05/02/2022
"In 1972, Dr. John Fryer risked his career to tell his colleagues that gay people were not mentally ill...
The 10-minute speech, delivered 50 years ago Monday, was a tipping point in the history of gay rights. The following year, the A.P.A. announced that it would reverse its nearly century-old position, declaring that homos*xuality was not a mental disorder.
It is rare for psychiatrists to transform the culture that surrounds them, but that is what happened in 1973.
By removing the diagnosis from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or D.S.M., psychiatry removed the legal basis for a wide range of discriminatory practices: for denying gay people the right to employment, citizenship, housing and the custody of children; for excluding them from the clergy and the military and the institution of marriage. The long process of rolling back those practices could begin.
When referred to psychiatrists, gay people would no longer be sent to be “cured” — injected with hormones, subjected to aversion therapy or pored over by analysts — but instead told that, from the point of view of science, there was nothing intrinsically wrong with them."
In 1972, Dr. John Fryer risked his career to tell his colleagues that gay people were not mentally ill. His act sent ripples through the legal, medical and justice systems.
