50th Anniversary: APA removal of homosexuality as a mental disorder

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the American Psychiatric Association’s removal of homosexuality from its Diagnostic Manual in 1973. The decision, and the reasoning behind it, made for was a culture-changing event. It led to an important shift in mental health practices as clinicians stopped asking questions like “What causes homosexuality?” and “How can we change it?” nd focused instead on the health and mental-health needs of LGBTQ patient populations. January 2023 saw the passing of Charles Silverstein, Ph.D., an important figure who participated in persuading APA to bring about this diagnostic change.

FEATURE DOCUMENTARY and Q&A

Five years in the making, CURED illuminates a pivotal yet largely unknown chapter in the struggle for LGBTQ equality: the campaign that led the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to remove homosexuality from its manual of mental illnesses. Before this momentous 1973 decision, the medical establishment viewed every gay and lesbian person as diseased and in need of a cure. Business and government used the mental-illness classification to justify discrimination and bigotry. As long as lesbians and gay men were “sick,” progress toward equality was nearly impossible.

Incorporating a trove of newly unearthed archival material — much of it unseen for decades — CURED takes audiences inside this riveting narrative to chronicle the strategy and tactics that led to a crucial turning point in the movement for LGBTQ rights.

​Indeed, following the Stonewall rebellion of 1969, the battle that culminated in the APA’s decision marked the first major step on the path to first-class citizenship for LGBTQ Americans. CURED sheds new light on this victory — which was far from inevitable — while situating the APA story within the larger context of the modern movement for LGBTQ equality.

Join us in the theater for a special screening of CURED, followed by Q&A with the Director/Producers, Bennett Singer & Patrick Sammon.

Cured Website

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In 1973...
Homosexual behavior was criminalized in most U.S. states.

Openly gay men and women were banned from serving in the U.S. military. If a gay person in the military came out or was outed by someone else, they could be court-martialed and discharged.

Being gay was grounds for being fired from a U.S. government job. This is what happened to Frank Kameny, who, in 1957, lost his job as an astronomer with the U.S. government after it was discovered that he had once pleaded guilty to a legal charge of homosexual activity. Kameny, both a scientist and an activist, would go on to become a leader in persuading APA to make diagnostic changes.

An openly gay physician, psychiatrist, or other mental-health professional could lose their state license to practice.

Most Americans were unlikely to approve of gay marriage, otherwise known as marriage equality did not even appear in major polls and surveys until the 1980s.

​How Diagnostic Change Happened
Psychiatric diagnosing of homosexuality as a mental disorder began in the 19th century, most prominently in the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who thought it was due to “degeneration” of the nervous system—degeneracy being a now-disproven medical theory of that era.

Sigmund Freud directly disagreed with Krafft-Ebing’s concept of homosexuality as an illness and instead saw it as a “developmental arrest,” a kind of psychological immaturity. However, by the middle of the 20th century, the belief that homosexuality was a mental disorder was the prevailing view among psychiatrists and most of Freud’s psychoanalytic followers.

​Thus, in 1952, when the APA published the first edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-I), it classified “homosexuality” as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” In the DSM-II, published in 1968, homosexuality was classified as a “sexual deviation.”

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