Richard Socarides served as President Clinton's senior adviser on gay rights (and is an Out100 honoree), and in this video he explains his coming out experience to his dad, a prominent psychiatrist who viewed homosexuality as a mental illness and who spent much of his life attempting to "cure" gay people.
In the great video interview Socarides--who points out "my story is no harder nor easier than anybody else's. It's just my story. It is a little stranger than most"--describes how in his twenties he made the difficult decision of coming out to his father. As he explains:
[My father] was the founder, or one of the founders, of the school of psychiatry that believed homosexuality was a mental illness and that it could be cured through psychotherapy. ... [H]is idea was they should be treated like any other neurotic. Couple of trips to a therapist and it should be just fine.
Watch the video below:
