Pride Month
During Pride Month, the NAM features health pioneers and NAM members who have worked tirelessly to benefit the health of the LGBTQIA+ community and advance the field of health and medicine in a Twitter campaign. On this page, you will find those featured in this year’s campaign, and those from years past.
We encourage you to share the tweets and graphics below with your networks throughout the year – not just during Pride Month.
Ben Barres (1954-2017) was an NAM and NAS Member, and the first openly transgender member of both. His work to identify the cellular causes of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s diseases revolutionized the field of neurobiology.
Reggie Williams (1951-1999) was an X-ray technician who became a community activist focused on spreading awareness about HIV/AIDS to gay men of color. He was the founding executive director of the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention.
Kiyoshi Kuromiya (1943-2000) was a Japanese-American author, gay liberation activist, and HIV/AIDS educator. Kuromiya created the Critical Path newsletter to increase access to information about HIV/AIDS. He also advocated for community engagement in research.
Evelyn Hooker (1907-1996) was a psychologist best known for her study of a population of straight and gay men that showed that homosexuality was not linked to mental illness, and there was no detectable difference between the groups in terms of mental acuity.
Richard Isay (1934-2012) was a pioneer who changed the way that psychoanalysts viewed homosexuality, by encouraging his patients to accept themselves rather than deny their feelings. A gay man himself, he fought against stigma in the medical community.
Neena Schwartz (1926-2018) was an endocrinologist who studied hormonal signaling pathways in women. She wrote a memoir in 2010 titled A Lab of My Own, in which she described the feminist movement in science and came out as a lesbian.
John Fryer (1937-2003) gave an anonymous speech at the 1972 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, which is widely credited as being a key factor in the removal of homosexuality as a mental illness in the APA’s manual of mental disorders.
Robert Frascino (1952-2011) was a physician, immunologist, and advocate for HIV-positive people. He was one of the first physicians to specialize in HIV during the outbreak of AIDS in the 1980s. After becoming HIV-positive himself, he retired from practicing medicine and devoted his energy to advocacy.
E. Kitch Childs (1937-1993) was a clinical psychologist and lesbian activist who provided free and low-cost therapy to communities who faced barriers to accessing care. She was a founding member of Chicago Lesbian Liberation and the Association for Women in Psychology.
Alan Hart (1890-1962) was a physician, radiologist, tuberculosis researcher, and writer. He was a pioneer in tuberculosis research and invented a new screening method using x-ray photography to detect tuberculosis.
Judith Baynard Bradford (1943-2017) was an early advocate for the inclusion of LGBTQ+-specific data in population health data collection. She was Research Director for the National Lesbian Health Care Survey, which the IOM recognized as a landmark study.
Mathilde Krim (1926-2018) was galvanized by the stigmatization and victimization of gay men in response to the outbreak of HIV and AIDS, which led her to create the AIDS Medical Foundation with much of her own personal wealth. Her foundation later became amfAR.
