Health Care

Community Nursing Founder

b. March 10, 1867
d. September 1, 1940

“Nursing is love in action ...”

Lillian Wald was a social reformer and the founder of the American community nursing movement. Her visionary leadership in public health; women and children’s welfare; and labor, immigrants’ and civil rights led to the formation of countless institutions worldwide.

Wald was born to a German Jewish middle-class family in Cincinnati, Ohio. After graduating in 1891 from the nursing program at the New York Hospital Training School, she took a job at the New York Juvenile Asylum, an orphanage, where she quickly grew disillusioned with institutional methods of child care. As her biographer and friend, R. L. Duffus, commented, “She had too much individuality to be willing to lose herself as a cog in an established institution. Instinctively, she wanted to change things—to do better.”

Wald attended medical school briefly. During this time, she witnessed firsthand the poverty and hardship endured by immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. She resolved to bring affordable health care to those in need.

In 1893 Wald quit medical school and organized the Henry Street Settlement, otherwise known as the Visiting Nurse Society (VNS) of New York. The VNS operated on a sliding fee scale to provide all city residents with an opportunity to access medical care. Wald pioneered, and coined the term, “public health nursing” with the belief that the nurse’s “organic relationship with the neighborhood should constitute the starting point for a universal service to the region.” By 1913, through her tireless efforts, the VNS grew from 10 to 92 nurses, making 200,000 visits annually. It became a model for similar entities across the nation and around the globe.

Wald became a highly influential advocate at the city, state and national levels. She persuaded the New York Board of Education to initiate the first American public school nursing program in Manhattan. She successfully lobbied President Theodore Roosevelt to create a Federal Children’s Bureau to protect children from abusive child labor, and she helped form the Women’s Trade Union to protect women working in sweatshops. She campaigned for women’s suffrage and supported racial integration, helping to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Upon her recommendation, The New York Commission on Immigration was formed to investigate the living and working conditions of immigrants.

Wald did not marry and maintained her closest relationships with women. Although she did not self-identify as a lesbian, her letters reveal the intimate affection she felt for at least two of her companions, Mabel Hyde Kittredge and Helen Arthur.

Wald died of a stroke at the age of 73.

CEO of the APA

b.  September 5, 1957 

“It is our firm stance that homosexuality is not a mental disorder, a position we have maintained since 1973, when homosexuality was rightly removed from the DSM.”

Saul Levin is the first openly gay CEO and medical director of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). He also serves as board chair the APA Foundation and as a clinical professor at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

A native of South Africa, Levin received his medical degree in 1982 from the University Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He completed his residency in psychiatry at the UC Davis Medical Center and worked as a coordinator for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Levin joined the APA in 1987 and served on several committees. 

In 1994 Levin earned a Master of Public Administration (MPA) from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He  founded a health care consulting firm, Access Consulting International, which he led for 10 years.

Levin has served as the president and CEO of medical education for South African Blacks, a U.S-based charity that grants scholarships to black South African students pursuing health care degrees. He has served as vice president for science, medicine, and public health for the American Medical Association and has held numerous other leadership positions in the medical and social equity fields. 

In 2012 Mayor Vincent Gray of Washington, D.C., named Levin interim director of the District of Columbia Department of Health. By this time, Levin was widely known to be openly gay. 

In 2013 Levin was hired as the CEO and medical director of the APA, the world’s leading psychiatric association. His position as the organization's top medical executive marks an LGBT milestone. Until 1973 homosexuality was listed in the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders. Treatments for the “disease” included lobotomy, electric shock treatment, chemical castration and other catastrophic therapies. 

In 2018 Levin addressed the audience after a performance of “217 Boxes of Dr. Henry Anonymous,” an Off-Broadway play about APA member John E. Fryer, M.D., and his role in the declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness. Levin praised Dr. Fryer and spoke about the APA’s commitment to LGBT inclusion and equality.

Workplace Pioneer

b. September 8, 1947

“I seem to have been a pioneer in realizing the idea for what are now called domestic partnership benefits. It took years for the idea to catch on.”

Jeffrey Weinstein is a writer, editor and critic. As a union representative, he won the first employee healthcare benefits for same-sex couples from a private employer.

Born in Manhattan, Weinstein was raised in Brooklyn and Queens. He earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Brandeis University before enrolling at the University of California in San Diego, where he pursued graduate work in English and American literature. Shortly after the Stonewell Riots in 1969, Weinstein came out to his family and friends and taught the first class in gay literature in California.

Weinstein started his career as a food critic at the San Diego Reader in 1972 and became a restaurant critic for New York’s Soho Weekly News in 1977. He joined the Village Voice in 1981 as editor of visual arts and architecture criticism, where he remained until 1995.

In his first year with the Village Voice, Weinstein founded the National Writers Union. In 1982 he helped negotiate the union contract agreement to extend health, life insurance and disability benefits to same-sex partners and other spousal equivalents of the newspaper’s employees.

From 1997 to 2006, he served as the fine arts editor and cultural columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and, subsequently, as arts and culture editor for Bloomberg News.

In 2009 the University of Southern California named Weinstein deputy director of its Annenberg Getty Arts Journalism Program. The following year, the National Endowment for the Arts named him associate director of its Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater. In 2013 and 2014, he served on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. 

Weinstein writes frequently about gay issues. He created the “Out There” column about LGBT culture on artsjournal.com and wrote a culinary coming-out story, “A Jean-Marie Cookbook,” which earned him a Pushcart Prize. He serves on the board of directors of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City.

Weinstein married his partner of 32 years, the artist John Perreault, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 2008. 

Employee Benefits Plaintiffs

b. Ruth Berman, 1934
b. Connie Kurtz, 1936

“We’re all entitled to equal treatment.” - Ruth Berman

Ruth Berman and Connie Kurtz were the first same-sex couple in the United States to successfully sue an employer for domestic partner benefits. Their landmark case against the New York City Board of Education eventually led to the extension of health and dental benefits to the domestic partners of all New York City employees.

Born in Brooklyn, the women first met when they had husbands and children. Years later, they reconnected and both divorced. As a couple, Berman and Kurtz shared a commitment to LGBT rights and feminist activism. 

In 1988 Berman worked as a health and physical education teacher at a Brooklyn high school. Kurtz was self-employed. The couple sued for Kurtz to receive medical and dental benefits under Berman’s employee healthcare plan. They won the case in 1994 and went on to become spokeswomen for LGBT rights, sharing their story on television and through other national media. It was the first time many Americans had seen an out lesbian couple. An emotional public outpouring led them to create Women in Discovery, the first forum empowering lesbians married to men to discuss their attraction to women.

Over the years, Berman and Kurtz helped organize Parents, Friends and Family of Lesbian and Gays (PFLAG) chapters in Florida and New York and founded The Answer is Love Counseling Center. They served as co-chairs of the New York State NOW Lesbian Task Force.

In 2011 the couple, both grandmothers, married in New York just two days after the state legalized same-sex marriage. “Forty-two years we have been significant others, we have been life partners,” Kurtz said. “Now we are spouses.”

In 2015 a New York State bill, the Ruthie and Connie LGBT Elder Americans Act, was introduced to improve and protect services for aging LGBT adults.

A 2002 documentary, “Ruthie and Connie: Every Room in the House,” explores their lives and contributions as a couple.  In 2016 they received the SAGE Pioneer Award. 

Workplace Pioneer

b. December 15, 1941

“I’ve never been interested in standing in the middle. Sure it’s comfortable, but life’s too short for the middle.”

Tom Ammiano is an LGBT rights activist and one of the first American politicians to fight discrimination against LGBT schoolteachers. He served as the San Francisco school board president, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and a member of the California State Assembly.

Ammiano grew up in Montclair, New Jersey. Classmates and his gym teacher routinely bullied him. He turned to humor and education, earning a bachelor’s degree in communications from Seton Hall University and a master’s degree in special education from San Francisco State University.

Ammiano became a special education teacher in San Francisco and cofounded a gay teachers organization that successfully petitioned the school board to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. In 1977 he worked successfully with Hank Wilson and Harvey Milk to defeat the Briggs Initiative, which sought to ban gay people from teaching in California.

In the 1980s Ammiano worked as a teacher, an activist and a standup comic. In 1990 he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Education and became vice president a year later. He was instrumental in creating gay and lesbian sensitivity training for students in the San Francisco Unified School District. He also made condoms available to middle and high school students and banned the Boy Scouts of America from recruiting and teaching in schools, citing the group’s ban on gay scouts and leaders.

In the mid ’90s, Ammiano was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors where, among other reforms, he pushed for LGBT rights and affordable housing. He helped create the city’s Health Care Security Ordinance, making San Francisco the first city in the country to provide universal healthcare access. He also developed the city’s Domestic Partners Ordinance, which offers benefits to the unmarried domestic partners of employees.

In 1999 Catholic groups criticized Ammiano when he granted the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an AIDS charity run by drag queens, a permit to participate in Easter Sunday events. The same year, he mounted an impressive write-in campaign for San Francisco mayor. He lost, but his bid was documented in the film “See How They Run.”

Ammiano was elected to the California State Assembly in 2008. During his tenure, he authored the landmark School Success and Opportunity Act, which permits students in sex-segregated programs to participate according to their gender identity. Ammiano played himself in the Academy Award-winning  film “Milk” (2008).

In 1994 Ammiano’s longtime partner, Tim Curbo, died from complications of AIDS. Ammiano married Carolis Deal in 2014.