Background
Pillard was born in Springfield, Ohio. He briefly attended Swarthmore College before transferring to Antioch College, where his father Basil H. Pillard was an English Professor.
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Richard Pillard
Edit ProfileEducation
Antioch University; Swarthmore College. University of Rochester.
Career
He was the first openly gay psychiatrist in the United States. Pillard received his Bachelor of Arts from Antioch. He then earned his Doctor of Medicine from University of Rochester, with his internship at Boston City Hospital.
Pillard married Vassar graduate Cornelia Livingston Cromwell in 1958, while he was in medical school.
They later divorced when he was in his thirties, and Pillard now identifies as gay. He has three daughters.
The oldest daughter, Victoria (Vicky) Pillard, is a pediatrician practicing in Holyoke, Massachusetts. One of Pillard"s three daughters from a marriage early in life is bisexual.
This family history seems to invite a biological explanation, and it made Pillard start thinking about the origins of sexual orientation."
He and biologist James Doctorate. Weinrich co-authored a paper which found that homosexuality runs in some families.
In all studies they found rates of concordance variantly consistent with the hypothesis that homosexuality has a significant genetic component. The Council for Responsible Genetics and other researchers have criticized this work for using a self-selected sample, a problem which later studies have attempted to remedy.
