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By Root 1921 0

changed, and so the perception on the street of him—how he looks on the outside, how he feels, and who he feels himself to be … there’s no incongruity—they take him as a male. And so when I first started going out with him, those changes weren’t as dramatic yet. If we had been somewhere more rural, not the Castro, not San Francisco, I think that even at that point most people would have taken him as a male. But because of the consciousness here that a woman can look a lot of different ways and a man can look a lot of different ways, there were people who did spot him and see him as female still. And I know that was really hard for him. You have a kind of protectiveness in that you don’t want the person you love to be hurt, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

Six

CHILDHOOD, INTERRUPTED

I wonder what my parents imagined would happen to me in a mental hospital. They wanted the doctors to tame me but they didn’t ask, and the doctors didn’t say, exactly what this process entailed. It was the doctors who came up with the idea that I was “an inappropriate female”—that my mouthy ways were a sign of a deep unease in my female nature and that if I learned tips about eyeliner and foundation, I’d be a lot better off. Who would have told my parents this? Not me. Once I was locked up, I lost interest in holding a meaningful conversation with my parents.

Daphne Scholinski,

The Last Time I WORE A DRESS, Chicago, 1981

In 1974 millions of Americans were suddenly cured of mental illness when homosexuality was deleted from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), often referred to as the “bible” of psychiatry. This reference book, which today runs to nearly nine hundred pages, defines and classifies more than three hundred mental disorders. The DSM is used not only by psychiatrists, but also by courts, schools, and social service agencies in making decisions about matters as varied as child custody, criminal liability, placement in special education classes, and receipt of Social Security benefits. The DSM also profoundly affects the way that we as a society think about mental health and disease. “Defining a mental disorder involves specifying the features of human experience that demarcate where normality shades into abnormality,” write sociologists Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk in Making Us Cray, a study of the rhetoric of science in the practice of psychiatry. This boundary shifted dramatically for gay people in the late seventies, after activists inside and outside the psychiatric profession called into question the scientific merit of the diagnosis of homosexuality as a pathology.

As early as 1956, the psychologist Evelyn Hooker showed that gay men did not exhibit signs of psychopathology in their performance on a series of three testing instruments often used to provide evidence of mental health. After the Stonewall riots, in 1968, gay activists began to picket and disrupt the annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and other professional meetings, demanding to be heard. From 1970 to 1974, activists within the psychiatric profession and without forced the profession to examine its basic assumptions about human sexuality and the way that it defined pathology. Ultimately, a majority of APA members conceded that their views on homosexuality were based on moral considerations rather than scientific ones. In 1974, when ballots were mailed to the members of the association asking them to vote on a decision of the board of trustees to delete the homosexuality entry from DSM, 58 percent of the ten thousand psychiatrists who replied voted in favor of the deletion. For a few years, an alternative diagnosis of “ego-dystonic homosexuality” (individuals unhappy with their own homosexuality) was retained, but then this, too, was dropped in the 1987 revision of the DSM.

The deletion of homosexuality from the manual was viewed as a major victory for gay rights groups, who knew that their revolution would not advance very far as long as homosexuality was certified as a pathology