GLR November-December 2022

ESSAY

The Vote That ‘Cured’ Millions B ARBARA G ITTINGS meager statistics up, down, and sideways in order to present these beliefs as scientific conclusions.

E DITOR ’ S N OTE : The following speech by the late Barbara Git tings first appeared in the G&LR ’s July-August 2007 issue. The speech was delivered on October 7, 2006, on the occasion of Gittings’ acceptance of the American Psychiatric Association’s Fryer Award for her contribution to GLBT mental health. W HEN the American movement for full civil rights and equality for homosexu als was launched 56 years ago, we had a huge range of basic problems to tackle. We were denounced as immoral and sinful. We were punished as crimi nals and lawbreakers. We were labeled “sick” and needing a “cure.” We were mostly invisible as gay, which made it hard for gay men and lesbians to develop good social lives and to create a movement to battle injustice and prejudice. It’s difficult to explain to anyone who didn’t live through that time, how much homosexuality was under the thumb of psychiatry. The sickness label was an albatross around the neck of our early gay rights groups: it infected all our work on other issues. Anything we said on our own behalf could be dismissed with “That’s just your sickness talking.” The sickness label was used to justify discrimination, especially in employment, and particularly by our own government. Some brutal methods for curing us in vogue at one time in cluded incarceration in mental hospitals, lobotomies, and aver sion therapy. The latter is when they show you pictures of the “wrong” kind of sexual partner and give you an electric shock, say, and then show you pictures of a person you should like and play nice music to persuade you to change your choice of sex ual partner. There were, of course, other efforts at curing ho mosexuality that were less physically brutal, including psychotherapy, but they all thrived on the notion that homosex uality was bad for the individual and for society and should be fixed. (You can see more on this in a 1993 documentary video titled One Nation Under God . While the film is mainly about the faith ministries that try to convert gays to heterosexuality, it’s chock full of anecdotes on psychiatric cures and footage of psychiatrists expounding on how sick homosexuals are.) Most psychiatrists know about one particular book that pop ularized the sickness view, namely Homosexuality: A Psycho analytic Study , published in 1962 and claiming to be a scientific study comparing a group of gay men in psychoanalysis with a group of heterosexual men also in analysis. The authors, in cluding Dr. Irving Bieber, announced at the beginning their be lief that homosexuality was pathological, and they worked their Barbara Gittings (1932–2007) was a pioneer in the struggle for gay and lesbian rights starting in the late 1950’s, including her work to re verse the DSM ’s “homosexuality” listing.

What a shameful work! More shameful is the fact that it was uncritically accepted at the time. I’m not aware of a single re view or comment in the contemporary psychiatric literature that pointed out that the Bieber authors failed to follow scientific methods. This bothered me, so I talked to a psychologist, Dr. Fritz Fluckiger. He wrote a detailed critique of the Bieber study titled “Research through a Glass, Darkly” that was published in 1966 in The Ladder —the magazine of the national lesbian or ganization Daughters of Bilitis—which I was editing at the time. Unfortunately, Dr. Fluckiger wasn’t an MD analyst, and his review wasn’t published in a professional journal. But reaction was building to the sickness label’s bad effect on gay individuals’ self-image and on our fight for equality. One of the psychoanalysts who participated in the Bieber study gave a public lecture in December 1964 plainly titled “Homosexual

John E. Fryer

The G & LR

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