Tribute: Richard Friedman ’66M (MD)

A Pioneer in Studying Sexual Orientation’s Roots in Biology

An ethical obligation motivated Friedman to do the research that led to major changes in how psychiatrists and psychologists viewed and treated homosexual patients.
Photo provided by Jeremiah Friedman

The driving forces for Richard Friedman ’66M (MD) were simple: ethics and science.

“I felt an ethical obligation to find the reasons for antihomosexual prejudice,” the acclaimed psychoanalyst once said in an interview.

In his 1988 groundbreaking book, Male Homosexuality: A Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspective, Friedman illustrated that sexual orientation was largely biological and not pathological. Using studies of identical twins and theories of developmental psychology, Friedman showed that biology—not upbringing—made the biggest impact on a person’s sexual orientation.

It was a direct contradiction of the widely held Freudian notion that same-sex attraction was somehow curable, and it made Friedman a champion for gay men who dreamed of marrying and adopting children. The book led to major changes in the way psychologists and psychotherapists viewed and treated homosexual patients.

Friedman died in March 2020 at the age of 79.

Even after the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973, many therapists considered it an illness that could be cured. “Straight people had the same personality issues, and they got away with murder,” Friedman’s wife, Susan Matorin, a clinical social worker at the Weill Medical College of Cornell, told the New York Times. “Gay people were stigmatized, and he didn’t think that was right.”

Born and raised in the Bronx, Friedman attended Bard College before enrolling at Rochester for medical school. He completed his psychiatric residency at Columbia. While serving in the Army Medical Corps, he treated traumatized Vietnam veterans at a medical center in El Paso, Texas. He later became a faculty member at Columbia University.

In his acknowledgments for Male Homosexuality, Friedman cites his time at Rochester as being key to the book’s inspiration. “I was fortunate enough to spend a year in the laboratory of Dr. Seymour Reichlin,” he writes. “Dr. Reichlin’s brilliance, patience, kindness, sense of humor, and warmth were appreciated beyond measure. Dr. George Engel’s lectures on psychological development in health and disease were also remarkably enlightening.”

Matorin says her husband “cherished” his time at Rochester. After his death, she found his old textbooks in their apartment. “That so moved me,” she says.

Friedman’s early research focused on sleep deprivation experienced by physicians in training. He was the first to demonstrate that lack of sleep impaired the ability of doctors to function during surgery. His later psychiatric research examined sexuality, and a 1998 article he authored on female homosexuality was named best publication of the year by the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Author Andrew Solomon, winner of the 2001 National Book Award for The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression and Friedman’s patient for 25 years, said Friedman gave him the optimism to see a bright future during some of his darkest days.

“He seldom proposed anything as a possibility. He talked in absolutes,” Solomon wrote in a tribute piece in The New Yorker last May. “I am happily married, have children I love, and enjoy reasonable career success. I once said to Dr. F. that if I had been able to see one day of life in my fifties when I first entered his office, I wouldn’t have had to go through so much anguish and peril along the way. He replied that if I hadn’t gone through so much anguish and peril, I wouldn’t have ended up with the life I had.”

Friedman’s obituary in the New York Times noted his impact on the world while also depicting a man with strong passions—he always carried a copy of the US Constitution—and at least one dislike: “A devoted fan of both opera and professional basketball, he was a lifelong lover of literature, a passionate student of history, a gifted pianist, and hated broccoli.”