HUFFINGTON
07.14.13
STRAIGHT TALK
tempts to change it. In a 1920
case study, he warned that “to
undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual does not offer much
more prospect of success than
the reverse, except that for good
practical reasons the latter is
never attempted.”
Still, when the practice of psychiatry spread from Vienna to
New York after World War II, the
American mental health community classified homosexuality as a
sociopathic personality disorder.
In a society where gays faced routine discrimination and could be
institutionalized or jailed for sodomy, many psychiatrists viewed
sexual conversion therapy as a
humane alternative.
Unsurprisingly, the first wave
of gay rights activists in the 60s
and 70s didn’t see the profession
in such a benign light. In 1970, the
same year as New York City’s first
gay pride parade, a group of gay
radicals stormed into a meeting of
the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco and derailed
it. They saw the profession’s stigmatization of homosexuality as
one of the main barriers preventing gays from enjoying the same
civil rights as everyone else.
Under pressure from these activists, a bitter feud erupted within
the psychiatric community over
whether gay people were sick. To
those who scorned the APA’s decision to remove homosexuality from
the list of mental disorders in 1973,
it seemed as though the group had
capitulated to the pressures of
the nascent gay rights movement,
privileging the politics of the moment over the unchanging laws of
science. This view persisted for
decades, even as it became abundantly clear to many people in the
profession that the supposed science behind the APA’s former classification was dubious, if not completely baseless.
One of the most outspoken critics of the APA’s shift was Charles
Socarides, a psychiatrist widely
considered to be the modern father of sexual conversion therapy.
In the ‘90s, when the APA and
other mainstream groups began
to issue formal statements repudiating the profession’s history of
discrimination against gay doctors, Socarides and a younger colleague, Joseph Nicolosi, formed
the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, or NARTH, one of the movement’s intellectual pillars.
The group’s formation coincided with the rise of the evangelical
movement and the religious right,