A Major Milestone in LGBTQ+ Rights Occurred 50 Years Ago Today

Fifty years ago today came a major ruling that affected how LGBTQ+ were perceived by American psychiatrists.

"On Dec. 15, 1973, the board of trustees of the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its diagnostic manual of mental illnesses. Newspaper stories the next day mostly treated it as a technical change rather than a seismic shift that would transform the lives of gay people. The activists who fought for the change knew otherwise," reports the Washington Post.

Prior to that such a diagnosis was used as a tool to discriminate. "When the diagnosis was finally removed, a major rationalization for discrimination was taken away," Jack Drescher, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University and author of "Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man," tells the Post. Adding, "Nothing happened overnight – it took a long time. But it was a world-changing event."

The notion that homosexuality was a disorder came from Freudian analysis, Andrew Scull, a sociology professor at the University of California in San Diego explaines to the Post. "The Freudians had a great deal invested in the idea that homosexuality was the result of arrested development, and a form of mental illness."

In 1952 the APA published the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM. It defined homosexuality as a "sociopathic personality disorder," and inadequate parenting was commonly deemed the cause. "The psychoanalytic stereotype of the family that created a homosexual," Drescher tells the Washington Post, "was an overbearing mother and a distant or hostile father."

The 1950s, as the Showtime series "Fellow Travelers" attests, were amongst the darkest days for gay people in America. In addition to this definition, being gay was considered illegal in most states, and gay people were being drummed out of the Federal government, thanks to an executive order by President Dwight Eisenhower.

Stonewall changed things, bringing new energy to the movement for gay equality, and the APA became a major target for their definition. In 1970 the APA meeting in San Francisco was disrupted by activists to protest a form of conversion therapy (called aversion therapy) that was popular at the time. The meeting was disrupted, according to the Post, by protesters who disrupted the proceedings with shouts of "vicious," "torture," and "Where did you take your residency, Auschwitz?" But the protests found no sympathy with the APA.

The following year at the APA convention in Washington DC, the organization still resisted the protestors' demands, though began to find allies within the organization and allowed a panel called "Gay is Good." There was, nonetheless, a dramatic confrontation when Frank Kameny, a full-time gay rights activist, grabbed the microphone from a lecturer at an APA event. Kameny, the Post notes, had lost his job as an astronomer with the Army Map Service in 1957 because he was gay. "Psychiatry is the enemy incarnate," he told the shocked audience. "Psychiatry has waged a relentless war of extermination against us. You may take this as a declaration of war against you."

Yet despite the drama, no changes were made to the definition. Nor were there any the following year (1972) at the Dallas convention, though there was another gay panel and an appearance of a gay psychiatrist, John Fryer, under conditions. Fryer had lost his job as a psychiatric residency at the University of Pennsylvania when he was outed. He asked for anonymity at the convention.