Richard Pillard

Richard Colestock Pillard (born 11 October 1933) is a professor of psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine. He was the first openly gay psychiatrist in the United States.

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. Pillard received his B.A. from Antioch. He then earned his M.D. 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. His second daughter, Cornelia T. L. (Nina) Pillard, is a circuit judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and formerly a Georgetown University Law Center professor and assistant to Attorney General Janet Reno. His youngest daughter, Elizabeth Jane (Eliza) Pillard, is a social worker specializing in child psychiatric issues in Vermont.

Chandler Burr reported that Pillard jokes "he is uniquely equipped to investigate whether homosexuality has a biological basis: he, his brother, and his sister are gay, and Pillard believes that his father may have been gay. 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 D. Weinrich co-authored a paper which found that homosexuality runs in some families. Pillard feels this is some of his most significant work, and that paper won the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality Hugo Beigel Award for the best paper published in The Journal of Sex Research.

Pillard is also well known for a series of studies he coauthored with J. Michael Bailey, which examined the rate of concordance of sexual identity among monozygotic twins, dizygotic twins of the same sex, non-twin siblings of the same sex, and adoptive siblings of the same sex. 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.