Does Medicine Discourage Gay Doctors?

During my surgical training, whenever the conversation turned to relationships, one of my colleagues would always joke about his inability to get a date, then abruptly change the subject. I thought he might be gay but never asked him outright, because it didn’t seem important.

But one morning, while we working at the nurses’ station with several of the other doctors-in-training, I realized it was important, because at the hospital, he really couldn’t be himself.

That morning, one of the senior surgeons stormed over. He had found one of his patients feeling slightly short of breath, no doubt because of an insufficient dose of diuretic overnight.

“Which of you idiots,” he growled at us, “gave my patient a homosexual dose of diuretic?”

It took me a moment to understand what the surgeon was trying to say. But when I finally did, I couldn’t help but glance at my colleague. He stood mute, his face ghost white.

Later that day, the group of us would rant against the surgeon and even make fun of him. But none of us, including that colleague and me, ever confronted him directly or reported the egregious remark. We were too scared. Doing so, we felt, would have been tantamount to saying we were gay or lesbian ourselves. And it wasn’t hard to realize that in an environment where senior doctors felt free to equate homosexuality with incompetence, such an admission would have clearly been a career-ender.  Read More