The American Counseling Association (ACA) has become the first of the major mental health professional associations to boast an openly gay president. Dr. Mark Pope, associate professor in the Division of Counseling & Family Therapy at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, was elected by the membership of ACA to serve as their president 2003-2004. ACA is the world’s largest association exclusively representing over 50,000 professional counselors in various practice settings.
Dr. Pope is serving as president exactly 30 years after the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders. In a speech at the American Psychological Association annual convention, he chided his colleagues he said, ‘By a vote of the Board of Directors of the American Psychiatric Association in 1973, we were removed from their ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.’ They waved their magic wand and we were made ‘sane’ overnight. … As the first openly gay man elected to such a position, I represent a final and total repudiation of that past.’
Pope founded a peer counseling program at an LGB community center in Chicago, and established a counseling program for HIV-positive Native Americans in San Francisco. He describes himself as a ‘poor, gay, Cherokee boy from rural southeast Missouri.’