Betty Berzon, an author and pioneering psychotherapist, who was a beacon of the Los Angeles gay and lesbian community for three decades, died Tuesday at her Studio City home after a 20-year battle with cancer, according to her partner, Terry DeCrescenzo. She was 78.
In 1971, at a time when gay professionals could lose their livelihoods if they publicly affirmed their homosexuality, Berzon helped found the country's first social service agency for gays and lesbians, now called the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center. She was a leader in the human potential movement of the 1960s and was instrumental in organizing the first meeting of gays in the American Psychological Assn. at a time when her profession still classified homosexuality as a mental illness.
In later years, she wrote bestselling self-help books -- including "Positively Gay" (1979), "Permanent Partners" (1988) and "The Intimacy Dance" (1996) -- and a popular advice column for the website PlanetOut.com. In private practice, she counseled only gays and lesbians, particularly male couples.
She also wrote a memoir, "Surviving Madness, A Therapist's Own Story" (2002), which won a Lambda Literary Award for excellence in gay and lesbian writing.
According to her often anguished account in that book, her life was cleaved into two distinct halves: The first part was dominated by inner battles over sexual identity as a deeply closeted gay, and the second half by political and social battles she led as an openly gay activist.
Berzon was born in St. Louis on Jan. 18, 1928, to teenage parents, whose unhappy marriage encouraged her to seek solace outside her family from an early age. She started dating boys when she was 14.
She was aware of a strong attraction for other women but buried those feelings, explaining in her memoir that she "had heard of homosexuality ... heard that it was a sickness" and wondered if she had "caught" it. When a woman in her dormitory at Stanford University tried to seduce her, Berzon fought her off and dropped out of school.
She moved to New York City, where she talked her way into a job at Gotham Book Mart, a legendary haunt frequented by such literary heavyweights as W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Gore Vidal and Eugene O'Neill.
Her job ended abruptly when its eccentric proprietor, Frances Steloff, threw a book at her head, but the overall experience of working there served Berzon well when she arrived in Los Angeles in 1950.
