By Caitlin Cruz
In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the list of diagnosable mental illnesses, a monumental victory for early queer activists. Despite this successful effort, queer people still experience harmful reparative therapy today, thought by many to have been left behind in the mid-20th century.
* * *
“In the 1950s and 60s, we had the church deciding homosexuality was sinful, governments deciding that it was criminal, and then we had psychiatry state that we were sick,” Dr. Lawrence Hartmann says in the film Cured. “Both of my parents were psychoanalysts, so I read the psychiatric literature in my teens and twenties. It said gay people are universally nasty, pathetic, psychotic, manipulative, superficial, unable to form real relationships. As a young gay person, that was devastating.” Dr. Hartmann is a psychiatrist and important gay rights activist who helped lead reform within the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
In the early 1970s, queer activists began to more vocally protest the inclusion of “homosexuality” in the APA’s 1952 and 1968 editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which declared gay and transgender people as unfit and mentally ill. As LGBTQ+ people across the country were losing jobs, kids, medical services and basic dignity, these activists wanted the diagnosis removed—to move psychiatry into the 20th century.
Their ultimately successful work is detailed in Cured, which premieres on PBS on October 11, National Coming Out Day. But nearly 50 years later, the discredited practice of “conversion therapy” is still being used against queer people, particularly trans youth.
“They had no idea what to do with me”
Chris Tyler grew up in Nevada and Utah, in a religious home where deviation from the norm wasn’t tolerated in their Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints congregation. His upbringing was a “hyper-conservative religious environment,” and the church was “this water that I swam in.”
He understood he was gay by the time he was eight years old, but he internalized the church’s overt message that homosexuality was “a really bad thing.” When he was 19, he confessed to a church bishop that he was gay, after refusing to participate in the sect’s traditional two-year mission trip. Tyler was sent to his church’s social services to see counselors “who were pretty clueless,” he said. “They just had no idea what to do with me. It was the oddest thing.”
“Reparative Therapy”
With his first attempt at “reparative therapy” behind him, Tyler decided to move to Seattle for art school. “[I] ended up having a sexual experience with a guy that I met. Really nice guy, but I freaked out because all of my religious programming, anti-sex, anti-everything,” Tyler explained. “It was like an emotional landmine in my mind.”
His parents found out and freaked out. “They sent me a letter. They say, ‘You’ve got to come home right away. Your father has access to this program that we can send you to that can help you,’” Tyler said. “So I left school and I moved back to Utah. I’ve still got the letter to this day.”
Tyler entered another “reparative therapy” program in Salt Lake City called Evergreen. The 52-year-old compared it to Alcoholics Anonymous, men sitting in suits, sitting in a circle together—or men playing sports, trying to pound heterosexuality into their system through physical exertion.
“The core of the message was that homosexuality was simply a psychological malfunction of improper emotional development as a child and teenager,” Tyler said. “It took me a long time to understand why I was so affected by it. I understand now, it’s because it was all shame, right? It was just horrible, horrible shame.”
Facebook allowed ads for ‘gay conversion therapy’ to target LGBTQ users: https://t.co/jEcgpMFGAG pic.twitter.com/zOh4b4d6jX
— Big Think (@bigthink) August 30, 2018
Shame is what anchors so many of these programs. Despite the removal of queerness as a listed, diagnosable mental disorder in the DSM and the legalization of gay sex in 2003, so-called “reparative therapy” programs still exist in religious and secular spaces across the nation and world.
A report from the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation published in 2017 stated that there is “no credible evidence” that any type of “conversion therapy can change a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.”
An early skeptic of gay conversion therapy, the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud wrote this letter in 1935 (seen below) to a woman concerned about her son’s orientation. It starts off:
“I gather from your letter that your son is a homosexual. … it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development… By asking me if I can help [your son], you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. “
The Damage Done
LGBTQ+ children sent to “reparative therapy” are 8.4 times more likely to attempt suicide and 5.9 times more likely to say they’re depressed, according to the medical journal Pediatrics and a San Francisco State University study.
The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law estimated as of June 2019 that 698,000 LGBTQ+ adults in America had been subjected to “conversion therapy” with roughly 350,000 experiencing it as children. Further, the Institute’s research estimates that 16,000 LGBT teens ages 13-17 will be subjected to so-called conversion therapies by a licensed health care provider before they’re 18 while 57,000 LGBTQ+ teens ages 13-17 will be subjected to “reparative therapy” by a religious leader before they turn 18. The basis for these present-day programs stems from the belief that gayness is a disorder to be cured, as was defined by 81 words in the DSM prior to 1973.
Activists attended the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meetings and disrupted them, making it known in speeches how much they disagreed with these doctors. But disruptions, while winning supporters, weren’t exactly getting the response they wanted.
In 1972, at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in Dallas, the activists tried another tactic. At a packed panel, a man sat at the front table wearing a wig and a President Richard Nixon mask. The anonymous man began his speech: “I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist.” (The masked man was Dr. John Fryer, who would die in 2003 after a career working as a psychiatrist in Philadelphia.) The speech was a turning point in the activists’ fight to be considered sane.
The next year, the APA removed “homosexuality” from its list of diagnosable disorders, giving thousands of gay people an instant cure.
“It altered the course of my life”
Tyler, the 52-year-old man who experienced “reparative therapy” through his church in Utah, said it took him between 15 to 20 years to “get to the point where I felt like I had re-educated myself” about self-acceptance and happiness.
“If I could go back in my life and change one thing, it would be to go back and get as far away from that as I could have. It was devastating for me. It altered the course of my life,” he said. He’s now a professional 3-D graphic designer.
The discredited practice of conversion therapy for LGBTQ children is now banned in Utah, making it the 19th state and one of the most conservative to prohibit it. https://t.co/Njj9EJtR1f
— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) January 22, 2020
In January 2020, the state of Utah enacted statewide rules banning “conversion therapy” for minors. “Utah’s emergence as the most conservative state to address this issue shows how rapidly attitudes toward LGBTQ+ youth are changing in every part of this country,” National Center for Lesbian Rights Legal Director Shannon Minter said. “No matter what one’s political or religious affiliation might be, more and more people are recognizing that public officials have a responsibility to protect vulnerable youth from this life-threatening harm.”
Utah’s ban—and that of 18 other states and Washington, D.C.—became possible because a group of queer activists didn’t believe the doctors who insisted that they were ill.
Caitlin Cruz is a reporter and writer interested in abortion, politics, and power. Her reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Texas Monthly, Elle, and New York Magazine’s The Cut, among others. She lives in Houston with her girlfriend and two dogs.
Related Films
