35th anniversary of deleting "homosexuality" from the DSM

[jenk]

This may not seem important. siderea gets into why it was:

What was taught in the psychiatry classrooms of the US -- what had been taught since the mid-1940s [...was...] that same-sex sexual desire was not an ordinary human experience, but necessarily a symptom of a grave and disabling insanity. You could not desire members of your own sex, they taught, without also being a sociopath who would lie, cheat, steal, and rape (anything or anyone) at the slightest opportunity. Homosexuality -- for those of you who are clinicians -- was a personality disorder.
[...]
And this was, they insisted, necessarily so. You couldn't have the symptom of same-sex desire without this attendant whole personality illness, that pervaded every aspect of your life, the total of your personality. You could not be a person of character, could not have close human relationships, could not control your impulses or appetites in any way, they said.

This is what was taught. This was what was taught to psychiatrists. All of them, pretty much. For thirty years.

I was born in 1966. My earliest memories are from the early 70s. By the time I was grappling with my sexuality it was the mid-to-late 80s, and the only serious anti-gay voices I heard were religious.¹ This helps fill in some of why the older folks seemed so wigged at the idea, especially those who didn't know they knew anyone who was gay or lesbian.

What changed this? A combination of activism and education on the research that had been done - outside of the psychiatric field.

Among that research the most astonishing was Evelyn Hooker's 1956 "The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual". It was a gold-standard, double-blind experiment. Psychiatry claimed that homosexuality could not exist without all sorts of other debilitating effects throughout the personality. Very well, said Hooker: let's test that hypothesis. She recruited thirty gay men who had never had therapy and thirty controls who were matched for them on age, socioeconomic status and intelligence. Each was given the standard, most esteemed, tests for psychopathology then in use. Their anonymized results were shipped to three highly esteemed experts on those measures, to be graded.

And what was returned was that the very best experts in psychological testing for psychopathology, using the best tools of the day, could not tell the gay from straight respondants on the basis of pathology -- or at all. The rate of psychopathology in the two populations was almost identical, with the gay subjects being just a tad better adjusted.

This research made an enormous splash in psychology, but psychiatry wasn't ready to hear it in the 1950s.

Psychiatry was ready to hear it in 1973.

There's a lot more goodness here.

¹cooncat reminded me that I certainly heard anti-gay slurs and crass jokes. But the serious "authority" anti-gay voices were pushing the "It's against God" reasoning, not "Gays are by definition insane" reasoning. Even the anti-gay initiatives of the time resulted in publicizing research that shows that gays are normal.