Myra Riddell, a psychotherapist, former president of the Los Angeles County Commission for Women and pioneering activist for lesbian and gay rights, died Jan. 11 at her Studio City home. She was 81.
Riddell had Alzheimer's disease, according to a longtime friend, Susan M. Wolford.
A prominent figure in the gay community for several decades, Riddell was the founding president of Southern California Women for Understanding, launched in 1976 to build a social and political network of gay career women.
In 1977 she was one of 14 gay and lesbian leaders invited to the White House to brief Carter administration officials on discrimination against homosexuals by government agencies. The meeting, which provoked intense criticism from conservatives such as Anita Bryant, represented the first time openly gay leaders had met in the White House.
Riddell later served on the Los Angeles County Commission for Women for 12 years, including two years as president, from 1992 to 1994. She stirred controversy during her last few years on the commission when she helped form a task force on satanic ritual abuse. She had developed an interest in the subject after some of her psychotherapy patients described memories of satanic abuse as children.
Born in San Diego on Nov. 23, 1926, Riddell grew up in a family in which children were encouraged to speak their minds. Her father was a judge, and her mother was a radical who edited a Jewish newspaper.
In the late 1940s and early '50s, Riddell studied at UCLA, where she earned a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's in social work. She opened a psychotherapy practice in 1959.
Married at 18, Riddell left her husband in the mid-'50s and, despite the repressiveness of the era, came out as a lesbian. When the gay rights movement emerged after the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969, she became a political activist.
Through her work at what was then called the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center, she met psychotherapist Betty Berzon, who, in 1976, invited Riddell to help her start a support group for lesbians. It began as an offshoot of the Whitman-Radclyffe Foundation, a Northern California-based activist organization. Finding little support for their interests in a group dominated by gay men, the women soon broke away and formed Southern California Women for Understanding.
