Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [18]
These therapists ushered in a “gilded age” of conversion therapy from the 1940s to the 1960s, during which gays entered therapy in droves. In his memoir, Cures, gay historian Martin Duberman recalls seeing three conversion therapists during this period. Like Katz, Duberman describes how he so internalized “the dominant psychiatric view that homosexuals were a homogeneous group, bound together by dysfunction and neurosis,” that he thought of conversion as his “only hope for a happy life.”
Other scholars raised dissenting voices. Entomologist-turned-sexologist Alfred Kinsey published studies on human sexuality in the male (1948) and female (1953) that showed same-sex sexual conduct was much more widespread than commonly thought. His studies tacitly questioned the abnormality of homosexuality—could an activity millions of Americans engaged in be so heinous? Psychologist Evelyn Hooker challenged the pathologization of homosexuality more directly, showing personality experts could not distinguish homosexuals from heterosexuals. (Hooker’s test of clinical “gaydar” lives on in the Internet game of “Gay? or Eurotrash?” in which players are set the hopeless task of distinguishing gays from European urban hipsters.) Most radically, psychiatry professor Thomas Szasz argued the pathologization of homosexuality was a naked power grab by psychiatrists—an attempt by the medical establishment to wrest power away from the church.
The Stonewall Riots of 1969, of which more later, drew these and other strands of activism together, making a concerted challenge to conversion therapy possible. Gays began agitating for the deletion of homosexuality from the DSM, drawing on their growing sense that, as activist Del Martin framed it, “psychiatry was the most dangerous enemy of homosexuals in contemporary society.” The patients had become impatient, and had turned to make diagnoses of their own.
This antipsychotherapeutic stance marked a sea change. Until that point, therapists and gays were ostensibly on the same side. Unlike law and religion, medicine sought to assimilate gays into society through conversion rather than banishing them through condemnation. Guy Olmstead, castrated in 1894, insisted that “doctors are the only ones who understand and know my helplessness before this monster.” In fairness, conversion therapists also manifestly viewed themselves as nurturing advocates for their patients.
By Stonewall, however, most conversion therapists and most gay activists stood in opposed camps. Rather than seeking to convert to heterosexuality, gays sought to convert psychiatrists to their point of view. As professor of public health Ronald Bayer details, each APA meeting from 1970 onward signaled a progay advance. In the 1970 meeting, gay activists disrupted a psychiatrist’s presentation on aversion therapy with the cry, “Where did you take your residency, Auschwitz?” Asked to wait their turn, they responded, “We’ve waited five thousand years!” Pandemonium ensued. Anxious to forestall such outbursts, the APA granted gay activists a place in the program the next year. The year after that, a gay psychiatrist testified “openly” on a panel for the first time, albeit from under a mask and cloak, identified only as “Dr. Anonymous.” Finally, in 1973, gay activists like Ronald Gold and conversion therapists like Socarides and Bieber faced off. “Stop it,” Gold said to the therapists. “You’re making me sick.”
Significantly, the challenge to the DSM classification asserted the validity of homosexuality. Rather than arguing they could not convert, activists argued they should not have to do so. Riffing off “Black is beautiful,” they improvised the slogan “Gay is good.” The efforts of these activists, along with their allies within the psychiatric establishment, led to the deletion