Mid-1980s, Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III: Homosexuality: if they are comfortable with their sexual orientation, not mentally ill
Homosexuality: if “in conflict with” their sexual orientation: “Ego-Dystonic Homosexuality”
We had been jointly planning our tactics over the past month – I, along with my compatriots of the Gay Liberation Front and Gay May Day collective, friends from the Mattachine Society, and members of the newly formed Gay Activists Alliance. We were to gather on this bright morning during the first week of May in 1971 and carpool up Connecticut Avenue in northwest Washington DC to the Shoreham Hotel.
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Also joining us were people from out-of-town who were there for “Gay May Day” as activists attempted to shut down the federal government for what we considered an illegal and immoral invasion of Vietnam.
We parked about a block away since we didn’t want hotel security and attendees at the annual American Psychiatric Association (APA) conference to notice a rather large group of activists sporting T-shirts and placards announcing “Gay Is Good,” “Psychiatry Is the Enemy,” and “Gay Revolution.” Half the men decked themselves in stunning drag wearing elegant wigs and shimmering lamé dresses, glittering fairy dust wafting their painted faces.
A year before, activists demonstrated outside (and a few got inside) the APA conference held in San Francisco. As a result, conference organizers conceded to permit a panel to lead a discussion workshop at this year’s annual conference in DC under the title, “Lifestyles of Nonpatient Homosexuals.”
The panelists included Dr. Franklin Kameny, Director of Mattachine DC; Barbara Gittings, Director of the Philadelphia office of Daughters of Bilitis; and Jack Baker, first “out” U.S. student body president at the University of Minnesota.
In their capacity as official conference panelists, they were granted inside access to all proceedings, including admission to the annual Convocation of Fellows, in which all attendees were to hear U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark deliver the keynote address in the hotel’s over-the-top Regency Ballroom.
Earlier in the week, some of us checked out the hotel’s layout. The day before, a comrade placed a wedge in a doorway coming from the Rock Creek Park woods into the hotel, where we gained access.
All along, the panelists were to serve as our Trojan horses. After the Convocation was called to order and halfway through Clark’s address, our insiders opened the doors, and in we poured, chanting, waving, and shouting. On stage, we witnessed a stunned Attorney General surrounded by similarly stunned and also upset APA officials.
Seated in the front rows were elderly men who wore gold medals around their necks. When they saw us, they stood and began beating us with their medals while shouting, “Get out of here. We don’t want any more people like you here!” Others yelled: “You’re sick, you’re sick you f**gots, you drag queens!” Other psychiatrists stood up from their seats and attempted to push us physically from the hall. I was able to escape their grasp, and I sat locking arms with a contingent on the floor just beneath the stage.
I then saw Franklin Kameny rush the stage and grab the microphone, his booming voice cracking through the pandemonium even after the technician cut the power. “Psychiatry is the enemy incarnate,” he yelled, the anger seemingly oozing from his pores. “You may take this as a declaration of war against you!”
And this was, indeed, our intent: to declare war on the psychiatric profession for the atrocities, the colonization, the “professional” malpractice it had perpetrated over the preceding century in the name of “science.” It was war on the biological and psychological pathologizing of sexually and gender-transgressive people.
Degenerates & psychopaths
From the so-called “Eugenics Movement” of the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth century CE and beyond, medical and psychological professions have often proposed and addressed, in starkly medical terms, the alleged “deficiencies” and “mental diseases” of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people.
During what has come to be known as the “Eugenics” movement in science (coined by Francis Galton in England in 1883 from the Greek word meaning “well born” or “of good origins or breeding” and from which the socially constructed hierarchical concept of “race” was codified), some members of the scientific community viewed people attracted to their own sex as constituting a distinct biological or racial type — those who could be distinguished from “normal” people through anatomical markers.
For example, Dr. G. Frank Lydston, U. S. urologist, surgeon, and professor, delivered a lecture in 1889 at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Chicago in which he referred to homosexuals as “sexual perverts” who are “physically abnormal.”
“…the unfortunate class of individuals who are characterized by perverted sexuality have been viewed in the light of their moral responsibility rather than as the victims of a physical and incidentally of a mental defect… Even to the moralist there should be much satisfaction in the thought that a large class of sexual perverts are physically abnormal rather than morally leprous.”
Also, the American medical doctor, Allan McLane Hamilton, wrote in 1896 that “the [female homosexual] is usually of a masculine type, or if she presented none of the ‘characteristics’ of the male, was a subject of pelvic disorder, with scanty menstruation, and was more or less hysterical and insane.”
In 1921, physician Perry M. Lichtenstein wrote, “A physical examination of [female homosexuals] will in practically every instance disclose an abnormally prominent clitoris.”
And from 1857 France, Ambroise Tardieu wrote, “This degeneracy is evidenced in men who engage in same-sex eroticism by their underdeveloped, tapered penis resembling that of a dog, and a naturally smooth anus lacking in radial folds.”
In addition, rather than considering homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender nonconformity merely as emotional, gender, and sexual differences along a broad spectrum of human potential, some sectors of the medical and psychological communities forced pathologizing language onto people with same-sex and both-sex attractions, as well as on those who cross traditional constructions of gender identities and expression.
Dr. Sigmund Freud, for example, saw homosexuality as a developmental disorder, a fixation at one of the intermediate “pregenital” stages. He believed this was caused, at least in part, by an incomplete resolution in males of the Oedipal complex.
The Swiss physician, August Forel, wrote in 1905: “The [sexual] excesses of female inverts exceed those of the male… and this is their one thought night and day, almost without interruption. [Male inverts] feel the need for passive submission… and occupy themselves with feminine pursuits. Nearly all [female and male] inverts are in a more or less marked degree psychopaths or neurotics.”
Educational opportunities for primarily middle-class women improved somewhat during the mid-19th century in the United States. Since women were often locked out of most institutions of higher learning, a number of women’s colleges were founded, such as Mt. Holyoke College, Vassar, Smith College, Wellesley College, and Bryn Mawr.
There were, however, many conservative critics who attacked this new trend, warning that educated women would be unfit to fill traditional roles in society, and others, like Dr. Edward Clarke, in 1873 warning that study would interfere with women’s fertility, causing them chronic uterine disease.
Dr. Havelock Ellis concluded, “Women’s colleges are the great breeding ground of lesbianism. When young women are thrown together, they manifest an increasing affection by the usual tokens. They kiss each other fondly on every occasion… They learn the pleasure of direct contact…and after this, the normal sex act fails to satisfy them.”
Ellis posited that female homosexuality was increasing because of the rise of feminism, which taught women to be independent of men.
All of this has resulted in members of the medical professions committing LGBTQ+ people – often against their will – to hospitals, mental institutions, jails and penitentiaries, as well as performing forced pre-frontal lobotomies, electroshock, castration, and sterilization.
We have been made to endure “aversion therapy,” “reparative therapy,” “Christian counseling,” and genetic counseling.
The physician Irving Bieber co-authored a study in 1962, “Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals” sponsored by the New York Society of Psychoanalysts, in which he concluded that homosexuality constituted a psychopathology that could be cured or prevented with psychoanalysis.
Bieber then told the New York Times in 1973, “A homosexual is a person whose heterosexual function is crippled, like the legs of a polio victim.”
In addition, the psychiatrist Charles Socarides, founder of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), argued that homosexuality is an illness, a neurosis, possibly caused by an over-attachment to the mother, which he too argued could be treated.
Bieber and Socrarides became the “authoritative” and often-referenced researchers in the area of causation and “treatment” of homosexuality.
Fighting medicalized oppression
The year following our storming the Shoreham Hotel’s Regency Ballroom, APA held its next annual conference in Dallas, Texas. No activist propped open a side entrance, and no multi-group contingent burst into the assemblage, for something seemed to have changed within the organization over the intervening year.
Barbara Gittings and Franklin Kameny again presented their views and facilitated a workshop discussion, this time joined by “Dr. H. Anonymous” (a.k.a. psychiatrist Dr. John E. Fryer) wearing a costume mask to hide his identity while discussing his experiences as a gay psychiatrist and member of the APA.
By 1973, the American Psychiatric Association had finally changed its designation of homosexuality for those comfortable with their sexual orientation, now asserting that it does not constitute a disorder: “[H]omosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, stability, reliability, or general social or vocational capabilities.”
Two years later, in 1975, the American Psychological Association followed suit and urged mental health professionals “to take the lead in removing the stigma of mental illness that has long been associated with homosexual orientations.”
In the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-V, the diagnosis of “gender identity disorder,” which the manual has imposed upon transgender people since it published DSM-III in 1980, underwent what the APA’s subcommittee working on the change considered as a more neutral designation, “gender dysphoria,” which they considered as descriptive rather than diagnostic and pathologizing.
In the case of LGBTQ+ people, the scientific community has consistently deployed the “medical model” to investigate and pathologize the “other.” In so doing, heteronormativity and cissupremacy (oppression and colonization against trans people) become perceived as unremarkable or “normal” unquestioned hegemonic norms against which all others are judged.
This “medicalization” of homosexuality, bisexuality, and trans identities served to strengthen oppression and maintain heterosexual and cisgender privilege.
Destroying the status quo
I am very proud of the actions we took during those difficult and exciting times in the 1970s. We contributed our small piece to the large jigsaw puzzle of queer history. It’s a piece that when interlocked with the others as we comrades interlocked arms to prevent the outraged psychiatrists from evicting us from the Regency Ballroom, helped expose the biases and, most importantly, the foundational power dynamics in the social constructions of “abnormality,” “disease,” “mental illness,” “hysteria,” “disability,” and “immaturity” for us and for so many other marginalized groups, including women, people of color, people who are differently abled, young people, and elders.
Following our successful and historic zap on the APA psychiatrists that day in May 1971, we exalted comrades returned to the GLF commune at 1620 S Street in northwest DC, and we sang in unified and joyous harmony “When the Gays Go Marchin’ In.”
And in fact, we did!
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