When referred to psychiatrists, gay people would no longer be sent to be “cured” - injected with hormones, subjected to aversion therapy or pored over by analysts - but instead told that, from the point of view of science, there was nothing intrinsically wrong with them. The long process of rolling back those practices could begin.
It is rare for psychiatrists to transform the culture that surrounds them, but that is what happened in 1973.īy removing the diagnosis from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or D.S.M., psychiatry removed the legal basis for a wide range of discriminatory practices: for denying gay people the right to employment, citizenship, housing and the custody of children for excluding them from the clergy and the military and the institution of marriage. announced that it would reverse its nearly century-old position, declaring that homosexuality was not a mental disorder. The 10-minute speech, delivered 50 years ago Monday, was a tipping point in the history of gay rights. Officially, they did not exist homosexuality was categorized as a mental illness, so acknowledging it would result in the revocation of one’s medical license, and the loss of a career. this is what he had asked to be called - described the secret world of gay psychiatrists. “I am a psychiatrist.”įor the next 10 minutes, Henry Anonymous, M.D. But the outlandishness of his outfit diminished in importance once he began to speak. His face was covered by a rubber Nixon mask, and he was wearing a garish, oversized tuxedo and a curly fright wig. There was an intake of breath in the audience. At the last minute, he stepped through a side curtain and took his place at the front of the room. While the assembled psychiatrists, mostly white men in dark suits, settled into rows of chairs in the Danish Room at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, a disguised figure had been smuggled through the back corridors. On the second day of the annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association in 1972, something extraordinary happened.