Lori Puopolo
Professor Jack Gieseking
American Studies 409
3 April 2017
Literature Review
For several hundred years, psychiatry has used diagnosis as a means of social control (Brown 1990). Brown (1990) racks psychiatry’s role since slavery in U.S. history in perpetuating racism and sexism. Siobhan Somerville (2006) shows how the same language that justified scientific racism also justified scientific heterosexism. science general has a history of maintaining white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. It has determined who may live in the “real world’ and who is isolated and sent to asylums; who has a job; who is healthy; who is normal. Since the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) was first published, the American Psychiatric Association had labeled homosexuality as a mental illness (Blumenfeld 2017; Drescher 2015).
The definition of homosexuality has changed over time. Appearing in medical literature in the United States in the 1890s, it referred to someone who participated in gender-nonconforming behavior (Katz 1995). Becoming more of an everyday term in the twentieth century, police criminalized anyone who participated in homosexual behavior or cross-gender behavior (Chauncey 1996). Cruising spots were surveilled, gay men were fired from government jobs, and lesbians lost ownership over their children (Chauncey 1996). Gender non-conforming people of color experience the greatest amount of harassment from police (Chauncey 1996).
By the 1950s, psychiatrists had framed homosexuality has one of three things: an illness, a sign of immaturity (a phase) or as a normal variation (Drescher 2015). The mental illness frame became the dominant one through its implementation into the DSM. Gay and lesbian activists saw the harmful effects of these frames and rejected the pathologization that such frames brought upon homosexuality.
Through protest, gay men and lesbian activists defined their own sexuality. Dr. Frank Kameny, a gay activist who was fired from his astronomy job for his sexuality, criticized early gay rights activists for giving psychiatrists too much power over the definition of homosexuality (The Lavender Scare 2013). Activists from outside the discipline needed to change how homosexuality was perceived; that meant challenging the discipline that had declared itself to be “experts” on this “disease” or a “phase”. Although they had adopted a definition initially crafted by psychiatrists, they were still advocating for participation in everyday life, which meant getting their sexuality out of the DSM.
Literature that describe the protests against the American Psychiatric Association tends to focus on either how psychiatrists controlled or resisted mainstream understandings of homosexuality or on how gay men and lesbians combatted psychiatric paradigms of homosexuality. Resistance included panel discussions, T-shirts, signs with slogans like “Gay is Good” and “Psychiatry is the Enemy” (Blumefeld 2017). At the 1971 protest in D.C.Dr. Frank Kameny’s declaration of war against the American Psychiatric Association.
Many gay men and lesbians at this time had adopted the psychiatric theories that saw homosexuality as normal. From these theories, the mainstream LGBT movement adapted a born this way rhetoric to fight for rights. As Dean Spade (2015) points out, this fight for rights gave privileges to white, middle-class, wealthy, neoliberal, gay men and lesbians while denying more vulnerable LGBT populations to those same privileges. Despite biology’s use to perpetuate racism, sexism, and heterosexism, LGBT people used it as a basis upon which to fight for their rights. They had noticed how effective biological arguments are. This argument used psychiatric theories that homosexuality is normal as a tool to construct the born this way argument. However, this argument ahistoricizes homosexuality, ignoring that homosexual identity has not been around for even two hundred years.
The Mattachine Society, did not want to assimilate into mainstream culture but rather a separate homosexual culture (Bronski 2011, 181). Meanwhile, mainstream LGBT movements prioritized acquiring rights that assimilated into white, middle-class, neoliberal, heterosexist society. The Daughters of Bilitis a lesbian homophile organization, addressed gender issues (Bronski 2011,181). Both took part in the 1971 protest, knowing that they could be fired from their jobs, outed in newspapers. Lesbians could lose custody over their children (Bronski 2011, 181).
Topic Proposal
In this paper, I provide the case that the site at which the 1971 D.C. protest to depathologize homosexuality occurred should be nationally recognized as an LGBT historical site. Although it was not the first protest against the American Psychiatric Association’s oppression against gay men and lesbians (Blumenfeld 2017), it was the event at which gay and lesbian activists officially declared war against the association (Blumenfeld 2017).
After the 1971 protest ensured another protest a year later in Dallas, Texas. At the conference, gay psychiatrist Dr. John Fryer, identifying himself as Dr. Anonymous, told the American Psychiatric Association to listen to gay and lesbian activists trying to depathologize homosexuality (Fryer 1972). He also called out the association for firing the gay psychiatrists who are trying to protect the institution. Joining John Fryer were activists Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameny and again gay and lesbian activists protesting against the American Psychiatric Association.
These protests eventually led to the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association to vote in 1973 on whether to remove homosexuality form the DSM-III (Drescher 2015, 571). They voted yes. It is important to note that none of the trustees were psychiatrists, many of whom were providing their arguments up to the time of the vote. In other words, psychiatric understanding of homosexuality was left exclusively to a bunch of straight men. Gay and lesbian activists did not have the final say, but their pressure throughout the years was effective because homosexuality that year was no longer defined by psychiatrists as a mental illness.
The 1973 decision did not end psychiatric social control over homosexual bodies. Later additions such as sexual orientation disturbance showed that psychiatrists still vied homosexuality as a problem. Such a diagnosis suggested that homosexual people could be unhappy with their sexuality but ignored the similar notion that heterosexual people could be distressed over their sexuality. Sexual orientation disturbance in particular justified conversation therapy practices. Hence sexual orientation disturbance and similar diagnose maintained heteronormativity by treating it as normal and desirable. It would take several more years until homosexuality would no longer be considered to be a problem in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. (Cecco 1987).
Homosexuality was no longer pathologized, but distress associated with homosexuality was seen as a psychological condition that required treatment. Fast forward to 2013 when the DSM-5 no longer considered trans to be a problem but recognized that a transperson could be distressed due to relevant factors (Johnson 2015), such as cissexism and transphobia. The difference is that sexual orientation disturbance was used to justify conversion therapy (Drescher 2015).
References
Blumenfeld, Warren J. 2017. “How Homosexuality Stopped Being a Disease.” LGBTQ Nation. Accessed February 27. http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2016/06/homosexuality-stopped-disease/.
Bronski, Michael. 2012. “Visible Communities / Invisible Lives.” In A Queer History of the United States. Boston Beacon Press, 176–205.
Brown, Phil. 1990. “The Name Game; Toward a Sociology of Diagnosis.” The Journal of Mind and Behavior 11(3/4):385–406.
Chauncey, George. 1996. “Privacy Could Only Be Had in Public.” In Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, ed. Joel Sanders, 224–67. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.
De Cecco, John P. 1987. “Homosexuality’s Brief Recovery: From Sickness to Health and Back Again.” The Journal of Sex Research 23 (1): 106–14.
Drescher, Jack. 2015. “Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality.” Behavioral Sciences 5 (4): 565–75.
Fryer, John. 1972. “Speech of ‘Dr. Henry Anonymous’.” Paper Presented at the Annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Dallas, May 1972.
Katz, Jonathan N. 1995. The Invention of Heterosexuality. New York, NY: Dutton.
Somerville, Siobhan B. 2006. “Scientific Racism.” In Queer Studies: A LGBTQ Anthology, eds. Beemyn and Eliason, 241–255. New York: NYU Press.
The Lavender Scare. 2013. Frank Kameny: “Because I Was Right…” YouTube video, 4:29, March 20, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Fjn7YUqRe8.