CommonHealth: On Being Gay In Medicine

Dr. Mark Schuster is the William Berenberg professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the chief of general pediatrics at Childern's Hospital, Boston. He also happens to be gay.

Schuster's career was almost undone in the 1980s because of prejudice and ignorance that was typical then in his profession. He wrote about those years and the changes that have come since in an essay for WBUR's CommonHealth.

A decade after I considered turning my Bar Mitzvah into a public confessional, I entered medical school at Harvard. Some students had started a gay group the year before. They had scoped out the territory, searched for role models, and come up nearly empty. In a creaky old closet, tucked way in the back, they found a world-renowned senior physician at Children’s. He advised against starting the group, offering that it was much better to be secretive about being gay so that no one would bother you. I’ve heard that same advice many times from men and women from earlier generations who had fewer options in their day.

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