Dismantling a Diagnosis: Episode 2: The Cure

Making Gay History | LGBTQ Oral Histories from the Archive

Making Gay History

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4.7 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2023

⏱️ 49 minutes

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Summary

A half-century ago, millions of homosexuals were cured with the stroke of a pen when the American Psychiatric Association decided to change its diagnostic manual and remove homosexuality from the list of mental disorders. In this episode, we journey through several milestones in the battle for gay liberation and acceptance as we focus on how the field of psychiatry defined, and distorted, what it meant to be homosexual. Homosexuality was officially classified as a mental disorder in the 1952 edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, but the narrative that equated being gay with being mentally ill had been emerging for decades. The nascent gay rights movement in the 1950s was caught between believing the sickness narrative and seeking treatment, and questioning the diagnosis and using their own voices to fight back. A groundbreaking 1956 study by psychologist Dr. Evelyn Hooker debunked the notion that gay men were, by default, mentally ill, and even though societal pressures dissuaded Dr. Hooker from extending her study to lesbians, her research gave activists a foundation to advance the discourse. The years that followed brought continued campaigning by gay activists, and with the help of enlightened psychiatrists who became allies and closeted gay psychiatrists who had the courage to speak out, 1973 brought victory. The APA overturned its classification, effectively “curing” millions of homosexuals overnight. Visit our episode webpage for additional resources and a transcript of the episode. For exclusive Making Gay History bonus content, join our Patreon community. ——— To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi Eric Marcus here. I know I know your email inbox is flooded with appeals for money.
0:08.0	I have the same experience but we've just had a $25,000 challenge grant given to us by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, and there's a deadline.
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0:31.0	Thanks to Barbara and Eric and Harry. We've already gotten halfway there.
0:37.3	So I'm hoping you can help get us all the way there so we can take full advantage of this incredibly
0:41.8	generous grant and maybe before the end of the year
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0:48.2	You can find us at making gayhistory.com and then just press the donate button. That's Making Gay History
0:53.3	dot com and press the donate button. Thanks so much and sorry to be a bother but we
0:58.3	can't do it without you. Happy holidays. On December 15th 1973 the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association,
1:07.0	also known as the APA, approved a resolution striking homosexuality from the list of
1:12.4	mental disorders in the diagnostic and statistical manual.
1:16.5	It was, in the words of the newly founded National Gay Task Force, the Greatest Gay Victory. And it felt to many like it had happened fast,
1:25.0	as though this psychiatric orthodoxy
1:28.0	had just been swept away in the tidal wave of post-Stonewall gay liberation activism. But to understand how the sickness label,
1:35.7	a label that had been used to persecute so many, was overturned so seemingly easily,
1:41.4	we're turning back the clock to before Stonewall, to the decade before, to the 1950s.
1:47.0	We were cured overnight by a stroke of the pen.
	...

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