On a bright Saturday morning on the first day of May 1971, fifty thousand protestors calling themselves the May Day Tribe converged on Washington, DC. The government would not shut down the war in Vietnam, so they had come to shut down the government by using their bodies, tree limbs, rubbish bins, nails, tires—any barricades they could devise—to foul up traffic and prevent all federal offices from functioning. Of course, government workers would not be going to their jobs on Saturday or Sunday, so the May Day Tribe spread out over the meadows of West Potomac Park, in view of the Washington Monument, set up tents, and partied. Their scheduled rock concert went on all through the night. Early Sunday morning, the US Parks Department canceled their permit to congregate. Because the May Day Tribe did not clear out immediately, the park police donned riot gear, invaded the encampment, and succeeded in dispersing them with billy clubs and tear gas and pepper spray; but the May Day Tribe found refuge on DC college campuses and in sympathetic churches.
At the start of the workweek, they mobilized to shut the city down. The Washington Metropolitan Police Department again descended on them in riot-control phalanxes. For police backup, President Nixon summoned the marines, the army, and the National Guard, which came armed with bayonets. Over twelve thousand people were hauled off to DC jails in the largest mass arrest in American history. The timing of the May Day protest was serendipitous for out-of-town Gay Liberation Front members. They had made the trip to DC to do double duty.
Their second shift was on the evening of May 3, the first day of the annual American Psychiatric Association convention. Euphoric about their May Day exploits, twenty GLF members, male and female, donned “Gay Is Good” or “Gay Revolution” T-shirts; a dozen more GLF males dressed in drag—fabulous wigs; high, high heels; glittering lamé dresses; outrageously bright lipstick and eye shadow; and then they all piled into VW vans or cars and headed up Connecticut Avenue to the Omni Shoreham Hotel in northwest Washington.1 There, in the Regency Ballroom, two thousand psychiatrists had gathered for a Convocation of Fellows, at which several psychiatrists were to be honored for their lifetime achievements, and US Attorney General Ramsey Clark would deliver a keynote address.
Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings, and Jack Baker had already grabbed seats in the front row. They’d been given guest passes because they were to be speakers on a panel, “Lifestyles of Non-Patient Homosexuals,”2 which had been scheduled as a concession to protestors at the APA conference in San Francisco the year before: the San Francisco Gay Liberation Front, outfitted with radical gay uniforms of jeans and T-shirts, or with drag makeup and women’s feathered hats, had stormed into a room crowded with staid psychiatrists.3 Dr. Irving Bieber was speaking. Bieber, the author of the 1962 book, Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals, had been the zappers’ target because he was a chief propagator of the idea that male homosexuality was a mental disease caused by “close-binding” mothers, and it needed curing by the shrinks. Most APA members agreed with him. A poll of psychiatrists taken that same year showed that 90 percent of them believed that homosexuality was pathological.4
“Sadist!” the zappers called to Bieber. “Motherfucker!” “If your book talked about black people the way it talks about homosexuals, you’d be drawn and quartered and you’d deserve it,” one yelled. Many of the psychiatrists in the audience fled the room in horror, and the session was shut down. From there the zappers went to an auditorium packed with five hundred psychiatrists listening to a presentation by a young Australian doctor on the use of aversion therapy to cure homosexuality. One of the DC GAA insurgents seized the mic to scream, “Stop talking about us and start talking to us!”5 The others were not as reasoned in their exhortations. “Vicious!” “Torturer!” “Where did you take your residency, Auschwitz?” they yelled.6 The psychiatrists yelled back, “Paranoid fool!” “Stupid bitch!”7
To ward off a repeat of the 1970 debacle, the APA had agreed to let gays and lesbians have their own panel in 1971, scheduled for nine o’clock on the last evening of the convention. But even if it had been scheduled for prime time, it wouldn’t have made a difference to the activists, because they understood by now that as attention getters, outrageous tactics were indispensable.
As the attorney general walked to the podium on the ballroom stage and began his keynote speech, beads of sweat gathered on the foreheads of Kameny, Gittings, and Baker. It was not because of DC’s humid weather—they were waiting tensely for what they knew would happen any minute now.8 What ensued had been set up weeks earlier by Mattachine Society Washington in cooperation with Washington’s Gay Activists Alliance and Gay Liberation Front. The three groups all agreed that the American Psychiatric Association must be forced to excise from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders section 302.0, which defined homosexuality as pathological.
The night before the convocation, members of the DC Gay Activists Alliance had paid the Shoreham Hotel a furtive visit. They knew that police scrutiny would be heavy around the neighborhood the next day because of the May Day protest. But even if the GLF and GAA people could make it as far as the Shoreham lobby, they’d be spotted by security and kicked out because they didn’t look like the conventionally garbed clientele of a four-diamond luxury hotel. So Gay Activists Alliance moles located a path that went directly from the Rock Creek Park woods to the fire doors that led into the Regency Ballroom where the convocation would take place. They sneaked inside and inserted wedges so that the fire doors wouldn’t close. Then they advised their fellow infiltrators how to dodge security via the park path and the ballroom fire doors.9
Ramsey Clark had gotten midway into his speech. He never finished. The fire doors burst open and the zappers flooded in, chanting “Psychiatry is the enemy!” Mayhem ensued, with psychiatrists physically attacking the invaders, shouting, “Get out!” “You sick faggots!” “We don’t want you people in here!” Gays linked arms and plopped on the ballroom floor, resisting attempts to eject them. As more gays tried to force their way in, two psychiatrists, screaming execrations, locked the fire doors, but not before they’d managed to push back out a few of those who’d already squeezed in.
Among those pushed out was Cliff Witt, the Washington GAA leader who’d organized the zap. The plan had been that Witt would seize the microphone and give a speech about the horrors perpetrated on homosexuals by the psychiatric profession. But with Witt locked out, the invaders were at a loss about what to do next. Frank Kameny didn’t hesitate. He jumped up and seized the microphone from the moderator, who was trying to restore order. “We are here to denounce your authority to call us sick or mentally disordered,” Kameny shouted amidst psychiatric boos and jeers. Someone pulled the microphone’s plug, but Kameny only shouted louder. “For us, as homosexuals, your profession is the enemy incarnate. We demand that psychiatrists treat us as human beings, not as patients to be cured! You may take this as a declaration of war against you!”10 Pandemonium reigned. The convocation was over.
But some doctors in that large ballroom had listened, and after Kameny’s tirade, a few of them came to him and Barbara Gittings with a promise: they would get the program managers to give Kameny and Gittings permission to do an exhibition at the 1972 APA conference. “We’ll have our own gay booth at next year’s conference,” he reported with glee to New York gay leader Morty Manford.11 “Gay, Proud, and Healthy: The Homosexual Community Speaks,” it would be called.
The 1971 zap on the American Psychiatric Association was years in the making. It was helped along by the ethos of the sixties, which made authority less sacrosanct and credentials and “experts” less prestigious. Psychiatric wisdom had come under particularly devastating attack. Most notably, Thomas Szasz, in a popular 1961 book, The Myth of Mental Illness, presented the “mental health” profession as virtual quackery. Psychiatrists convert moral judgments into medical terms and then give them a misleading scientific aura, Szasz declared. They deem a person “mentally ill” just because he or she doesn’t conform to social norms.12 Szasz’s insights and critiques would prove invaluable to the homophile movement.
Frank Kameny’s first recruit, in 1961, to Mattachine Society Washington, twenty-three-year-old Jack Nichols, had long brooded on the memory that when he was an adolescent, an aunt had found out he liked boys, and she called him “sick.” Her insult threw him into depression and made him suicidal. Nichols came to believe that psychiatrists and other credentialed “experts,” the original sources of Aunt Betty’s notions about homosexuality, ought to be among gay people’s chief targets. In 1963, bolstered by Szasz’s work, he wrote the Mattachine board urging battle with the life-warping lie that homosexuals “are not well, that they are less than completely whole,” which was promulgated by so-called mental health professionals.13 Frank Kameny, a scientist who’d always believed that psychiatry’s assessment of homosexuality was nothing more than “shabby, shoddy, sloppy, sleazy pseudo-science,”14 wholeheartedly agreed. Kameny drafted a challenge to psychiatric lore that his DC Mattachine board adopted as a major tenet: “Homosexuality is not a sickness, disturbance, or pathology in any sense. It is merely a preference, on a par with, and not different in kind, from heterosexuality.”15
Randy Wicker, who’d been pushing and pulling New York Mattachine to more militancy since the 1950s, also went after the psychiatric profession about that time. In 1964 the Cooper Union Forum series had announced its December lecture: “Homosexuality, a Disease,” by Dr. Paul Dince, associate in psychiatry at the New York Medical College. Wicker showed up at Cooper Union with two other gay men and a lesbian. They carried a sign that said, “We Request 10 Minutes Rebuttal Time,” and they stationed themselves at the entrance to the lecture hall.
The organizers of the Cooper Union Forums had conceived of the forums as edgy and controversial, and when the head was informed that there were protestors in the hall and they wanted to rebut, he came out to meet them. “Okay, one of you can speak for ten minutes during the Q and A,” he told the little group.
The instant Dr. Dince’s lecture was done, Randy Wicker jumped to his feet and ran to the microphone. “How can you dare pretend that genuine scientific research supports this lie that homosexuality is a disease? What’s the evidence?” he demanded angrily. Dince looked dumbfounded. He’d never before heard anyone question the disease theory of homosexuality. “What kind of ‘scientific research’ is it that looks only at homosexual patients—people who are in therapy because they’re so miserable—and then makes statements about the whole population of homosexuals?” Wicker went on with his tongue lashing. “You ‘scientists’ begin with the premise that homosexuality is a disease, and then you make the conclusion that it’s a disease—that’s bullshit logic!” he shouted.16
Wicker’s was the first public challenge to psychiatric wisdom about homosexuality. Other, more polite challenges followed. In 1968—when the National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) was barely a gleam in the eye of Dr. Charles Socarides, its founder—Socarides advocated to an American Medical Association conference that there be established a government-supported “national center for sexual rehabilitation” for homosexuals. The next day, the San Francisco Daughters of Bilitis, together with the homophile group Society for Individual Rights (SIR), and members of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual wearing their clerical collars stood outside the Veterans Memorial Auditorium, where a session of the conference was being held, and they passed out two thousand leaflets to the doctors as they walked through the doors. “We call upon the American Medical Association to undertake to educate the medical profession,” the leaflets implored politely, “and to help educate the general public on the subject of homosexuality.”17 Needless to say, the AMA did not change its policies as a result of the leaflets.
Frank Kameny was not so polite. “Psychiatric balderdash” became one of his major talking points. Psychiatrists have been posing as authorities, but they’re ignorant about homosexuality, he complained in the Mattachine Society Washington newsletter of spring 1964. They decreed homosexuality to be pathological not because they had scientific evidence that it was, but because they needed to cover up their discomfort with nonconformity.18 Kameny was quick to seize the political implications of overthrowing that decree. “The entire homophile movement is going to stand or fall upon the question of whether or not homosexuality is a sickness, and upon taking a firm stand on it,” he told his New York Freedom House audience the night of the summer 1964 Harlem riot, when he urged homophiles to more militant combat.19 “THE most important single issue facing our movement today,” he wrote the following year, is “the proclamation of homosexual sanity.”20
Barbara Gittings, who’d flunked out of college because she’d spent most of her freshman year in the library reading what the shrinks had to say about homosexuality, came to believe that the American Psychiatric Association ought to be the major audience for the proclamation: Didn’t that organization have the last word on who was crazy and who was sane? She’d go undercover, “be a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” as she quipped to Kameny, and infiltrate a 1968 APA meeting in Boston, to see what they were saying about homosexuals. Gittings was outraged by the ubiquitous but unexamined assumption of the APA members that homosexuality is something to be gotten rid of, and she was horrified by the aversion therapy movies she watched sitting in an audience of psychiatrists.21 The movement’s top priority needed to be the overturning of the APA’s classification of homosexuals as crazies. Unless homosexuals were acknowledged to be as mentally sound as the average heterosexual, she and Kameny would argue with irrefutable logic, they’d never be first-class citizens.
But exactly how could the message of homosexual sanity be disseminated to those who were responsible for creating the myth of homosexual madness? There was only one way to do it. Homosexuals had to get into the “rough-and-tumble,” Kameny kept reiterating. It was time “to move from endless talk to firm, vigorous action.”22
Theirs was not a popular position among homophile groups. “Florence Conrad,” a pseudonym for Daughters of Bilitis member Florence Jaffy, represented the reigning view in her debate with Kameny in the pages of The Ladder.23 Conrad, a junior college professor of economics and the research director of DOB, had been a procurer for professional “mental health” researchers who needed lesbian subjects and were happy to get them from the DOB membership. Conrad was outraged that in Kameny’s speeches and writing, he took it upon himself to denigrate the duly credentialed “experts” by proclaiming “without evidence” that homosexuals were just as healthy as heterosexuals.
“Where’s the evidence that we’re not?” Kameny wanted to know.
The wiry, short-haired Conrad, as combative as Kameny and super-serious in her professionalism at a time when few women were professionals anywhere, harangued him: “If we put forward these views on our own, no one will listen. It’s empty propaganda. We need to be vindicated by the professionals. You can’t sell the gay movement like toothpaste!”
“Yes, you can,” Kameny answered.24
Homosexuals weren’t only patients treated by psychiatrists—some homosexuals were psychiatrists, including chairs of some of the most prestigious psychiatric departments in American universities and the head of the Transactional Analysis Association.25 But most of the homosexual psychiatrists were not happy in 1970, when gays started staging their zaps on the APA. Psychiatrist John Fryer was taught as a student at Vanderbilt University Medical School that homosexuality was a mental disorder, classified as such in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders since its first edition in 1952; and though he was himself homosexual, he believed what he was taught. Fryer would eventually play a role in the APA’s de-pathologizing of homosexuality, but when gays started zapping the APA, he was embarrassed by their demands and “wished they’d just shut up.” “Nothing would ever change the way psychiatry viewed homosexuality,” he thought. “They were on a fool’s errand.”26
Since the 1960s, Fryer had belonged to an underground, unofficial group of gay psychiatrists who drolly dubbed themselves the GayPA. They suffered from the same internalized homophobia as did lay homosexuals of their generation, and they agreed with Fryer that the gay activists should just shut up. The thought to question the definition of homosexuality as pathological never even came up at GayPA get-togethers.27
But, cautious as they were, eventually they were not immune to the era’s changing spirit. In May 1970, coincidentally the same week of the first APA zap, the United States invaded Cambodia; and at Kent State University, Ohio National Guardsmen fired sixty-seven rounds of bullets to scare off students who were at a rally protesting the invasion. Four students were killed and nine were seriously wounded. A young psychiatrist, Lawrence Hartmann (who, two decades later, would become the American Psychiatric Association’s first openly gay president), was appalled that the APA had no comment to make on the disasters, nor on any social issue. Hartmann was closeted in 1970, and did not even dare join the GayPA; but he’d been involved since his student days at Harvard Medical School with social justice campaigns, such as organizing psychiatrists to volunteer to work in prisons and agitating to get female medical students in residency paid as much as male residents. Though barely in his thirties, Hartmann had name recognition in the APA because he was the son of two well-known Viennese psychoanalysts, and his father had even worked with the venerated father of the discipline, Sigmund Freud. Shortly after the Cambodian invasion and the Kent State massacre, Lawrence Hartmann helped start a group called the Committee for Concerned Psychiatrists, whose purpose was to push the APA to develop a social conscience.28
The eastern contingent of the committee met often in the kitchen of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Dr. John Spiegel, who would also eventually become a president of the American Psychiatric Association. Spiegel was married with children, and no one—except his wife, whom he’d told two weeks before their wedding—knew that he was homosexual.29
Most members of the Committee for Concerned Psychiatrists were straight, but they were all liberal young Turks and, like Hartmann, they all wanted to make the APA more sensitive to the changing world. They decided the only way to do it was to replace the old boys’ club—the silver-haired conservatives who’d always run the APA—with people who were in tune with social concerns. Their choice for APA president was Alfred Freedman, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at New York Medical College. Freedman, already well into his fifties, was far from being one of the young Turks, but he was well known for his work that applied psychiatry to social problems. In 1959 he established a treatment center in East Harlem for adult and adolescent drug addicts; he led a delegation of psychiatrists to the Soviet Union to urge change in the government’s practice of declaring political dissidents insane and then locking them up in mental hospitals; he campaigned against the use of psychotropic drugs to make psychotic death-row prisoners “mentally competent to be executed.” Freedman’s liberal activism, coupled with his solid reputation in the profession, made him exactly the candidate that the Committee for Concerned Psychiatrists had in mind when they dreamed that the old order might be overthrown. The committee nominated him in 1972 to run for president for the 1973–74 term. He was not a shoo-in. Half of the eighteen thousand members of the APA voted in that election. Freedman won by a margin of just three votes.
The Committee for Concerned Psychiatrists also managed to get some of its own on the all-powerful APA Board of Trustees and the Nomenclature Committee, which was responsible for deciding what goes into—and what comes out of—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The APA was gearing up for huge changes.
Nineteen seventy-two: Barbara Gittings received a generous grant from the Pennsylvania-based Falk Foundation, a charitable-giving group interested in promoting liberal social policy and mental health. The money paid the way for several gay activists to make the trip to the APA Convention in Dallas; it also paid for an architect friend of Gittings to make the Gay, Proud, and Healthy booth that would be displayed in the APA exhibit hall. The booth was constructed of Styrofoam so that Gittings could easily transport it from Philadelphia, but it was eye grabbing. “Gay, Proud, and Healthy: The Homosexual Community Speaks,” it announced (to the evident discomfort of those who hurried past but couldn’t avoid seeing the message anyway). Never in the history of the APA had there been anything remotely like it, with pictures of happy-looking homosexual couples plastered all over. Then there was a whole rack of literature—essays by gays and lesbians on their hurtful experiences with shrinks who tried to cure them; an article by Evelyn Hooker on her 1950s study that showed that psychiatrists could not distinguish between homosexual and heterosexual respondents in blind tests; a study by biologist Frank Beach that concluded that human homosexuality was a reflection of the bisexual character of our mammalian inheritance; an article that had just been published by Judd Marmor, a vice president of the APA, titled “Homosexuality—Mental Illness or Moral Dilemma?,” which strongly refuted the sickness theory.
The word LOVE printed in huge white letters on a red background, was the booth’s focal point. “The only place at the whole APA Convention where that word appears,” Gittings pointed out to any psychiatrist who stopped to look at the booth’s displays.30
There was no need to zap the 1972 convention. There was the Gay, Proud, and Healthy booth that was assigned to a prominent corner of the exhibit hall; and there was a panel titled “Psychiatry: Friend or Foe to Homosexuals?—A Dialogue,” in which Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings were invited to participate. They’d be joining heterosexual psychiatrists Judd Marmor and Robert Seidenberg, both of whom rejected the pathologizing theories of colleagues such as Irving Bieber and Charles Socarides. Seidenberg went even further than Marmor did: he’d just written an article in which he asserted baldly that “homosexual culture” is a valuable asset to civilization, and he predicted that in the future homosexuals would be considered “ecological cult heroes” in a world burdened by dangerous overpopulation.31
The panel was set at four participants—until Kay Tobin, Gittings’s partner, came up with a startling suggestion. “You’ve got two gays who are not psychiatrists and two psychiatrists who are not gay,” she said. “What you need now is a gay psychiatrist.”32 Gittings and Kameny understood good theater. They immediately contacted Dr. Kent Robinson, who was to be the panel’s moderator. “If we can find a gay psychiatrist, may we add him to the panel?” they asked. Robinson could hardly say no to such a unique prospect, and Gittings started searching for the fifth panelist.
By now she knew of the existence of the GayPA, and even knew personally several psychiatrists who were members. They liked her. She was close enough to them that she could joke about being their “fairy godmother.”33 But they refused even to think about participating on the panel. “The American Psychoanalytic Association and all its affiliates have policies that bar homosexuals from being analysts,” one gay psychiatrist friend informed Gittings. “If my colleagues in the APA knew I was gay, I’d never get their referrals—or their respect,” another said. “I could lose my license,” another told her. One suggested that she contact Dr. John Fryer.
Fryer had been thrown out of his residency at the University of Pennsylvania when his supervisor learned that he was homosexual, he’d lost another position for the same reason, and now he had only part-time employment at Temple University. He thought fellow psychiatrists needed to hear his story. But he didn’t want to invite more trouble into his professional life. “I’d like to do it, but I can’t do it as me,” he told Gittings.
“Okay, what if we disguise you?” she asked.34
When Frank Kameny heard of Gittings’s offer to disguise Fryer, he was irate. “A masked psychiatrist goes against everything we’ve been fighting for!” he shouted. He’d find a gay psychiatrist for the panel himself—someone who wouldn’t think he had to resort to disguise! But after weeks of trying, with the 1972 conference looming, Kameny had to concede there was no such animal as an uncloseted psychiatrist.35
Dr. John Fryer was six foot four, weighed about three hundred pounds, and had bulldog jowls. Disguise seemed impossible. But Fryer’s lover, a drama major in college, was tickled by the challenge. He dressed Fryer in a tuxedo that was three sizes too large and so made him look smaller, a rubber mask of Richard Nixon that went over his head and face and was crimped to look clown-like, and a frizzy fright wig. On the day of the panel, Gittings spirited Fryer into the packed auditorium through a back corridor, so no one would get too close a look at him. He was billed as Dr. H. Anonymous. Kameny had to concede he’d been wrong about not presenting a psychiatrist in disguise. The effect was sensational.36
“There are more than a hundred homosexual psychiatrists registered at this convention,” Dr. H. Anonymous informed his APA audience. That news alone was astounding to most of them; they’d thought of homosexuals as being always on the psychiatric couch, not behind it. “Cease attempting to figure out who I am and listen to what I have to say,” he admonished. Then he told his audience that homosexual psychiatrists were forced to endure a variety of what he called “nigger syndromes.” They were like black men with light skin who needed to pass. They didn’t dare to be seen with their real friends and family—other homosexuals—“lest our secret be known and our doom sealed.” And like those black men who were driven to be “superhuman,” homosexual psychiatrists, too, felt constrained to overachieve, because if their homosexuality should be found out, their capabilities would be doubted. He implored the homosexual psychiatrists in the audience to challenge their fellow psychiatrists and not stand back when they hear them denigrating “faggots and queers.” “Make your homosexual patients know they’re all right. Find ways to counter the attitudes toward homosexuality that your profession has inculcated in both heterosexuals and homosexuals.”37 He was given a standing ovation.
• • •
But though Dr. Fryer rocked his audience that day in 1972, homosexuals still remained crazies in the DSM, which confirmed militant gays in their conviction that it would take more zaps to get a real rise out of the APA. That October at the New York Hilton, New York Gay Activists Alliance members infiltrated the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy. A dozen activists registered for the conference as “students,” which permitted them access to the sessions. (Dozens more staged agitprop outside the hotel, farcically acting out the roles of “unhappy heterosexuals” and “shrinks”: “You must submit to electroshock convulsions and apomorphine-induced vomiting. This treatment is guaranteed to turn you off even to the most attractive members of the opposite sex. It will convert you into a happy, healthy homosexual!” the “shrinks” promised.)38
Inside the Hilton, GAA members descended on a lecture by Dr. James P. Quinn, a psychiatrist from Northern Ireland. He’d been scheduled to present the aversion therapy techniques he’d been using—electroshock and chemically induced vomiting—with which, he claimed, he’d succeeded in turning homosexual men off to members of their own sex. Quinn must have thought he was back in Belfast in the midst of an IRA attack: A few minutes into his talk, GAA members who were scattered around the room shoved their chairs back loudly and jumped up to announce that Quinn had talked long enough; they were taking over. Ronald Gold, then the media director of New York GAA, took on the role of main spokesman.39
“We’re interrupting you. We can’t let you go on doing what you’re doing,” he said from the front of the room. “But please don’t go away. We want to have a dialogue with you.” A woman psychologist in the audience came to Dr. Quinn’s defense: “These people who come to us for help—they don’t want to be homosexuals. We’re doing what they ask us to do!”
“If a woman came to you saying, ‘Help me be what society says women are supposed to be, shy and retiring,’ would you do it?” Gold challenged her. She would not, she confessed.40
About a quarter of the psychiatrists got up and left, but the rest stayed to hear GAA’s gripes, and some even agreed that the first choice of treatment ought not be therapy to change the homosexual but rather therapy to help him get rid of the anxieties caused by a hostile society.
Dr. Robert Spitzer and his assistant were among those who stayed, but Spitzer was annoyed. He’d come to the conference to hear about behavioral therapy, and the GAA had shut down Quinn’s session. “I know Ron Gold. I actually went to college with him,” Spitzer’s assistant whispered. “Wanna meet him and tell him what you think?”
In the hallway, as everyone was leaving, she introduced the two men to each other. Spitzer informed Gold that he resented what he saw as GAA’s “bullying techniques” to shut down Dr. Quinn. Gold gave him examples of how disastrous practices like Quinn’s had been for homosexuals; Spitzer listened. Their altercation changed to conversation. Eventually it came out that Spitzer was a member of the APA’s Committee on Nomenclature—the group responsible for determining what went into or out of the DSM.
“Gee, could my group talk to your group?” Spitzer later recalled Gold asking. “Gee, that’s an interesting idea,” Spitzer, who would always enjoy being something of a gadfly, thought. “Maybe we could even have a symposium on the subject.”41
A short while later, Frank Kameny and several others from DC tried another approach. They’d infiltrate a meeting of the APA assembly in Washington, DC. They’d found out that Dr. Robert Campbell, another member of the Committee on Nomenclature (and a closeted gay), would be at the assembly. They buttonholed him: “We really need your help.” He listened. For two hours, they overwhelmed him with data such as the Evelyn Hooker study, which he admitted he’d never seen.42 Then they asked him to get them invited to appear before the Nomenclature Committee. Campbell agreed—but Robert Spitzer had already beat him to it. He’d gone to Henry Brill, the elderly head of the Nomenclature Committee and director of a large New York state hospital, and told him that gays would like to address the committee. Brill knew, of course, about the disruptions of the last three years and the growing controversy over the pathologizing of homosexuality. “Okay, let’s meet with them and see what happens,” he told Spitzer jovially.43
A small group of activists was invited to the Nomenclature Committee’s meeting at Columbia University’s Psychiatric Institute on February 8, 1973. Before the meeting, they’d sent the Nomenclature Committee a report about research that challenged psychiatric shibboleths on homosexuality.44 Like Robert Campbell, most of the committee members seemed never to have heard of Evelyn Hooker’s study that showed no perceptible difference in the responses of homosexual and heterosexual men to psychiatric tests such as the Rorschach and the Thematic Apperception Test—nor of the details of the Kinsey studies that found that big numbers of the sample admitted to having “extensive or more than incidental” homosexual experiences. The members of the Nomenclature Committee listened respectfully to Jean O’Leary—the sharp, articulate former nun—tell them that psychiatry’s classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder kept homosexuals from being granted the civil rights due to any American. Ronald Gold gave them a list of the discriminations suffered by gays because society said they were mentally ill. “Being told you’re sick makes you sick,” he chided them.45
Charles Silverstein, a GAA member who was working on his PhD in Psychology because he wanted some credibility in his fight with the shrinks, entertained them to the point of hilarity. Silverstein compared the diagnosis of homosexuality as pathology to the silliness of diagnostic categories of the past: Syphilophobia, Pathological Mendacity, Vagabondage—even Masturbation. It all sounds funny now, Silverstein told them, but it hurt a lot of people. “We have paid the price for your past mistake. Don’t make it again,” he admonished them.46
“Okay, Bob,” Brill said good-humoredly to Spitzer when the gay and lesbian contingent left. “You got us into this mess. Now what do we do?”
“Let’s have a symposium,” Spitzer said.47
• • •
“A Symposium: Should Homosexuality Be in the APA Nomenclature?” was scheduled for the 1973 APA Convention in Honolulu. Irving Bieber and Charles Socarides, leading proponents of the illness theory, presented the “yes” side. Perhaps GayPA members felt that by 1973 they could be more vocal, or perhaps the APA in general had undergone a cataclysmic change in the last couple of years. Whatever the explanation, Bieber was greeted with loud boos when he declared, “If all discrimination against homosexuals ceased immediately, I do not think their anxieties, conflicts, loneliness, and frequent depressions would be short-circuited.”48
At one point, Bieber, rehashing his views on how homosexuals are created, said that on Israeli kibbutzim, where children did not live with their parents and hence were not messed up by close-binding mothers, everyone was heterosexual. “Well,” Ronald Gold spoke up, “I just got back from Israel, where I had a thing with a man who was raised on a kibbutz.”49 The audience abandoned themselves to laughter.
“If our judgment about the mental health of heterosexuals were based only on those whom we see in our clinical practices, we would have to conclude that all heterosexuals are also mentally ill,”50 Judd Marmor, vice president of the APA, answered Bieber and Socarides; he was applauded wildly. Ronald Gold concluded his presentation, which he called “Stop It, You’re Making Me Sick!” with the rousing demands that the APA take homosexuality out of the nomenclature, work for the repeal of sodomy laws and for civil rights protections for gays, and tell the world that gay is good. He got a standing ovation.51
Gold had been such a hit that members of the GayPA discreetly came up to him after the symposium and issued a quiet invitation to their annual party, which was still a very secret affair. Pumped by his success, yet frustrated that section 302.0 of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders remained intact, Gold settled on a daring ploy. He knew that Robert Spitzer had been given an assignment by the Nomenclature Committee to research and report back the “scientific findings” about homosexuality.52 What happened next with 302.0 would hinge on Spitzer—and though Spitzer had held the door to the Nomenclature Committee open so that gays could step in, his own position thus far had not gone beyond “Gee, that’s an interesting idea.” What’s more, he admitted to having been trained by psychoanalysts who “took it for granted that homosexuality was not only an illness, but it was a very severe illness.”53 Spitzer had never knowingly mingled with homosexuals, Gold knew, and he was acquainted with no homosexual colleagues. It was time to educate him.
Gold told Spitzer about the secret group and his invitation to their get-together; then he invited him to come along. Spitzer was curious. “But you can’t let on you’re not gay,” Gold warned him nervously. “Just don’t say anything. Just observe.” Spitzer agreed. The GayPA party was held in a campy Honolulu gay bar with grass-skirted waitresses; a multipage list of drinks that were colored red, blue, purple, green; and island-themed geegaws and bamboo furniture.54 But Spitzer saw little of that. He was too busy being flabbergasted at how many faces he recognized among GayPA members: prominent APA officers, heads of APA affiliates, heads of prestigious university psychiatry departments. He kept neither his promise not to stare nor his promise not to speak, and he gave himself away by asking GayPA members what Gold thought were “absolutely dim-witted questions” such as “How long have you known you were a homosexual?” As Spitzer went around talking to one man after another, it was obvious that he wasn’t a candidate for GayPA membership. The panicked head of the group pulled Gold aside and told him to get Spitzer out of there. Now. “Get rid of him!”
“No! He’s willing to help us,” Gold answered, but he went to tell Spitzer to cool it.
Just then a man in an army uniform walked in. He recognized Gold from the symposium earlier that day. Then he looked around and recognized psychiatrists he’d seen in the audience, and he threw himself on Gold and burst into tears. He told Gold that he was an army psychiatrist. This was the first time in his life he’d dared go to a gay bar, and it was Gold’s speech that had given him the courage to do it.
“Let’s go,” Spitzer said to Gold. He’d seen and heard enough.55
• • •
That night, Spitzer sat at his hotel room desk, Ronald Gold prompting at his elbow, and wrote an APA resolution removing homosexuality per se from the DSM. It was Frank Kameny who later helped Spitzer draft the justifying letter to the Nomenclature Committee: “The only way that homosexuality could be considered a psychiatric disorder would be the criterion of failure to function heterosexually, which is considered optimal in our society and by many members of our profession. However,” Kameny wrote in Spitzer’s voice, reiterating the theories he’d promulgated for years, “if the failure to function optimally in some important area of life as judged by either society or the profession is sufficient to indicate the presence of psychiatric disorder, then we will have to add to our nomenclature the following conditions.” The list included celibacy (failure to function optimally sexually), religious fanaticism (dogmatic and rigid adherence to religious doctrine), racism (irrational hatred of other groups), vegetarianism (unnatural avoidance of carnivorous behavior), and male chauvinism (irrational belief in the inferiority of women).56
• • •
Spitzer’s resolution stated specifically that “homosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, stability, reliability, or general social or vocational capabilities.” But his resolution did not go far enough to satisfy gay activists because section 302.0 was not entirely deleted from the DSM: “Homosexuality” was replaced by “Sexual Orientation Disturbance,” a category for those who were “ego-dystonic”—that is, “disturbed by, or in conflict with, or wishing to change their sexual orientation.” It was a necessary strategy, Spitzer believed. There was no way the APA would have approved of getting rid of all references to homosexuality.57 Psychiatrists could still “cure” those who wanted “curing”; there was still money to be made by their “services.”
The Nomenclature Committee approved the change, and in November 1973 the proposal passed to the APA Reference Committee and the assembly and was endorsed by both bodies. In December, the eighteen-member board of trustees voted: two were absent, three abstained, and thirteen voted aye. The resolution had passed overwhelmingly.58
• • •
But Spitzer’s sop to those of his colleagues who still wished to cure homosexuals did not mollify them. Debate and confusion raged. The press demanded to know from Dr. Alfred Freedman, new president of the APA, “If it’s not a mental illness now, why was it on the list of mental illnesses for all those years?” Dr. Freedman, elected through the efforts of APA progressives, was at a loss. Answering such questions required a complicated disquisition about the Zeitgeist’s influence on notions of mental illness. “Are you saying that homosexuality is normal?” the reporters continued. “No,” Freedman said, “only that it’s not abnormal.”59
The New York Times fanned the flames of the controversy. Just days after the board of trustees’s vote to declassify, two of the paper’s editors arranged for Spitzer and Irving Bieber to spar with each other while reporters took notes. Young Dr. Spitzer argued, “We have to keep step with the times. Psychiatry, which was once regarded as in the vanguard of the movement to liberate people from their troubles is now viewed by many, and with some jutsification, as being an agent of social control. So it makes absolute sense to me not to list as having a mental disorder those individuals who are satisfied and not in conflict with their sexual orientation.”
The notion that psychiatrists ought to “keep step with the times” incensed and dismayed the sixty-four-year-old Bieber. That the official line of the APA would be that the “most injured” homosexual, one who doesn’t want to change, is fine; and the “least injured,” one who has “potential left for restoring his heterosexuality,” suffers a disorder “seems wild,” Bieber asserted.
“It seems wild to you because you have as your value system that everybody should be heterosexual,” Spitzer retorted. A Times photographer caught the two men as they punctuated sentences by jabbing angry fingers in the air. “You think it’s a value system?” Bieber cried. “[The homosexual’s] heterosexuality has been irreparably injured! Injury is not a value. A broken leg is not a value.”60
Spitzer’s arguments in their New York Times debate only exacerbated Bieber’s indignation, which was shared by more than a few irate APA members. The board had foolishly bent under political pressure from well-organized, militant homosexuals, they complained. Charles Socarides, still seething from the 1973 Honolulu “symposium” at which he’d been booed for making statements about homosexual illness that, until recently, had been widely agreed-upon truths, jumped in to mobilize those who remained on his side. At the next APA convention, he circulated a petition he knew like-minded colleagues would be happy to sign. It demanded that before the APA deleted homosexuality per se from the DSM, the entire body of the organization be allowed to vote on it. Under APA regulations, only two hundred signatures were required to force a referendum on any decision made by the board of trustees. The signatures were easily obtained.
The referendum was held in 1974 by mail. Of the 17,905 APA members eligible to cast a vote, only 10,555 bothered to send in a ballot. Fifty-eight percent of them voted to uphold the board of trustees’s decision. The seventh printing of the DSM-II, which would be published later that year, would not include “homosexuality per se.”61
• • •
Jack Nichols, who’d been the first to say, way back in 1963, that Mattachine must fight the psychiatric stigmatization of homosexuals as sick, was living in Cocoa Beach, Florida, away from the fray. He was working on a book about men’s liberation and redefining masculinity. After the APA votes, Frank Kameny wrote to tell him, “All the work that we did through the ’60s, with faith and foresight that perhaps someday it might be productive—all that work is now paying off.”62 He knew that Nichols, of all people, would remember how hopeless things had seemed as recently as the preceding decade, and would exult with him about how they seemed to be now.