Alan G. Hevesi, Comptroller of the City of New York (one of three city-wide elected officials) has long been an active proponent in promoting the civil rights of gay and lesbian individuals.  Mr. Hevesi has been Comptroller since January 1994, distinguishing himself with his expertise on budgetary matters while ensuring the integrity of professionals and of city programs.  Prior to this time, Mr. Hevesi represented Queens in the legislature for 22 years, and in 1994 he served as Grand Marshall of the Queens Gay and Lesbian Pride March.

The Forum moderator is Dr. Paul Lynch, instructor in psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute's first openly gay candidate. He is also the chair of the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists' Committee on Psychoanalysis. His paper, "Debasement in the sphere of homosexual love as understood through Freud's formulation of the universal tendency to debasement," presented at the 1997 fall meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association received the Karl A. Menninger Award for the best paper presented by a candidate.

Reverend  Peter Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University, has written extensively on the religious roots of prejudice, including homophobia. His book, The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, dissects new Biblical scholarship and his own thinking on these topics. He has contradicted the notion that homophobia's origin and basis is Biblical.

Dr. Nancy Chodorow is a psychoanalyst and professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. An acclaimed writer since publication in 1978 of The Reproduction of Mothering, one of the most influential books in the last two decades, Dr. Chodorow has focussed extensively on issues of gender and sexuality. She has written that only by linking heterosexuality to a culturally normative, male-dominant gender differentiation could psychoanalysis have provided grounds for pathologizing homosexuality.

Dr. Ralph Roughton, as chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association's Committee on Issues of Homosexuality from 1992 to 1998, led the effort to rid the Association of anti-homosexual bias. Dr. Roughton has given papers on homosexuality and homophobia at the meetings of the APsaA and the International Psychoanalytical Association, and has been a popular guest speaker at Institutes across the country.