Richard A. Isay | Psychiatrist, activist, 77

Richard A. Isay, 77, a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and gay-rights advocate who won a pitched battle to persuade his own profession to stop treating homosexuality as a disease, died Thursday in Manhattan. The cause was cancer, said his son David, the founder of StoryCorps, an oral-history project.

Dr. Isay was a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and a faculty member at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.

Early in his career, Dr. Isay accepted the mainstream view. Troubled about his own sexuality, he had 10 years of psychoanalytic therapy. In the early 1970s, soon after the analysis ended and he was supposedly "cured," he realized, he said, that he was homosexual. By then, he had a wife and two sons. He did not tell his wife he was gay until 1980.

In an essay published in the New York Times in November, Dr. Isay's former wife, Jane, referred to his coming out as "the time when we faced a terrible choice and decided to stay married for the children."

Even though the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a disease in 1973, many members of the American Psychoanalytic Association continued to regard it as an illness.

In 1992, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, he threatened a lawsuit to force the association to promise not to discriminate against gay people. The group relented, issuing position statements that it would not discriminate in training, hiring, or promoting analysts. In 1997, it came out in support of same-sex marriage.

By then Dr. Isay had long had a relationship with Gordon Harrell, an artist. They met in 1979 and moved in together after Dr. Isay's marriage ended in 1989. They were married last year in New York in the home of Dr. Isay's son Josh. - N.Y. Times News Service