How Stonewall cured gay people — of psychiatrists

Just 50 years ago, June 1969 — the month of Stonewall — many people were distracted by what seemed, then, a much bigger cultural uproar.

"Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)" by Dr. David Reuben had been published that month — and quickly shot to the top of the non-fiction bestseller list.

The sexual revolution had reached the suburbs: A certified psychiatrist — an expert! — was now saying that sex was good, healthy, and should be practiced without fear or shame.

Except for homosexuality.

There, Reuben concurred with most other mental health professionals of the time. Homosexuality was immature. It was pathological. But luckily, it could be cured. Otherwise, gay people could expect only a life of fear, loneliness and misery. "Tragically there is no possibility of satisfaction," he wrote. 

Jack Drescher, only 18 at the time, read those words with a chill. So did hundreds of thousands of other gay teenagers.

"Oh my god, it was very upsetting," Drescher recalls. "Because basically he said, it can't work, and that gay people only meet each other in public toilets. I was horrified. I wasn't yet ready to come out anyway, and that was the kind of thing one read that would make one not want to come out."

Today, Drescher is Jack Drescher, M.D., psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University, and Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association — the CEO and medical director of which is now an openly gay psychiatrist, Dr. Saul Levin. 

All of which speaks volumes about the changes since Stonewall — the uprising on June 28, 1969, in response to a police raid in a New York bar, that sparked the modern gay rights movement. 

One of the great — and lesser known — stories of that movement is the way it transformed therapists from enemies to allies in the struggle for equal rights. Stonewall, you might say, forced the mental health profession to analyze itself.

"The mental health community has evolved 180 degrees in its original view of people who identify as LGBTQ," said Christian Fuscarino, executive director of Garden State Equality, the LGBTQ rights organization based in Asbury Park.

"You've seen these organizations work hard to combat the difficult experiences that LGBTQ people face." Fuscarino said.

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Doctor's orders

It wasn't always so. Psychiatrists, from the early 1900s to the recent past, had been key enablers of homophobia: giving anti-gay bias the stamp of medical approval.

Lesbians and gay men were sick. Victims of arrested development. Obviously, they couldn't be allowed to serve in the military, work in government, get a visa to live in the U.S., or  — most unthinkable of all — practice psychology. “Blind people should be entitled to all the rights and privileges of sighted people, but you don’t want them to fly a plane,” Drescher quotes one psychiatrist as saying.

A gay teen of the 1950s or '60s, looking for expert guidance from a library book or drugstore paperback, was liable to find something like this:  "I have no bias against homosexuals; for me they are sick people requiring medical help." So wrote Dr. Edmund Bergler in his 1956 book, "Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life?" 

Taking their cue from Freud, but taking a harder line — Freud had written semi-sympathetically about the issue — psychiatrists like Bergler, Dr. Sandor Rado, Dr. Irving Bieber and Dr. Charles Socarides set the template. Gay men had been smothered by their moms. Lesbians were suffering from "penis envy." Both could be cured with "aversion therapy," shock treatment, and — if necessary — lobotomy or confinement in a mental institution. Some were.

All of this was codified in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the so-called "Bible" of the mental health profession, first issued by the American Psychiatric Association in 1952, which listed homosexuality as a "sociopathic personality disturbance." 

And that, at the time, was the enlightened view.

"To treat it as an illness was considered by many decent people to be an improvement," said Dr. Lawrence Hartmann, the first openly gay president of the American Psychiatric Association (1991-1992). "It was a progression over several centuries: a sin, a crime, and then an illness."

Even back then, there were outliers, contrary voices.

The 1948 Kinsey Report indicated that homosexual experiences were fairly commonplace. A 1957 study of gay men by Evelyn Hooker, using heterosexuals as controls, challenged doctors to detect who was and wasn't mentally ill — they could find no difference. Both studies were based on field research, not theories. But they were outside mainstream psychiatric literature, and they were mostly dismissed. "Doctors don't read outside their specialty," Drescher said.

Then Stonewall happened. And one of the first things the newly-organized gay liberation movement set its sights on was the psychiatric profession.

Change in the weather 

"Stonewall was a catalyst, and really lit a spark," said Bennett Singer, co-director of "Cured," an upcoming documentary on this chapter of the gay rights movement, which will be seen on public television next year.

Protesters organized what they called "zaps," invading conventions and professional meetings of psychologists and demanding to be heard. "They would storm the stage," Bennett said. "It was kind of political theater. They were saying, 'If you talk about us, we want to be part of the conversation.' "

Remarkably, they sometimes were. At a 1970 Los Angeles meeting of behavioral psychologists (they were discussing aversion therapy), protesters took over the podium and said, "We've been listening to you for years. Now it's time to listen to us."  

The meeting broke up into groups, the psychologists meeting with the protesters. "They talked about their lives and their mental health, and their claim that they were well-adjusted Americans who didn't need to be cured," Bennett said.

Many therapists, it emerged from these confrontations, had never seen a gay man or woman who wasn't a patient — and therefore, by definition, miserable.

"The psychiatric theory of homosexuality was based on stories of people who came to them as patients, and were unhappy about themselves," Drescher said. "Also on the study of prison populations. So that's where the theory evolved."

A turning point occurred in 1972, when a Philadelphia psychiatrist, "Dr. Anonymous," appeared before a Dallas psychiatric convention wearing a mask and speaking into a voice-altering mic, and told of his struggles to keep his homosexuality hidden — at a time when it could cost him his career. "By all accounts, this was one of the key moments that caused many members of the APA to rethink their position," said Patrick Sammon, co-director of "Cured."

In December 1973, in a contentious referendum, the APA voted to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (the result was challenged, but ultimately upheld). It was a proud moment for Hartmann, whose paper, written earlier for the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society, ultimately provided the language for the proposal. 

"The APA threw out gayness as a diagnosis largely using my words," he said.

Some protested. Some still do. Medical judgment, they say, should not be subject to social pressure — as this one undoubtedly was.

But Sammon would turn that argument on its head. It's the DSM's original, pathological view of gay people that was based on cultural bias, not sound research, he says. "It was based on studying homosexuals who were the patients of psychiatrists," he said. "It's junk science."

Allies

By now, the dust has mostly settled. The consensus, among the majority of psychologists, is that homosexuality is a "normal sexual variant."  "Conversion therapy," these days, has the taint of quackery, and is illegal — at least for minors — in many states, including New Jersey.

Same-sex marriage is national law — something that would have astonished Dr. Reuben, who insisted in 1969 that gay people are incapable of any lasting ties. 

"Mercifully for both of them, the life expectancy of their relationship together is brief," he wrote. 

As important, a new generation of mental health professionals has made itself allies of the LGBTQ community. On June 21, The American Psychoanalytic Association — not to to be confused with APA, the American Psychiatric Association — issued a formal apology for treating homosexuality as a mental illness, which it did until 1991.

"The medical field has come a long way, to make sure they're sensitive to the population," said Elaine Helms, executive director of the Essex County LGBT RAIN Foundation in East Orange. Both a homeless shelter and an LGBT safe zone, it has forged important relationships with therapists at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, St. Barnabas Medical Center, and other hospitals.

Recently,  a young trans woman at the shelter was having what Helms called "an episode." The therapist who responded, Helms noted, was respectful and sensitive, making sure to ask what pronoun she preferred, and generally making her client comfortable.

"It made me feel good," Helms said.

Anti-LGBTQ sentiment is still around, of course. But not the science that once shored it up.

Those who have objections to gay people can chalk it up to faith, or personal bias — but not scientific evidence. Whether God punishes those guilty of same-sex attraction, or whether the Almighty reserves the hottest spot in hell for those who persecute others because of race, creed or sexual orientation is neither provable nor disprovable in a lab.

"You can say you don't like homosexuals," Drescher said. "You can say homosexuals are going to hell. But you can't call it a mental disorder. By removing homosexuality from the DSM, they denied people the ability to use medical terminology to maintain their prejudices."

Email: beckerman@northjersey.com; Twitter: @jimbeckerman1.