Nanette Gartrell at Stanford University, 1968. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Photo of Dee Mosbacher shortly after meeting Nanette, 1975. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Nanette and Dee at their apartment, 1976, Boston, MA. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Nanette at Beth Israel Hospital, 1980, Boston, MA. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Nanette and Dee on the cover of "Lesbian Connection", taken while on vacation in Colorado, 1984. Photo by JEB (Joan E. Biren). Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Dee with her father during a Provincetown port stop while cruising on his boat, 1990. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Dee on the cover of the Pitzer College magazine at the time of her Pitzer commencement speech, 1992. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Dee with a mountain guide atop Breithorn Mountain, Switzerland, 1992. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Dee and Nanette scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, 1993. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Portrait of Dee in front of her framed 1994 Oscar lunch invitation. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Dee and Nanette biking in Ireland, 2003. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Dee poses with salmon, caught off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, 2004. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Nanette and Dee sailing in the Bahamas, 2005. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Nanette promotes her book, "My Answer is NO... if that's okay with you", at Stanford University, 2008. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Nanette and Dee marry each other for the third time, 2008. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Dee and Nanette celebrate their third marriage to each other, San Francisco, 2008. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Nanette (foreground) on a dog sledding adventure in the Yukon, Canada, 2010. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Dee at the helm of the NZ America’s Cup boat; Auckland, New Zealand, 2012. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Nanette and Dee with President Obama, San Francisco, 2013. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Dee and Nanette hiking in the Atacama Desert, Chile, 2014. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Nanette lecturing on her longitudinal lesbian family study, Burlington, Vermont, 2014. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Dee and Nanette snow shoeing in Antarctica, 2014. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Nanette and Dee on their 40th anniversary, Los Angeles, 2015.
Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Nanette and Dee fly fishing, New Zealand, 2016. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Nanette and Dee contributed a chapter to this 2017 NY Times best-selling book about former President Trump. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
“Nanette, Dee, and friend Kitty Kelley holding a banner at the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., 2017. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Dee and Nanette with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 2019. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Nanette and Dee join others to ring the closing bell on Wall Street, where Dee’s grandfather began his career as a teenager, living in the tenements, 2017. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Nanette’s award from the American Psychiatric Association for her contributions and leadership in advancing women’s health, 2020. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Nanette and Dee looking festive for Pride, while celebrating at home during the Covid pandemic, 2020. Photo courtesy of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher.
Nanette Gartrell, MD and Diane (Dee) Mosbacher, MD, PhD are psychiatrists in love. Dee is also a filmmaker and social justice activist; and Nanette is also a researcher and writer whose 53 years of scientific investigations have contributed to the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ+ civil rights. Individually, they are formidable leaders, thinkers, and activists; as a team, they are a force of nature.
Within a few months of arriving at Stanford for her undergraduate degree, Nanette had fallen in love with a woman, come out as a lesbian, and made it her personal mission to remove the word “homosexuality” from the DSM. As a pre-med student at Stanford, her faculty mentor Dr. Keith Brodie encouraged her to do a special project on homosexuality because, as a lesbian, she’d bring a unique perspective to the research.
Meanwhile, while taking pre-med courses at George Washington University, Dee saw her first “real live lesbian” speak at a reproductive rights speak-out. The role modeling she saw there “threw open the closet door” for her.
In 1975, Nanette got an externship at the National Institute of Health in Washington, DC. She’d never been to the east coast, but a friend found her a spot in a lesbian collective household in DC, where she met Dee. They bonded over their research, their activism, and their mutual enjoyment of the TV show “Little House on the Prairie.” Nanette ignored the housemates’ warning that Dee was a “heartbreaker” — and rightly so – as the two women have now been together for 47 years.
From DC, Nanette became a psychiatric resident at Harvard. As the first out lesbian on the full-time Harvard Medical School faculty, she found herself in the position of trailblazer multiple times. She published a paper on homophobic stresses associated with being lesbian in The American Journal of Psychotherapy, likely the first paper of its kind to appear in that journal. And when the American Psychiatric Association blocked a groundbreaking curriculum based on a single sentence written by Nanette, “Homosexuality is a normal form of sexual expression,” she pulled out of the project. In solidarity, many of her colleagues follow suit.
Once Dee finished her PhD in social psychology, she went to medical school at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. As an out lesbian, Dee was often invited to speak at schools. She created a slideshow presentation called “Closets Are Health Hazards: Gay and Lesbian Physicians Come Out,” which was shown in med schools all over the country. In a way, the slideshow started Dee’s career as a filmmaker. She eventually directed and/or produced nine documentaries, including the Academy Award-nominated Straight from the Heart, about religious parents coming to terms with their children’s homosexuality.
In 1986, Nanette began a study of lesbian families. The study continues to this day, and has been cited internationally in litigation and legislation concerning equality in marriage, foster care, and adoption. The study’s findings played a critical role in the American Academy of Pediatrics’ affirmation of same-gender marriage. Nanette also spearheaded a 10-year project documenting sexual misconduct in physicians, which led to the creation of ethics codes and laws outlawing the sexual abuse of patients. For this work, Nanette was featured in a PBS “Frontline” documentary, My Doctor, My Lover.
Dee, among her many other descriptors, is also the daughter of Robert Mosbacher, who was George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Commerce from 1989-1992. Motivated by the virulent homophobia Dee witnessed at the 1992 Republican National Convention, she founded Woman Vision, a nonprofit promoting equality through educational media. She also served as San Mateo County’s Medical Director for Mental Health and Senior Psychiatrist at San Francisco’s Progress Foundation.
In 2004, Drs. Gartrell and Mosbacher raced to San Francisco City Hall and were married one hour after the first same-sex marriage ceremony was performed for Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, improvising with their pinky rings. When the Supreme Court of California annulled these marriages, the couple wed again the following year in Victoria, British Columbia.
Since sharing the stories of their careers and their relationship with OUTWORDS, Dee and Nanette have become close friends of the project, always at the ready to offer a word of encouragement and support. In this way, the strength and warmth of their personal bond has fortified OUTWORDS’ quest to ensure that stories like Nanette’s and Dee’s are preserved and shared for many generations to come.