1973: WHEN HOMOSEXUALITY STOPPED BEING A MENTAL ILLNESS 1 Dec 2004 Volume 1 Issue 17

1973: WHEN HOMOSEXUALITY STOPPED BEING A MENTAL ILLNESS

    Most Gays remember June 27, 1969 as the date of the Stonewall Rebellion. However very few remember the historical significance of December 15, 1973. On that date the American Psychiatric Association's Board of Trustees recommended the removal of homosexuality from the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders' (DSM) list of psychiatric disorders.

Until 1973 homosexuality had been treated in American society as a crime and then later a disease. Homosexuals, who did not regularly end up in jail, often ended up in mental hospitals subjected to various brutal "cures," such as aversion therapy and electroshock therapy. For most of the 20th Century, homosexuals were being classified as mentally ill which prevented them from entering such professions as education, government, law enforcement, and ironically psychiatry. After the Stonewall Rebellion Gay activists demanded that all this stop by removing homosexuality from the APA's list of mental diseases.

  

Dr. Alfred Kinsey

An APA Committee first instituted the construct of homosexuality as a pathology in 1952 with the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Known as the "Psychiatrist Bible", the DSM classified homosexuality as being "among the sociopathic personality disturbances". In other words homosexuals were insane; this despite of the findings of Dr. Alfred Kinsey that 37 percent of American males had reached orgasm with another male.

Dr. Evelyn Hooker

In the 1950’s UCLA Psychology professor Evelyn Hooker was the first to challenged the theory that homosexuality was a mental illness. In her 1957 ground breaking study "The Adjustment of the male Overt Homosexual," she showed that there was no specific psychopathology linked to homosexuality. 

However later Dr. Irving Bieber published a study that declared homosexuals were the product of a dysfunctional family containing a domineering mother and a passive father. This theory became widely accepted by Americans, even today. In 1973, Bieber told an interviewer that "a homosexual is a person whose heterosexual function is crippled, like the legs of a polio victim.

Gay Liberatists and the APA collided in 1970 when activists barged into the APA National Conference held in San Francisco, where Dr. Irving Bieber was a keynote speaker. The Gay Libbers’ main goal was to "de-legitimize the authority" of the APA and to "talk back to them. Activists thus dressed in outlandish costumes, heckled from the audience, called Bieber a "motherfucker", while APA attendees verbally attacked back, even calling a Lesbian a "paranoid fool and stupid bitch". 

At the 1971 APA  National Conference, Gay Liberationists broke through a conference room door and stormed through the audience denouncing the APA's position on homosexuality and demanding the removal of the stigma of mental illness. The following year, Lesbian activist Barbara Gittings asked John Fryer, a Gay Psychologist whose career was ruined for merely being suspected of being Gay, to speak at the 1972 National Conference. At the Dallas Convention, Fryer donned a large Richard Nixon mask and addressed his peers as Dr. Anonymous, detailing the plight of Gay Psychiatrists. He received a standing ovation.

Ron Gold 

While Gay Liberationists were hammering at the APA from the outside, a group of closeted Gay psychiatrists worked to put liberal psychiatrists in the political echelons of the APA. The fall of 1973 Ronald Gold, a Gay Liberationist and a founding member of the Gay and Lesbian National Task Force met with Dr. Robert L. Spitzer,who was on the APA Committee which decided what and what was not a disease. Spitzer agreed to have Gold speak at the 1973 APA Conference in Honolulu. 

There Gold gave a speech entitled, "Stop! You Are Making Me Sick." After the conference Dr. Spitzer was invited by Gold to attend a meeting of Gay psychiatrists in a "campy Gay bar" in Honolulu and was surprised to see so many well-respected colleagues there. Dr. Spitzer and Gold left the bar and went and drafted a change in the DSM, deleting any reference to homosexuality being pathological. 

Later, on December 15, 1973 the APA's Board voted to remove homosexuality from the revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM II) after intense debate. The board stated that homosexuality "does not necessarily constitute a psychiatric disorder." Members of the APA who specialized in treating homosexuals, in particular Dr. Bieber protested the board's decision.  However a letter went out in the name of the board, urging APA members not to reverse the board's decision which was upheld by the general APA membership the following year on April 9th by a 58 percent approval.

Effectively, this decision was the official acceptance of homosexuality as a viable sexual orientation and acted as a catalyst for an increase in Gay Liberation throughout the Western world. "Gay Libbers triumphed over their greatest enemy, the psychoanalysts", by forcing the APA to examine its own positions and remove homosexuality from its official list of mental diseases.