, my mom was psychiatrically hospitalized for depression. It was close to Christmas. We were still in school. We came home from school, and she wasn’t there. We had no warning or preparation. I had read the book Jane Eyre, and I imagined that my mom had gone mad. In addition, we weren’t allowed to see her for three months. My father moved us into his sister’s home so that she could take care of us after school when he returned from his 14-hour workdays at the lumberyard. My dad was terribly needy and anxious and stressed. He looked to me for emotional support, so I became an adult in the family at a very young age, even though I was anxious and frightened all the time.
When we finally were allowed to visit our mom, we found her in a locked psychiatric ward surrounded by psychotic people, which was just as bad as I had expected. From the time that she was discharged until I departed for college some seven years later, she was depressed, she was violent, she was rageful, she was really unpredictable, and really out of control. There was never a logic to any of it. I mean, sometimes she would come into the room, and we would be sitting in the den watching the news, and she would start screaming that the magazines weren’t neatly stacked on the table, and just completely lose it. I mean, there was just no predicting any of it.
She saw a psychiatrist, a man whose name was John Carleton in Santa Barbara, about five times a week at about $25 to $35 per hour, which caused an enormous economic hardship for my family, because my father earned $8,000 a year, and as I mentioned, never received a raise. So, we went into massive debt. Conflicts ensued over that with my father saying, “Why do you have to go so often?” And then my mother going completely nuts that he didn’t support her. We were all miserable. I couldn’t wait to leave home. As I saw it, my only ticket out of there, and I mean completely out of there, out of town, away from them, was an academic scholarship to college. So that became my goal. To get the heck out of town and away from them.
Unfortunately, I failed the placement tests for junior high. I went to a public school at which they gave placement tests to determine whether you would be tracked into one of three levels. A system I absolutely don’t believe in, but that’s what it was. The tests were given the day after my mom was hospitalized. I had been a straight A student even though I couldn’t read aloud in class. But I couldn’t see the questions on the placement tests because I was crying, and my vision was blurred by tears. I completely failed the tests, and I was tracked into the lowest level, the third level.
So, I started junior high with classmates who likely had learning disabilities. Many of them didn’t speak English. They were children of immigrants, or they didn’t speak English well. And the teachers for this level somehow thought that the way to teach was to call us stupid, lazy, losers, and tell us on a daily basis that we would never make it in the world.
I was ashamed and terrified because I was certain they must be right. Because I was so shy, and because I was incapable of reading in class, I never felt any confidence in my academic abilities. The fact that I worked hard and got straight As did not make me feel smart. I felt that I was not smart, and thought that this was the correct tracking for me because it was finally discovered that I really didn’t belong in the learning groups in which I had formerly been placed. So, my goal of getting the hell out of there was completely dashed. My dreams of going to college just squashed. My father couldn’t escape his fears and his psychopathology. My mother couldn’t escape her mental illness, and it was becoming apparent that I wasn’t going to be able to escape from them or their misery.
I stopped studying because there seemed no point in it. The only class in which I participated was math. I had a keen interest in math. When I was 10 my elementary school teacher had allowed me to go through as many math books as he had in the room. Just me, independently. I actually completed algebra when I was ten years old, through self-study, through his encouragement.
So, in 7th grade, I did complete the work for my math class in that otherwise terrible environment, and the teacher somehow figured out that I maybe had some talent. He allowed me to take the test for 8th grade algebra and based on my exam scores, he lobbied to have me moved up to the top-level academic classes despite the fact that all my other teachers objected, and said I was a terrible student, and I was going to be a failure. But he lobbied, and somehow, he made it happen. If that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be talking to you today. That was such an incredibly critical moment in my early life. Scarred as I was by having been told over and over that I was doomed to fail for six months on a daily basis, I was thrilled to be removed from those insults. At the same time, I felt profoundly sad for the students left behind. It was really, really painful to have shared that experience, and to leave them.
School then became very different. I earned straight As, and I did very well. I still didn’t make friends. By then, I attributed other reasons to the possibility that I wouldn’t ever make friends. It was publicly known that my mother was mentally ill. It wasn’t publicly known that my father was, because his was a secret kind of mental illness, or a hidden one. But it was publicly known that my mother had been psychiatrically hospitalized. Because of that, I suspected that I wouldn’t have a chance at making friends.
Also, the children who were my peers in the level one classes were mostly sons and daughters of engineers and physicians. I didn’t fit in because I didn’t have that educational pedigree in my family. We didn’t have money. We didn’t have status. Their parents all went to fancy colleges, and they bought clothes at the fancy stores. I didn’t have money and the clothes that I wore, I sewed myself. The sweaters I wore, I knitted myself, because we didn’t have money to buy them at the store. During the summers when a lot of them got to go to the beaches and hang out, I had summer jobs to save money for college.
So, as I mentioned, I was born a lesbian. I was aware of the fact that I was a lesbian from the time that I was three. I didn’t have the word for it, but I knew that that was my identity. I was attracted to girls, and the attractions, just in terms of age, rose with my own. So, first it was girls, and then adolescents, and then adults. My first crush or love, was my day camp counselor, who wasn’t a lesbian. But she played the guitar, and that just seemed so exciting. She seemed funny, and she seemed to take an interest in me.
When my mom was hospitalized, the first night that my father went to visit her, he didn’t have anybody to take care of us, so he took us to the hospital and he had us stand in the dark outside the emergency room waiting for him and told us, “Don’t go anywhere.” Of course, we were terrified that we’d be kidnapped or something awful. And up walked my camp counselor saying, “What’s going on? Why are you here?” She was visiting somebody in the hospital. I said, “Oh, my mom’s in the hospital.” I didn’t say why, but she found out. I think she maybe felt sorry for me or cared about me. She was seven years older. She gave me her high school graduation picture that I put on my bureau, and I kept that there until I left for college.
My subsequent crushes were when I was about 13, on Kim Novak, a movie star. And then, of course, the crush that so many lesbians had when I was a senior in high school, Julie Andrews. Oh, my gosh. I took my hard-earned college money and went to see The Sound of Music seven times because I was so in love with Julie Andrews. I would lay in bed just replaying the film in my head. Oh, gosh, I just loved, loved, loved Julie Andrews. I had no interest in boys. None whatsoever. It just wasn’t there for me. But I had fantasies about Kim Novak and Julie Andrews.
I studied every moment that my mother would allow it, but the household was often disrupted by her outbursts. Her priority was for us to do household chores or help with cooking. She insisted always that household responsibilities were more important than homework. Throughout high school, I studied with my fingers in my ears to block the sounds of her screaming. We were often woken in the middle of the night to her screaming and sobbing. And then they would drive off for emergency sessions with the psychiatrist and we never knew if she was coming back. Every time, we thought she was going to be locked up again.
But with as much focus as I could muster, I got straight As. I graduated at the top of my class. I was admitted to the colleges that I applied to, and my top choice was Stanford. I was also admitted to Bryn Mawr. I would have been very happy to have attended Bryn Mawr. I got full academic scholarships, because we had not enough money for me to go to college, but the Bryn Mawr scholarship did not include enough money for winter clothes.
I didn’t have a jacket that was warm, and I certainly didn’t have a coat. So, there was just no way. I couldn’t sew them. There was just no way I could have gone to a school in a cold climate. And Stanford was the college I’d heard about ever since people started talking about college, because my classmates whose parents were doctors and engineers had parents who had gone to Stanford. So, it was the place to go, from the perspective of my peers.
ER: I know some of your childhood. It’s just amazing how you survived and thrived in those circumstances.
NG: Well, yes, they were very, very, very painful times.
ER: I just want to clarify, when you were put into that group three – or tier three school it started – you said for six months? Was it seventh and eighth grade or?
NG: It was seventh grade. And then the math teacher started lobbying to move me. And he moved me during the academic year.
So, my parents drove me up to Stanford. All the way my father was telling me, “You’re not going to get straight As anymore because college is much harder than high school, so don’t count on it.” Just trying to push down my aspirations. They were very reluctant to leave me, but I was thrilled when they did. I felt free for the first time in my life. I was no longer burdened by having to observe on a daily basis my father’s insecurities or my mother’s uncontrollable behavior, and I could finally study without interruption.
I was determined to make friends, and I did. I was so, so happy. Again, I didn’t really know how, but I became part of a raucous friendship group during my freshman year. In a way, it kind of felt like going away to camp rather than going away to college. I think everybody felt free of their parents for the first time. Whether their childhood experiences were good, bad, or indifferent, they loved the freedom. We just played all the time. I mean, it was just so much fun.
My classes turned out to be very easy. Because I was pre-med and I wanted to go to medical school, I had already taken all the first-year pre-med courses in high school. Since they were really a repeat of everything that I already had, it was very easy to study and play. Whereas if I really were taking classes that were challenging, I wouldn’t have had as much time to play. We did all kinds of fun and raucous things, and I really had so much fun. This is just with women friends.
Also, during that first year, actually, the first quarter, I fell in love with my resident advisor, my RA, who was a senior, and I came out as lesbian. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the best person for me to be involved with because she was trying to be straight, and in trying to resist being a lesbian, she had multiple affairs with men, all of which she told me about in lurid detail, all of which was very distressing and heartbreaking to me.
Much later, when she and I met other lesbians, she got involved with other women as well, but always came back to me. I had no models for healthy relationships, so I didn’t know how to get out of that dynamic. I just was happy to have a relationship. My straight women friends, although we’d come together in a raucous, playful atmosphere, were pairing up with boys, and so they weren’t available anymore.
It’s kind of like my social circle shrunk to a single relationship that was very unhappy, with a person who was also very critical of my academic accomplishments. She said a lot of things that were damaging to the self-esteem that I was beginning to develop. It was just never a positive or healthy relationship for me.
I’d always wanted to travel. My family had no money, so I couldn’t. We didn’t even go camping. I mean camping was pretty inexpensive, but we didn’t go because my father was too fearful. He would say, “There are murderers or kidnappers out there.” So we can’t go camping, can’t travel, can’t go anywhere. I was thrilled that one of the things that Stanford had to offer was an overseas program. They paid my scholarship and gave me enough money to travel.
This overseas program had three-day weekends, and six weeks off in between quarters, and those of us on scholarships even had enough money to travel on a Eurail pass. I of course, chose Austria because of Julie Andrews. Hoping to somehow locate Julie Andrews in the Alps during my travels around Austria on a Eurail pass!
But I was also really determined to free myself of my father’s fearfulness. I hitchhiked, and I traveled alone through six countries on a Eurail pass. I met up with other Stanford friends and had the most wonderful time. It was really so delightful. Thus began my lifelong love of travel.
I also got to reconnect with a lot of my women friends from my first year at Stanford, and we started hanging out again. Everybody had gotten to a place in their relationship where they didn’t have to be with their partner all the time. So, we were wild and crazy and comical again, and it seemed as though we were always laughing, which was just so much fun. I was very unhappy in my relationship, but I was always very, very happy with my friends. And some of those friendships have continued to the present day. I really value them.
Stonewall happened on my 20th birthday. I was in Vienna, June 28th. I’ve always considered that a terrific coincidence, because every birthday I’ve had since has involved a Pride Parade that has been particularly festive in the cities in which I’ve lived. Sometimes I pretend that the festivities are just a celebration of my birthday. After Austria, I returned home, back to the U.S., to the anti-war movement, the rebirth of feminism, and the birth of lesbian feminism.
I was really turned off by the macho, male dominated anti-war movement. The whole free-love concept, which was all about men having access to women or sex whenever. And of course, I was a lesbian, so it didn’t appeal to me in any way. But I was really fascinated by feminism, because the fears I’d grown up with really had to do with men. Having been sexually abused, having been almost kidnapped. My fears were always about being assaulted or kidnapped or raped by men. I never felt unsafe around women—aside from my mother—but I was always fearful about being assaulted by men. Eerything about feminism resonated with my desire to resist oppression and advocate for the disempowered. It was like a pair of gloves that fit.
The next few years were formative years for me at Stanford. I met another lesbian, and I began to suspect that there might be more of us. Not just the two of us, me and my lover. Unlike the two of them—I don’t know whether it was because I identified as lesbian from my early childhood—I never felt that there was anything wrong with me. They were both involved with men, trying to marry men, to fit in with the dominant heterosexual paradigm. I, on the other hand, felt I was a lesbian to my core. There was nothing wrong with it. I knew that it was considered a mental illness by psychiatry, and that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders labeled us as mentally ill. I knew that we were considered sinful to those who believed in religion. I knew that it was illegal, but I didn’t buy any of that.
There I was in that very privileged environment educationally, and I decided to use that privilege to become a psychiatrist to provide non-homophobic healthcare for lesbians. I’d already experienced homophobia when I sought GYN care from a straight woman physician during my first year at Stanford. I already knew that there was a need for educating physicians about this homophobia. By my senior year, after meeting even more lesbians, we held the first meeting of Stanford Lesbians in my off-campus apartment that I shared with another woman who was in the process of coming out. About ten showed up. We began to meet regularly and even invited Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon to join us. Del and Phyllis then became friends whom I knew and interacted with throughout their lives.
Also, during my senior year, which was 1971, the program in Human Biology was created and I chose that as my major. One of the requirements for a degree was to do a special project, or kind of internship, under one of the faculty members. Most of the students tried to sign up to go to Africa with Jane Goodall to meet the chimps. I was really fascinated by the lectures on neuroscience that were presented by Keith Brodie, who was a young assistant professor who had just come to Stanford from NIH. I had to get up my courage, make an appointment, go and speak with him, and ask if there was any way that I could do a special project under him.
So, I did, but I was petrified. He said to me, “Oh, I’d be delighted.” I might have been the first student, or maybe second student, who asked to work with him. He’d be delighted to work with me, and I could choose any topic I wanted to study. He listed a whole bunch of things, and in there was the word “homosexuality.” I said, “Well, if there’s some way to study something related to homosexuality, I would really like to do that.” He said, “Oh, great, are you a lesbian?” I hadn’t even thought that I was going to be asked, and so I just said, “Yes, I am.” And he said, “Fabulous. That’s great. Then you’ll have your own insight into what you’re studying. Go back to the dorm and come see me next week and tell me what you want to study.” So, under his auspices, I conducted two studies as an undergraduate, which was quite rare for people applying to medical school in that era.
The first was on psychiatrists’ attitudes towards lesbians, which I published. The second was a study of hormone levels in gay men versus straight men. A study had just come out by a guy named Kolodny, under the Masters and Johnson group, that found that gay men had lower testosterone levels than straight men. They thought they found the answer—that homosexuality was caused by low testosterone levels. We replicated the study. I found a group of gay men at Stanford and a group of men who identified as heterosexual and we drew their blood levels.
It turned out that our gay men had higher testosterone levels than the straight guys did, which was a fun finding. Other groups around the country at the same time found similar results. It was just an interesting study to have done that I really enjoyed. I did the same study looking at hormone levels in women some years later when I was an extern at National Institutes of Health. One other thing that I should mention is that, in getting to know Del and Phyllis, I organized, with Del’s support, the first panel presentation on lesbians in which lesbians were not pathologized, at the American Psychiatric Association convention, in 1975. That was very exciting, and I was thrilled that we had the opportunity to do that.
ER: Let me ask you, before you finish up with Stanford, did your parents go to college? I know they married very young.
NG: My father went to UCSB, and I had mentioned that I attended his college graduation. But my mother was so damaged with her dyslexia and double vision that she couldn’t even write a coherent sentence. She barely graduated high school after the head trauma.
ER: Given that your father wanted to go to medical school but couldn’t, were they proud of you getting into Stanford and then going to medical school?
NG: Yes, extremely proud. Extremely proud. Yes, they were very, very happy about that. So maybe I’ll just say a little bit more, I’ll do a little backtracking and fast forwarding on my family. Then I’ll talk about a very significant chapter in my life that started in 1975.
I’d like to say just a little bit about my siblings. They grew up in the same environment as I did, but neither of them suffered from any lack of confidence in their academic abilities. Neither my mother’s side of the family, nor my father’s side of the family, had slews of people who were great academic successes. I don’t know where my siblings’ confidence came from. I considered them brilliant, and I considered myself a failure. Even though I got into Stanford, I still, internally, thought I was completely fraudulent, that I had just worked hard, managed to do well, but there was nothing inherently there that gave me a leg up in any way.
My brother Greg had a similar goal of getting out of town through academic achievement and scholarships. He was a straight A student who got perfect scores on his SATs— 800s on every one of them. He aspired to be an astronaut, that’s how far away from them he wanted to get. He would have been thrilled to have the gravitational field of earth not be strong enough to keep him on, because he wanted to go to space. I mean, it’s just kind of a bizarre circumstance with my father being afraid he couldn’t be held on, and my brother wanted to fly off.
My brother was the top graduate of his class. He was also the top appointee in the country to West Point, to which he applied to because he wanted to be an astronaut, and that was a way to become an astronaut. He ended up turning them down even though he had generals pressuring him to go to West Point. He went to Cal-Tech instead, where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in environmental engineering. I’m very, very proud of him and the work that he’s done. He won the top award in the world, called the Straub Award, for his doctoral thesis on hydraulics and water resources.
Among his many accomplishments, one that I think is really cool, is that in the early ’80s, he developed a computer model used to simulate flood flows in the Seine, France, and all the other rivers of France, as well as the sewers and pipe networks, that is still being used today. And that’s when computers were gigantic! And then back in California, for his career, he became the principal engineer in northern California at the Contra Costa Water District, earning tons of awards throughout his career. National, state and local. He was the key negotiator in the 1994 Bay Delta Accord that established water quality and fish protection measures for water diversions serving 25 million Californians. He’s been a rock star, and I’m so proud of him.
I was also very proud of my sister Yvonne who was a really talented creative writer and nonfiction writer, who published her first piece in the Santa Barbara newspaper when she was nine years old. She was accused by her teacher of having it written by our mother, when my mother couldn’t write a sentence. After my brother left for college, Yvonne couldn’t live in that house any longer. She was 15 years old. She ran away. She got into drugs, and lived on the streets. Sometimes she lived in Yosemite and Big Sur with a bunch of drug-using kids. I don’t know how they supported themselves. My parents refused to give her any money. They didn’t have money, but they wouldn’t even give her money for food.
But later, Yvonne pulled herself together. She took her GED and passed it, then went to community college, and then transferred ultimately to U.C. Berkeley from which she graduated. She then took up ballet and became a principal dancer with Ballet Russe. She got a master’s degree in gerontology, and joined the Gray Panthers. She was a real activist.
She was preparing to enter a doctoral program in social work at Berkeley when she tore a muscle in her thigh that turned into a little mass. She was told by the doctor, “It’ll heal,” but two months later, she got the flu, and it grew to the size of a football. It turned out to be a very lethal form of cancer called rhabdomyosarcoma. Basically, she went through every form of treatment, but it’s untreatable, even today. Her leg was amputated. There she was—a professional ballerina losing her leg, which was a great, great tragedy, who then slowly suffocated to death when it metastasized to her lungs. I was very close to her, and I continue to feel her loss to this day. I always imagined whatever happened, she and I were going to be together until the end. And that dream, hope, fantasy, was taken away in 1980.
In terms of my parents, my father, when I was applying to medical school, finally asked for a raise after never having had a raise since he had been working at the lumber company. He was fired, along with three others who also asked for a raise. He applied for a small business loan and set up a lumber company. A lumber company that was in competition with the one where he’d worked for all those years. He became very successful. My parents paid off their debts, and for the remaining time that they were alive, they were economically privileged. They did all the things that they always wanted to do. Joined the country club, bought a sailboat, bought new cars, bought nice clothes.
My father never recovered from my sister’s death. Immediately afterwards he also lost both of his parents, and his only brother died of ALS. In 1989, he decided to retire, and they gave the company to a few employees, which was a phenomenally generous thing to do. Most of the new owners were not college educated. One was a Latino from an immigrant family. It was an opportunity of their lifetime to have this company.
But without these 14-hour days, he became very dysfunctional and crippled by his anxiety. He was psychiatrically hospitalized on two occasions. He refused our interventions. His psychiatrists weren’t helpful. And then in 1981, just two years after he retired, he conquered his two greatest fears in life—choking and death. He hung himself in the garage while my mother was paying bills inside the house. It was devastating and very traumatic to all of us, and another great tragedy in our lives.
My mother continued to be haunted by her internal demons. To make matters worse, her psychiatrist sexually abused her during treatment, which I only learned about 20 years later after I’d spent more than a decade documenting sexual abuse by physicians. I tried to get her to report him, but she wouldn’t do it. And certainly, life was not made any easier for her psychologically after my father’s suicide. But she managed to carry on and set up some scholarships in my father’s and sister’s names at Santa Barbara City College. She published a children’s book that she had a lot of trouble writing. It was an illustrated children’s book full of watercolors that was very sweet.
She almost had to be psychiatrically hospitalized in 2009 because she developed unmanageable anxiety and depression again. We tried everything to solve the problem. One of the things that we did was get her a psychiatrist who was competent. He put her on a medication that changed her behavior. Despite her lifelong history of borderline personality disorder, she became an apologetic, loving, considerate person, who stopped complaining about life struggles and losses. She had the best eleven years of her life before she died this past summer, six months ago. Very, very sadly for me, I was not able to be there because of COVID, but I’m very grateful that she got to have a very positive ending to a very challenging life.
ER: Yes, that’s remarkable.
NG: I’d like to say something about the love of my life. My beloved Dee.
ER: Wait, can we backtrack? So, you stopped with Stanford. You might want to talk about medical school just for a second. Where you went.
NG: Oh, yes. I attended U.C. Davis Medical School, and in my senior year, I applied for an externship in neurology at National Institutes of Health. The reason I did it was not because I knew that much about what the externship was about, but I wanted to go to D.C. because I’d heard the women’s music cultural movement had begun. Lesbian songwriting, guitar playing, and piano playing musicians had come through the community where I was at Davis, and they were telling stories of lesbian communities in other places in the country. I was ecstatic. I developed friendships with some lesbian law students, one of whom had gone to Mount Holyoke.
I heard stories about Seven Sisters college women who had become radical lesbians. They were living in D.C., where they formed radical lesbian feminist collectives. At one of the women’s concerts I attended they were making and selling t-shirts, and also selling pamphlets of radical writings that weren’t published as books. I bought a pamphlet from the Furies Collective written by Charlotte Bunch. I was ecstatic because finally there were women who were writing what I felt, and they were singing songs about what I felt. I applied to NIH so I could go to this D.C. community that I had heard so much about. The idea of living in a city with women’s collectives was a dream for me.
One of the friends of my law school friend happened to be Joan Biren—JEB—the photographer, who came to visit when I was still in Davis. I met her and got to know her a little bit. When I was accepted at NIH, I wrote her and asked if she happened to know of any place I might be able to live. She found me a place in a women’s household where there were three other lesbians living. They’d just had one person move out, and so, sight unseen and people unmet, they agreed that, “Yes, it would be good to have a lesbian medical student. Why not come live with us?” So, with my still troubled long-term relationship partner, I drove to D.C. in my little VW bug that I had been able to acquire during medical school.
On the way, we stopped and spent the night in Nashville. I’m just saying this because I became a fan of a rising star I saw there. I had always heard about the Grand Ole Opry, and I really wanted to go. We got really cheap tickets to see a performer who was pretty unknown at the time, who turned out to be Dolly Parton. Oh, I fell in love with her. I just couldn’t believe it. She was so funny and so charming and I loved her songs, and I just loved everything. So, it was really an exciting adventure.
Then I arrived in D.C. I moved into this house where I was just thrilled to be, and the women were very friendly. One of the three roommates was supposed to be coming back from Texas where she’d been visiting her family. Because I hadn’t started work yet, I was asked to go pick her up at the airport. I said, “But what does she look like?” I mean, “How do I know which person?” They said, “Her name is Dee.” “Do I say Dee every time? Put a sign up that says Dee? How do I do this?” And they said, “Oh, here, this is what she looks like.” They pulled out a Willie Tyson record album. Willie Tyson was one of the lesbian musicians from back then. Her album had a picture of the Lammas baseball team on the cover. Lammas was the lesbian feminist bookstore in D.C. Dee was the manager of the baseball team. They said, “This is who she is. Go find this person at the airport.”
I went to the airport, and really, I mean, everything was new. I found my way to National Airport, stood outside the plane, and this woman walked off the plane with frosted hair. Which, you know, by then for lesbians it was all about overalls, unshaved pits, unshaved legs, flannel shirts. So, frosted hair coming from Texas, it just didn’t quite work with my image of a politically active lesbian, but she looked a little bit like that tiny picture I had. She had a tennis racket under her arm. I thought, “Oh, my goodness” and I said, “Dee?’ and this beautiful smile emerged, and she said, “Yes,” and I said, “I’m Nanette. I’m your new roommate, and I’m here to pick you up.” Well, to make a very long story short, within a few months, we had fallen in like, and then in love, and we have been together ever since.
She is the love of my life. She is one of the most psychologically grounded people I have ever met. She helped me recover from the traumas of my childhood. She taught me to appreciate the dynamics of healthy, loving relationships. She’s really been my role model in so many ways. And her love, her likes, her politics, her activism, her visions, her integrity, her ethics, her character, her generosity and her values and her purpose. I just absolutely cherish her. She has given me just the best possible life I think anyone could ever hope for.
We’ve been together 45 years. We were married to each other three times. The first, immediately after Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon on February 13, 2004. And then that was annulled so we got married again a year later. We decided, “Well, this is going to be a multiple-deal thing.” So, we chose her birthday a year later, because if we were going to have birthdays, and then anniversaries of the first time we slept together, and then the marriages, we’d better pick some dates that we can remember.
We got married on her birthday a year later in Vancouver because it was legal in Canada. And then we got married again in San Francisco in 2008 when it became legal in California again, just to round it out. We tried to book our ceremony on my birthday that year, but as you can imagine, Stonewall was a popular day for people to sign up for. Even though we signed up right away, we were only able to book a few days before my birthday for our third marriage.
With the good fortune of being with Dee and sharing the same enthusiasm for travel, we’ve had the incredibly good fortune to be able to circle the globe. We climbed to great heights paragliding over Switzerland, plunged to great depths scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef and other places around the planet, and also traveled very far north to Churchill, Canada, where we went to see polar bears. We also went south to Antarctica, where we went snowshoeing, which was just phenomenal.
Dee also is the first reader and editor of anything that I write, and she’s supported me in everything that I do. Every time I’ve encountered adversities, she’s been there for me. She has also helped me through the tragic losses that I’ve experienced. She just really has shown me depths of love that I never, ever, early on could have imagined would be possible.
So, Dee. When we first met, I lived in a women’s house with her. She had just finished stints as a construction worker. She came from a very privileged family that was very politically involved on the Republican side. Her rebellion took the form of coming to D.C. and working as a construction worker and then as an auto mechanic. When I went to Harvard to do my residency, she came to Boston and worked on a PhD in social psychology. Despite my efforts to convince her not to go to medical school (because who wants to go to medical school—it’s so stressful and hard and difficult), she went to medical school, and then she also became a psychiatrist.
I have always taken care of the“worried well.” Dee took care of the chronically mentally ill, which is much more admirable a field, in my opinion. She also developed a secondary career as a filmmaker—an Academy Award nominated documentary filmmaker—and she has been a lifelong social justice activist. Like my papers and like yours, Esther Rothblum, my dear, dear, dear, dear, dear, very, very, very close friend, her papers are also archived at the Sophia Smith collection.
ER: I just want to ask, you know, it’s interesting, you barely mentioned medical school. I get the impression it was probably easier than Stanford in some ways, although most people would think of it as very, very difficult.
NG: I think it was just all memorization. I guess I would say that the amount of material we needed to memorize in a week, was about the amount that I had to memorize for anything at Stanford in a quarter. It was just a massive amount of memorization, so there was nothing fun about it. When I got to my clinical years, I really hated the way that physicians treated patients. I’d already gotten excited about doing research in psychiatry, and I knew that I was going to be doing clinical work with LGBTQ+ people. But I really had the bug for research planted when I was at Stanford.
I was looking forward to getting to a place where I would be in control of how patients were treated, and I didn’t feel good about the way I saw patients discounted, and talked down to, and sometimes really talked to very abusively by residents and attendings. It was quite awful. Not to mention that sexism was horrible. We were very much a minority as women. I loved the political activism that began with affiliation with the lesbian law students but there’s nothing about medical school that I liked.
I applied for psychiatric residency at Harvard and Columbia and Duke. This has been documented multiple other places but I was pretty much a shoe-in at Duke because Keith Brodie, who became my mentor at Stanford, had departed from Stanford, eventually to become president at Duke. At the time I was applying for residency, he was chair of the department of psychiatry, and he wanted me in the program. He tried so hard to get me that he rounded up three lesbians who were living together in a relationship with each other on a farm, one of whom worked in his department. He asked her out of the blue, “Excuse me? By the way, I hope it’s okay for me to ask you this, but are you a lesbian?”
And she was just like, “Oh, my God. My department chair is asking me if I’m a lesbian.” She said, “Well, you know, yes, I happen to be. I hope that’s it’s not an issue.” And he said, “I’m so glad because, listen, I’m trying to recruit a lesbian to come here as a resident. Could you please take her and introduce her to people when she comes to town?” They had me over for dinner. I don’t think he knew that he had tapped into a particularly unique dynamic of a relationship. Three women living together on a farm. I was there thinking, “Oh, my God, who sleeps where?” Anyway, that was pretty funny. To me it was.
I was next interviewed at Columbia. Because I’d already done research, I was pretty unique as an applicant for that reason. I’ve told the story before, so I’ll just make it very brief. Robert Spitzer, who was the architect of the DSM and highly resistant to removing all references to homosexuality from the DSM throughout his career, really pathologized homosexuality up until he had a “come clean” moment just before died, around 2012. The department chair told me that I was a shoe-in and to “Please count on an acceptance from Columbia.”
My last interview with Spitzer was incredibly homophobic. He asked me things like, “Are you the butch or the femme?” and a whole series of inappropriate questions about sexuality, all of which I refused to answer. I mean, suddenly I had confidence, and I was not going to be pushed around by a person like that. I replied, “Your questions are inappropriate. I am there to interview for residency, and you need to ask me about my academic background or things that are relevant to the program.”
Well, soon after that, I got a letter of rejection from Columbia. Keith Brodie called the department chair there, whom we knew; Keith had actually gone to Columbia himself for residency, and he said, “So what’s the deal on Nanette?” The chair said, “Well, Spitzer says she has a problem with her lesbianism because she doesn’t think it’s a problem.” Hey, that was true, and they didn’t want me in their psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy program. So, I ended up at Harvard.
I became the first out lesbian on the Harvard Medical School full-time physician faculty. I did a lot of work promoting non-homophobic healthcare for LGBTQ+ people. I did a lot of work on eliminating sexism in medicine. I was doing my clinical work, seeing LGBTQ+ people, helping them with their internalized homophobia, helping them to come out, and developing techniques to help them come out. At the same time, I was working on all these other tracks that were of great interest to me in terms of creating a clinical environment that was not sexist and not homophobic. It was exciting and dynamic work. I mean, it was uphill all the way, the struggle to do it. But by then, I realized I really liked fighting with people who were oppressive, and I liked struggling against oppression.
Among other things, I developed curricula for providing non homophobic treatments for LGBTQ+ patients. I organized women physicians at Harvard. They’d never been organized. Not as a sort of union, but for support. There was no support among women physicians at Harvard, and I did it after one of the most beloved, young, dynamic, successful women physicians committed suicide. Nobody knew why. At the first meeting we had, some women raised their hands and said things like, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Comments like that made it essential to me that we meet. We had to have a way of supporting each other because we were in the minority everywhere, and we needed to change so many things about medicine, medical education, and medical care.
I co-edited the Harvard Medical School Joint Committee on the Status of Women Newsletter and conducted research on all different kinds of topics. Just anything that interested me. Things like psychiatric symptoms in medical students, medical student stress, and gender differences in the naming of children’s genitalia—the names that children were taught to call their genitalia. It was a really fun study I did a long time ago. I reported on increased libido in women taking trazodone early in the days that trazodone became available as an antidepressant. I did research on women’s attitudes toward breast conserving treatment. Just a whole variety of things, and it was really of great interest to me. I loved collaborating with people, and I really had a great time doing all that.
I think one of the very important things that happened in terms of being the only one who was out was that I forged a path for other LGBTQ+ physicians to come out at Harvard. My psychiatry department chair at Harvard, who was at Beth Israel Hospital, hated the research I was doing. Hated, hated, hated. Particularly topics related to sexism and the sexual abuse of patients by physicians. Hated that I was outspoken about LGBTQ+ people. He pulled me aside one day in a rage, and told me that I could no longer use my Harvard Medical School or Beth Israel hospital affiliation on any of my publications because I was giving both institutions a bad name. That was just not okay with me. That just didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, but I figured, why not ask the person at the top?
I made an appointment with the president of the hospital whom I’d never met. His name was Mitch Rabkin. I believe he’s still alive. A few years ago, I wrote to him to thank him again for what I’m about to say, and he responded. He had done some research on me before I showed up in his office and had read my publications and read some things about me. I came in and I said, “I do work in areas that are pretty controversial, and I would like to know if it is your and the hospital’s policy, and the medical school’s policy, that a person like me doing this kind of research should not use my affiliations when publishing papers or speaking to the media, because it’s not good for the institutions. And if that’s the case, I’d just like to know from the person at the top.”
He said, “That’s absolutely not the case. Your research is outstanding. Your clinical work, from what I understand, is outstanding, and you absolutely are entitled to use Beth Israel Hospital and Harvard Medical School as your affiliations on your publications and when you speak to the media.”
Here I was, an out lesbian talking to the president of the hospital, and he was saying what I was doing, and what I was saying, and how I was doing it, was okay. I realized that I could take that experience and share it with my colleagues who were totally closeted. I had so many closeted colleagues who’d told me, “There’s no chance, no way. It never would be safe for me to be out.” I told them about meeting with Dr. Rabkin. I said, “This place, it’s safe. You can be out. I’m out. He was fine with it. Come out.” Over time, more and more of them came out, which was just fabulous. I was thrilled about that inadvertent success in a dimension that I hadn’t imagined when I walked into his office.
ER: I have been amazed when you describe how shy you were as a child, how much courage you had. I mean, you sort of took it for granted, but how many times you were so courageous in your adulthood.
NG: It became fun to be fighting against oppression. I mean, it was just never, ever, boring. When I started my residency, I was given an honorary appointment as a Falk Fellow at the American Psychiatric Association. That meant that I got to go to American Psychiatric Association meetings. I was chosen by my residency program to do that. This is just another illustration of, where did I get the chutzpah? I went to these meetings. I was appointed to a task force on the Psychology of Women and Men to develop a curriculum for medical schools, and residency training programs all over the country.
Each of us took sections of the curriculum, and I agreed to do the sexuality section, among others. The curriculum was submitted for APA Board approval. Would you believe they flipped out over a single sentence written by me: “Homosexuality is a normal form of sexual expression.” In this whole curriculum—a huge curriculum—they said I had to take it out this one sentence. This was in the late ’70s. Homosexuality was already removed as a mental illness from the DSM. There were still pathological references, but I was just appalled. So, I said, “No, I won’t take it out.” And then, various high-ranking people decided that they would rewrite my section and submit their versions under my name. When I found that out, I went to those individuals and said, “That’s not okay. You can’t submit anything under my name without my approval, especially on this particular issue.”
We had included very prominent senior women psychiatrists as contributors to this curriculum, including Jean Baker Miller and others, who went along with what I decided to do, which was to resign from the editorial board of the curriculum and to withdraw my sections. They followed suit, and that killed it. I mean, it’s tragic that it killed it. It’s tragic that they were so incredibly homophobic that they wouldn’t allow a single affirmative sentence about homosexuality. I was still a resident at that time.
I was also simultaneously organizing within the APA. The struggle for the ERA was happening at that time. Because I was now privy to the inner workings of the American Psychiatric Association, I decided that the APA needed to boycott states that had not ratified the ERA, and I organized the boycotts.
At the 1980 annual meeting that was held in San Francisco, I organized picketing outside by psychiatrists who were supporters, and also by medical students. We wore black armbands that I had torn up, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of black armbands. I made signs that said things like, “Warning, anti ERA psychiatrists hazardous to your mental health.” We managed to get Gloria Steinem invited as a speaker at that APA meeting. As she was walking in, she saw that this big protest was happening. She turned around and picketed with us, which was really great.
Whatever the issue was, I picked it up and ran with it. I really felt that I had the privilege of having my voice be heard, not only because I’d been given these honorary positions inside the American Psychiatric Association, but also because I was at Harvard. I’d met all these very prominent women, not all of whom were willing to take radical positions, but some of whom were. They supported me, and that was great. Coming from the privilege of being at an institution like Harvard does make people listen to you, and it did make the media listen to me.
I’m hoping I can bring this to a close, since most of what I’m going to talk about now is really well documented in my writing and work, but I’m just going to say a little bit about how it happened. In 1982, I was appointed chair of the American Psychiatric Association National Committee on Women. I had a national responsibility in that role, and my job was to advocate for women’s mental health all over the country.
It came to my attention that the malpractice claims being filed against male psychiatrists for sexually abusing women patients were skyrocketing. The APA was having to pay out big bucks for these claims. I realized that we had a serious problem happening in real time and we needed to do something about it. Therefore, I got colleagues appointed to the Committee on Women, including Judy Herman and Silvia Olarte, who joined me in that effort. We proposed that the APA survey the membership in order to document the severity of the sexual abuse problem, because we realized we couldn’t get any money or funding, or enlist the public in an effort to address this, if we didn’t have numbers. Well, the APA spent two years blocking every effort we made to do our survey through the APA. But I was determined not to let that stop me.
We informed the APA that we would conduct the study independently if necessary. I was able to do something which they couldn’t imagine I would be able to do, which was to purchase the mailing labels of every fifth psychiatrist in the country through a clearinghouse at the AMA. Continuing education was just becoming a big thing, and we were able to survey every fifth psychiatrist in the country and document the severity of the problem. Then I did multiple other studies of psychiatrists, psychiatric residents, and physicians in other specialties, documenting that sexual abuse of patients was quite a severe problem.
We didn’t have decent ethics codes. We didn’t have laws, rules, and regulations. The research that came out of that decade of work between 1982 and 1992, of which I was the principal investigator, led to a clean-up of the ethics codes, felony statutes in many states, and licensing board prohibitions against sexual contact with current or former patients. I really feel proud of that work, but it wasn’t without going up against the entire APA to do it independently. We tried, but the APA refused to comply. As part of that work I was featured in the Frontline documentary My Doctor, My Lover in 1989.
A second major research theme I began in 1986 with colleague Jean Hamilton. The lesbian baby boom had started when the Oakland sperm bank opened its doors to lesbians and single heterosexual women who wanted to become pregnant through frozen sperm. My friends and my patients were sending off for vials from California. I was still at Harvard, and we realized that we needed to document this phenomenon in real time. We launched the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study. We gathered a team of researchers who were all volunteers, and planned to do it in the three cities where the researchers lived. These were the metropolitan areas of Boston, Washington D.C., and San Francisco.
This longitudinal study has led to numerous publications documenting the lives of these parents and children as the children grew up. We are now just starting our 7th wave when the children will be between the ages of 30 and 35. It is my great honor to have the most fabulous five currently as research collaborators, including you, Esther Rothblum. I’m so, so thrilled that you’re a member of this team, which has been so productive. In these last years, the others have included Henny Bos at the University of Amsterdam, Audrey Koh, who’s at UCSF, and Nicole Carone at the University of Pavia in Italy. We have a wonderful international team. I’m so thrilled and proud of the work that all of us have done together. It couldn’t have been done by me alone, and I’m so grateful for the wonderful collaborative experience.
One other major organizing that I don’t want to forget to mention is our lesbian physician group. In the late 1970s, I began organizing what we called then, Dyke Docs, in Boston. We’d have meetings for residents and medical students who were lesbians, to support each other and talk about whether it was safe to be out, or encourage people to be out. I started giving talks as an out lesbian on the faculty at Harvard Medical school and sometimes I was able to find a student who would agree to talk about their experiences of homophobic oppression.
Simultaneously, a group was forming on the West Coast, where I now live—in San Francisco, and have lived since 1987—formed by Patty Robertson and Leslie Anderson. They decided to have a national conference. They organized the first national conference of lesbian physicians in 1984, and they invited me to be the keynote speaker since I was out at Harvard. I gave a talk about the importance of coming out as lesbian physicians.
Dee and I organized the second conference, and these annual conferences, through an all-volunteer effort, have continued to this day. They are open to sexual and gender minority women physicians and their families. It’s been a wonderful, supportive atmosphere for women from all over the country, often internationally, to come together and do scientific presentations for continuing education credit. And also to have their children grow up together, and the rest of us grow older together. That’s been wonderful.
The final project I’d like to mention happened right after the 2016 election, when the person who did not win the popular vote was heading to the White House. Our colleague Judy Herman, with whom I’d worked on the sexual abuse studies, contacted Dee and me to ask if we would be willing to co-sign a letter to President Obama about the mental instability of the president elect. We said, “Absolutely, we will do that in a heartbeat.” We tried to get others to sign on, but our colleagues were very frightened and didn’t feel safe doing so.
Judy drafted the letter and we went over it, signed it, and sent it off to Obama. Nothing happened initially. Then about three weeks later, Dee and I were contacted by a colleague who works at one of the major newspapers, and she asked if we’d be willing to go on record talking about our feelings or concerns about his mental instability. We said that we had just written a letter to Obama, but nothing had happened with it. She asked to see it. We sent it to her. I mean, we all talked about it, and we agreed that we would send it to her. We didn’t know what would happen with the letter, but we knew that once we sent it to her, it would be out of our hands.
Well, she gave it to a colleague at the Huffington Post. He published it. It went viral. It was all over the world. It was a front-page story. Our neighbors were in India, they opened the newspaper, and top of the fold, they saw: Three Psychiatrists Called Donald Trump Mentally Unfit. Then they saw that two of the psychiatrists lived next door to them. Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan saw the coverage. They came into our mini network with a lot of recommendations about reaching out to—literally, this was Robin’s suggestion—the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She encouraged us to get our letter to him. She reminded us of the time when Nixon was leaving office and Kissinger and Schlesinger made an agreement that they wouldn’t allow him to start a nuclear war in order to divert attention from his departure.
Dee and I had some connections that I can’t specify, but we were able to get our letter delivered to the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Additionally, I happened to be swimming one day with a woman whom I hadn’t seen for two years. I said, “Oh, welcome back. Where have you been?” She said, “I just came from a stint at Langley.” I said, “Langley? You mean the CIA?” She said, “Yes, the CIA.” And I said, “Oh, my God. Well, is it possible that there might be some people of like mind whom you might be able to share this with?” So, she shared it with colleagues at Langley who were of like mind. And Gloria Steinem, at the Women’s March on the Mall which Dee and I attended, read a segment from our letter in her speech, which was really wonderful.
This letter going viral and all the attention to his mental incapacity and incompetence led to the formation of a group headed by psychiatrist Bandy Lee, a professor of psychiatry at Yale. She proposed a book with contributed chapters that came out as an instant New York Times bestseller called, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Dee and I wrote the final chapter in the first edition about use of the 25th Amendment and the importance of having every candidate for presidency and vice presidency, and every person holding those offices, assessed on an annual basis for competency, and for their mental capacity and mental status.
That’s been a big project for us in these past four years that’s kept us very busy. I’m speaking to you on a day (January 6th, 2021) that there is a lot of turmoil in Washington. I do believe we have just elected two Georgia Democratic senators, and Donald Trump is trying not to leave office. But I’m proud of the fact that we played a big part in starting a movement that taught the country that this man is dangerous and incompetent and mentally disturbed and should not be where he is.
I think I am at a place where I’ve come to the present, and it’s a good place for me to stop. I’m aware of the fact that as I told my early story, I wasn’t smiling very much. I am also aware of the fact that as I talk about all of these battles in which I’ve been engaged to bring about social justice, and improve lives for LGBTQ+ people everywhere, and have people understand psychopathology in the form of our unhealthy president, I feel quite happy about the contributions I’ve made. I hope to continue to be able to do so for the remainder of my life. Dee and I are each in our 71st year. We hope to have many years of productive, active struggle and accomplishment in the years to come.
I want also to say that I mentioned friendship at the beginning and I’ll mention friendship at the end. I’m so blessed to have a cadre of fabulous, fabulous friends. Among my very best friends are you, Esther Rothblum, and Marny Hall. Both of you also have your papers archived at the Sophia Smith Collection. It’s been said so many times, “It takes a village.” Dee is very much a core of my village, and you and Marny are central components of that village. I’m thrilled with the village I have. I’m thrilled that I have the love I have for Dee, and for my friends, and I’m thrilled to have all of you.
ER: What a wonderful life and a great story. I was going to ask you about pivotal moments, but I realized, connecting with Keith Brodie at Stanford, and meeting Dee while at NIH, I mean, every one of your research projects started in a sort of pivotal way. Are there any other moments that you want to mention?
NG: Well, it was pretty pivotal to meet you because you and Ellen Cole came to my house, and whereas –in what year was it?
ER: I think 1991maybe?
NG: I think it was 1991, yeah. I was already feeling pretty confident in my ability to struggle against oppression within the institution of medicine and psychiatry, but I was very intimidated about the world of feminist scholarship outside of medicine. I felt as though I would never be welcome in that world. I assumed that whenever I published articles, they would be in medical academic journals and never in social science journals. And so, it was a very pivotal moment for you and Esther Cole to show up at my house on the day that you did in the early ’90s to invite me to co-edit a special issue of The Journal of Lesbian Studies.
ER: I think it was Women in Therapy.
NG: Oh yes, Women in Therapy. I’d been reading Women in Therapy and just thought, Oh, I wish I knew these women. I wish I could be part of this community. I wish I could be part of this world of scholarship. So, I was just gobsmacked that you invited me and considered me worthy, and I was thrilled to be able to do it. I had so much fun talking to the two of you about your extracurricular interests, and mine. I shared that I was a tap dancer, and I think Ellen Cole had also done tap dancing, and you told me that you had taken lessons to learn how to juggle. I just thought, Oh, these are really fun people, and they also may want me to be a member of their club. So that was incredibly pivotal for me, not only because it led to the friendship that has been so special to me, but also it was an entree into the world of social science scholarship, for which I am so grateful.
ER: Yes, well, I had certainly heard of your work. I think that in medicine you were really facing an uphill battle at the time. I’m a little bit younger, and so I was following in the footsteps of a few women. I think you were often really the one who had to do everything.
NG: Well, I’m very grateful that you walked into my life that day.
ER: Yes, me too.