An appreciation by Karen Ocamb

Betty Berzon would have loved her funeral. She helped plan it, of course, so she would be pleased that all had gone well. She would have been proud, too, of how her partner of 33 years, Terry DeCrescenzo, held up amid the tears and laughter. Terry was with Betty when she died at their home in Studio City after a 20-year struggle with cancer. Betty was a feisty 78.

But Dr. Betty Berzon couldn't have planned the outpouring of love and media attention that immediately followed word of her death in the early morning of Jan. 24. In addition to the spate of gay coverage, the long, reverent Los Angeles Times obituary enshrined Betty's legacy as "an author and pioneering psychotherapist, who was a beacon of the Los Angeles gay and lesbian community for three decades."

The chapel at the Pierce Brothers funeral home in Westwood overflowed with 200 public officials, family, and scores of notable close friends, many of whom were regulars at Terry and Betty's salon-like gatherings.

Rabbi Denise Eger led the service, musing about a dinner where she and Betty conversed about the existence and nature of God. Former USC professor H. Eric Schockman talked about how Betty was "bigger than life in many respects," but "challenged" when it came to attire, once sporting a cap reminiscent of The Captain and Tennille, minus the yacht. Terry confided that she buried Betty in a T-shirt given to her by and featuring a picture of her close friend and writing mentor, the late Paul Monette. Schockman mentioned how one of Betty's favorite Monette quotes was, "Go without hate but not without rage. Heal the world." Betty, Schockman said, "had a lot of rage -- that good, positive rage."

Good, positive rage. About 4-feet-11-inches tall, Betty could cut anyone down to size with one look if they failed to grasp a significant point about LGBT rights. A trained listener, she might acknowledge a sliver of an opposing argument. But she never backed down. She was fighting for a principle larger than herself -- the right for a person to be who they are and want to be, the right legally, politically, and socially denied LGBT people.

That was the crux of her life work -- to help gay people overcome the shame and self-loathing instilled in them by society, and how to find and maintain a long, healthy relationship with someone engaged in the same healing process. On the flip side was rage against those who continue the oppression.

The motivation for her life and work was her own soul-deep struggle, as she described in her Lambda Literary Award-winning 2002 memoir, Surviving Madness, A Therapist's Own Story. Authentic self-awareness and the power to exorcise the inculcated demons screaming that homosexuality is a "perversion" led Betty through the hell of two selves: one that met the world with the air of cultivated authority, the host of such luminaries of cultural expression as avant-garde writer Anais Nin. Simultaneously there existed the other, secret self who attempted suicide and landed in and out of mental hospitals after a failed lesbian affair. "Identity crisis is too mild a phrase to do justice to that witless period of my life. I punished myself in the mirror of society's image of me. They were, in fact, right, I thought. I was all wrong for this world," she wrote.

Betty found relief, then inspiration, then a career in helping others. From 1952 through to the mid-'60s, she studied and earned degrees in psychotherapy, winding up working with the founders of the human potential growth movement, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. Betty became something of a star herself when she developed tapes for self-help encounter groups and started "Quest for Love" workshops.

In 1968, as the world around her churned with change, Betty finally encountered her own truth, coming out at 40. Three years later, after a curious meeting with Gay Liberation Front leaders Morris Kight and Don Kilhefner, she agreed to help create the first social services center for gay people. Betty talked them out of soliciting volunteer psychiatrists and instead offered to train peer counselors to lead therapy groups. By the time the Gay Community Services Center opened in October 1971, Betty had trained gays to help others gays experience themselves and each other with pride.

The benefit was mutual. Betty also developed a "clarity about what it means to be gay," including rage at society's classification of homosexuality as abnormal and perverse. Defying stigma and the potential loss of her credentials, Betty took on her profession, organizing the first meeting of gays and lesbians in the American Psychological Association, which led to the 1972 founding of the Association of Gay Psychologists. Protests led the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973.

That was also the year Betty and Terry fell in love. The two went on to found or participate in several significant LGBT organizations, including Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services (GLASS) where Terry is still the director.

A poignant moment at the end of the funeral summed up Betty's legacy. West Hollywood City Councilmember Jeff Prang, speaking for U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, announced that the American flag draped over Betty's coffin had flown half-staff over the U.S. Capitol. It was folded up by two openly gay uniformed LAPD officers and presented to Terry "on behalf of a grateful nation." The officers then unfurled a rainbow flag over Betty before her burial. The overflow audience cried with pride. Dr. Betty Berzon lived her life, as she once said of protesters with HIV/AIDS, with "defiant gayety."

A public memorial service will be held on Feb. 26 at 5 p.m. at the Omni Hotel, 251 S. Olive St., Los Angeles. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to GLASS, 650 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, CA, 90069, or Lambda Literary Foundation, P.O. Box 1957, Old Chelsea Station, New York, N.Y., 10113.