Born in Peoria, Illinois, on April 15, 1924, to a civil engineer, Howard Junior Brown spent his childhood in several small towns in Ohio.
He earned a medical degree from Western Reserve in 1948, but believed that he would always be a second-rate physician because of the common psychiatric teaching that homosexuals were inherently impaired.
And when he learned that Puerto Rican women often failed to show up for their Ob/Gyn appointments because their husbands resisted their being examined by male doctors, Brown sought out female Ob/Gyn physicians to serve these patients.
In late 1967, Brown received a warning that an investigative reporter planned to expose homosexuals in the administration of Mayor John Lindsay and resigned rather than be forced out.
His bad experiences with psychiatry, shared by many other gay men and lesbians, prompted the NGTF to challenge the American Psychiatric Association's classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder, a battle that was ultimately successful.
[4] His estate published his autobiography, Familiar Faces, Hidden Lives, a book that also contains anecdotal stories of discrimination experienced by other gay men throughout America.