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New film chronicles fight to remove homosexuality's 'mental disorder' label

The PBS documentary “Cured” details gay activists’ yearslong battle to get the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders
Demonstrators gathered in Albany, N.Y., in 1971 to 
demand gay rights and declare "Homo Is Healthy."
Demonstrators gathered in Albany, N.Y., in 1971 to demand gay rights and declare that "Homo Is Healthy."Richard C. Wandel / LGBT Community Center National History Archive

In May 1970, Gary Alinder and fellow members of the activist group the Berkeley Gay Liberation Front attended — or, as Alinder later recounted, “invaded” — the National Convention of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco. 

The activists’ purpose was clear: They planned to confront the more than 10,000 psychiatrists present about the APA’s designation of homosexuality as a mental illness. The organization had maintained that characterization since 1952, when it first officially classified homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance” in the first edition of its manual.

“We figured it was an opportunity for us to be there and raise our voices,” Alinder, 77, said of the confrontation. “We said: ‘This is our lives we’re talking about. We know them better than you do.’ ... We created a bit of an uproar, and that was our intention.” 

“As long as the psychiatric establishment labeled and classified gay people as mentally ill, the consequences of that were really far-reaching."

Bennett Singer, 'CURED' Producer

The action was “the first active protest which actually disrupted one of their conventions,” he said. Over the next few years, others followed. 

A new documentary, “Cured,” premiering Monday on PBS — Oct. 11 is National Coming Out Day — chronicles this yearslong campaign, which ultimately led the APA to remove homosexuality from its manual of mental illnesses in 1973. (The APA initially reclassified homosexuality as a “sexual orientation disturbance,” which it removed from its manual by 1980.)

The 1973 decision was “a momentous turning point in the movement for LGBT equality,” said producer and director Bennett Singer, who teamed up with Patrick Sammon to make “Cured.”

“As long as the psychiatric establishment labeled and classified gay people as mentally ill, the consequences of that were really far-reaching — both in terms of society’s perceptions and unwillingness to consider civil rights or steps towards equality for gay people, and also in terms of gay peoples’ perceptions of ourselves,” Singer said. 

For decades before the shift, LGBTQ people were subjected to painful and traumatizing practices — including electroconvulsive therapy and shock therapy — to “alter” their sexual orientations. More extreme measures included castrations and lobotomies. Doctors and other perpetrators of the practices often justified the procedures based on the APA’s characterization of homosexuality as a mental illness.

Rev. Magora Kennedy leads a worship service in Harlem to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising. Now 81, Kennedy spoke about her decades of activism on behalf of LGBTQ equality and racial justice.
The Rev. Magora Kennedy leads a worship service in Harlem in New York City to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising.Story Center FIlms

People who were spared the procedures faced other forms of torture. For the Rev. Magora Kennedy, who appears in the documentary and grew up in upstate New York, the threat of being sent to a mental institution loomed over her childhood, she said. When she was 14 years old, her mother forced her to marry a man 21 years older, she said. The marriage was soon annulled because of Kennedy’s age, but the damage to her relationship with her mother persisted for decades, she said. “I really felt betrayed by my mother,” said Kennedy, 83. 

Kennedy also felt betrayed by fellow activists who didn’t recognize the compounded discrimination she faced as a Black lesbian, she said. 

The white gay activists she organized with “didn’t recognize the role of race,” she said. “It was a whole different world.”

And “Black people in the Black Panther Party got thrown out because they were gay,” Kennedy added. (One of the party’s co-founders, Huey Newton, published a letter in its newspaper in 1970 urging members to support the Gay Liberation Movement.) 

Greater acceptance of gay people became more normalized as the gay liberation movement gained steam after the 1969 Stonewall uprising. Resistance to the psychiatric establishment’s discriminatory views of gay people also became more widespread. 

Alinder’s questioning of psychiatrists’ dominant characterizations of gay people had begun a few years earlier, when he was a student at the University of Minnesota in the 1960s. There, he skimmed the writings of two then-prominent psychiatrists — Dr. Irving Bieber and Dr. Charles Socarides — who both argued that homosexuality was an illness that could be “cured.”

When Alinder later learned that Bieber was going to be at the 1970 convention that he would disrupt, “it was like the devil himself was going to show up,” he said. “How could we not be there?” (Alinder and others in the Gay Liberation Front heckled Bieber during his remarks, Alinder says in the documentary.)

Frank Kameny, center, marches with members of The Mattachine Society of Washington DC to march in New York's 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade.
Frank Kameny, center, marches with members of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., in New York's 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day march.Kay Tobin / The New York Public Library

At the 1971 APA convention, activist and astronomer Frank Kameny demanded that the psychiatrists provide proof of their so-called theories that homosexuality was a mental illness — a request they were unable to fulfill. 

“Kameny was able to make a very persuasive argument that those claims were not based on solid scientific principles,” Singer said. “That was a really essential insight that mobilized the activists and also was really instrumental in getting members of the APA to rethink this diagnosis.” 

At the next year’s convention, resistance came from within: An anonymous psychiatrist, wearing a wig and a mask in disguise — who later came forward as Dr. John Fryer — gave a speech describing both the challenges and the responsibilities gay psychiatrists faced, based on his own experiences. “I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist,” the first two lines of his speech read. 

Disguised as "Dr. H. Anonymous" in an oversized tuxedo and distorted Nixon mask, Dr. John Fryer sent shock waves through the American Psychiatric 
Association's 1972 convention by describing his life as a closeted gay psychiatrist.
Disguised as "Dr. H. Anonymous" in an oversize tuxedo and a distorted mask of Richard Nixon, Dr. John Fryer sent shock waves through the American Psychiatric Association's 1972 convention by describing his life as a closeted gay psychiatrist.Kay Tobin / The New York Public Library

“Cured” features images and audio of Fryer’s speech, which showed “what was at stake for John Fryer and for gay psychiatrists at the time,” Singer said. “He could’ve lost his medical license. He could’ve been fired from his job. But it also underscores the courage that he summoned in making the decision to come out as a gay psychiatrist.” 

When the APA decided to remove homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973, “it was really a fundamental building block for the progress that emerged after,” Singer said, pointing to the federal government’s lifting the ban, in 1975, on the employment of gay people in the civil service; 20 states’ repealing their sodomy laws over the 1970s; the repeal in 2011 of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which allowed gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military; and the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015. 

But progress has neither been linear nor complete, Singer said, citing the persistence of conversion therapy — the controversial practice of trying to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity — which is legal in at least 22 states, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit policy institution.

“There’s a direct connection between the impetus of wanting to ‘cure’ someone that we document in the film and the ongoing practice of conversion therapy,” Singer said. 

Still, the APA’s 1973 decision and the years of activism that preceded it were, for LGBTQ people, “really a first step in claiming some kind of legitimacy as people,” Alinder said. 

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