Friday January 5, 2007 SGN.org |
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Volume 35 Issue 01 |
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Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
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Past Out by Liz Highleyman |
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| Who was Reed Erickson? | |
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by Liz Highleyman -
SGN Contributing Writer Though not well known today, female-to-male philanthropist Reed Erickson provided funding for one of the first U.S. Gay organizations and some of the earliest services for Transgender people. Erickson, originally named Rita, was born October 13, 1917, in El Paso, Texas. Erickson grew up in Philadelphia, attending the Philadelphia High School for Girls and taking secretarial courses at Temple University. In the 1930s, the family moved to Baton Rouge, La., and in 1946 Erickson became the first woman to graduate from Louisiana State University with a degree in mechanical engineering. After completing school, Erickson returned to Philadelphia for a few years, living in a butch/femme Lesbian relationship and working as an engineer. There, Erickson came under FBI surveillance due to involvement with progressive causes and leftist groups. In the early 1950s, Erickson returned to Baton Rouge, worked in the family lead-smelting business, and started a company manufacturing stadium bleachers. Upon her father's death in 1962, Erickson inherited the family businesses. The following year - by now well into middle age - Erickson adopted the name "Reed" and began the process of gender transition under the care of pioneering psychotherapist Dr. Harry Benjamin. After a legal sex change, Erickson married a woman (the first of three wives) and became the father of two children. In 1964, Erickson started a nonprofit philanthropic organization, the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), with a mission "to provide assistance and support in areas where human potential was limited by adverse physical, mental, or social conditions, or where the scope of research was too new, controversial, or imaginative to receive traditionally oriented support." After running the family's companies for several years, he sold them for about $5 million in 1969. He was involved in various other business ventures throughout the 1970s and 1980s, amassing a fortune estimated at $40 million. Although the EEF had a board of directors, Erickson made most of the financial decisions himself. He provided funding for the Los Angeles-based ONE Institute (founded in 1952), one of the first U.S. homophile organizations. Much of ONE's educational and advocacy work fell under the auspices of a new nonprofit created by Erickson, the Institute for the Study of Human Resources (ISHR), which also sponsored forums on variant sexuality featuring speakers such as Evelyn Hooker, Christopher Isherwood, and Christine Jorgensen. In the early 1980s, Erickson purchased an estate for ONE/ISHR, paying with more than $1 million in South African krugerrand coins he had stashed away in a bank vault. The EEF was also a primary source of funding for Transgender organizations and projects during the 1960s and 1970s. Erickson supported the work of Dr. John Money, who co-founded the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University, where the first sex-reassignment surgeries in the United States were performed in the mid-1960s. The foundation provided funds for some of the earliest services for transsexuals, including San Francisco's National Transsexual Counseling Unit. It also maintained a referral network of counselors and published educational materials for transsexuals, family members, clergy, and medical and law enforcement professionals. The EEF sponsored several international conferences on gender identity, which laid the groundwork for the formation of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association in 1979. But Erickson's interests extended beyond sexuality and gender. He also funded research on homeopathy and acupuncture, dreams and altered states of consciousness, and John Lilly's work on interspecies communication with dolphins. In addition, he supported the International Plastic Surgery Project, providing free corrective surgery to children in poor countries. Erickson led an adventurous life and enjoyed traveling and collecting art. Though he shied away from publicity, he was often the subject of rumors, as his associates considered him eccentric. For many years, he lived in a sumptuous villa in Matazlan, Mexico, with his family and his pet leopard, Henry, before moving to Southern California. By the late 1970s, however, Erickson had become addicted to drugs. His behavior became erratic, and he grew suspicious of his colleagues and inattentive to his business affairs. He severed ties with many of his former beneficiaries, including Benjamin and Money. His relationship with the founders of the ONE Institute were increasingly contentious, as Erickson pushed ONE to sponsor projects unrelated to homosexuality; his refusal to turn over the deed to the Los Angeles estate sparked a legal battle that continued into the 1990s. After a series of drug-related arrests - and increasingly disabled by bladder cancer - Erickson fled to Mexico, where he died in January 1992. "When Erickson began the EEF, transsexualism was little known to either professionals or the public," says sociology professor Aaron Devor, and his contribution to the study and understanding of transsexual people is "incalculable." And, thanks to the ISHR's prudent fiscal management, "the proceeds of Erickson's philanthropy quietly continue to fund Gay and Lesbian research almost 40 years after he saw the need for this support and offered his wealth and his expertise to provide it." Liz Highleyman is a freelance writer and editor who has written widely on health, sexuality, and politics. She can be reached care of this publication or at PastOut@qsyndicate.com. |
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