How “Gay” Became Okay

In 1973, America's mental health authorities switched gears, declassifying homosexuality as a mental illness. The story of how that decision came about will make your jaw drop.

Happy June, folks! 

Given that liberals, as part of their satanic liturgical calendar, have designated June as “Pride Month,” homosexuality is in the news, to say the least. In keeping with the (un)holiday spirit, this column will focus on the militant LGBT movement, its lies, and the consequences of its long march through our civilization.  This week’s piece will tell the jaw-dropping and bizarre story of the global LGBT movement’s watershed moment.

This honor is usually granted to the highly mythologized 1969 Stonewall Riots, when patrons of a mafia-owned gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, spontaneously erupted into violence against police.

However, while the Stonewall Riots serve has rich narrative fodder for activists, a far more consequential step in the mission to normalize homosexual acts and lifestyles actually took place a few years later. This moment occurred in 1973, when America’s authoritative classification of mental disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), declassified homosexuality as a mental illness.

This change is constantly hailed as a triumph of facts and research over a bigoted scientific establishment. However, as you will soon find out, this process of declassification had little to do with “science.” What you will instead find is a fascinating, absurd, and borderline comical story of bullying, lies, and goofball antics.

If you would like to learn more about this stunning tale, and the normalization of homosexuality in the West more broadly, I could not recommend Robert R. Reilly’s groundbreaking 2014 book Making Gay Okay enough; I credit Reilly with the airtight source-work from which this story is told, and take heavy inspiration from his findings in this article.

Before being changed, the DSM-II, in accordance with the natural law and reflecting the research-based consensus of psychological understanding, classified homosexuality as a “sexual deviation.” To those who reflexively decry this scientific consensus as being the result of bad science, ask yourself this: Does the following story, by which this “error” was supposedly “corrected,” ring as objectivity coming to the rescue?

Bullying

According to the lesbian activist Barbara Gittings, the DSM’s classification was a massive obstacle to the fledgling “gay rights” movement, which felt that it was “under the thumb of psychiatry”; that “the sickness label was an albatross around the neck of our early gay rights groups—it infected all our work on other issues.”¹ In order to lift that thumb, did the scientific community really band together and, using the trusty scientific method, dispel personal bias and political pressure by the light of reason?

They did the exact opposite. According to Psychiatric News (a publication of the APA), the 1970 national convention of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco, which presented papers about behavioral therapy intended to mitigate homosexual inclinations, was disrupted by “Gay Liberation Front activists along with political protesters.”² According to Don Teel’s The Gay Militants, “by the time the meeting was over, the feminists and their gay cohorts were in charge … and the doctors were heckling from the audience.”³ 

At a similar 1971 Washington conference, the gay rights activist Frank Kameny (who was honored by President Obama in 2011, and who happened to also be pro-bestiality⁴) led a group of thirty protesters into the conference, shouting, “We are here to denounce your authority to call us sick or mentally disordered. 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.”⁵

Kameny then threatened the scientific community with a letter to Psychiatric News in which he warned, “Our presence [at the conference] was only the beginning of an increasingly intensive campaign by homosexuals to change the approach of psychiatry toward homosexuality or, failing that, to discredit psychiatry.”⁶ 

Needless to say, these intimidation tactics do not sound like those driven by scientific inquiry, something that members of this declassification push brazenly acknowledge. In most open fashion, a remorseful Eric Pollard, former member and cofounder of ACT-UP/DC, stated in 1991 that his group acted as a “truly fascist organization,” which “would work covertly and break the law with impunity.”⁷

Tactics like these are what 1970s APA Board of Trustees member Melvin Sabshin (in the words of Reilly) described as being instrumental in emboldened gay psychiatrists, who no longer “felt alienat[ed] from their APA colleagues”⁸ to begin pushing for changes to the DSM’s classification of homosexuality.  

Cope

Thus, according to Reilly, there was “no scientific basis to justify the change in classification”⁹ and this change was instead triggered by political pressure. He claims that the APA gave into this pressure and abandoned the scientific method largely because “some APA members were heavily invested in the rationalization [of homosexual acts as being normal and ordered] for reasons in their personal lives.” Reilly points to an apt quote from Aristotle, who stated that “men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.”¹⁰

Reilly notes that even the initial stages of the classification coup were facilitated by gay insiders in the APA. Garry Allender, one of the activists who infiltrated the 1970s APA convention, stated: “As I recall there were evidently closeted gay and lesbian people who were inside the APA who wanted something to happen and I think they just passed along information to us—and somebody got us press passes, I guess, so that we could get through the front door.”¹¹

Furthermore, alongside the aforementioned “gay psychiatrists,” Reilly observes that Dr. John P. Spiegel, who was president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association in 1973, was “a closeted homosexual” who took up “very young men” after his wife died, and operated in the APA with a “very particular agenda”¹² corresponding to his own inclinations, according to his granddaughter and journalist Alix Spiegel.

However, things did not stop with Dr. John Spiegel. Alix Spiegel paints a vivid portrait of a small group of psychiatrists inside the APA “who had decided to reform the American Psychiatric Association from the inside,” “keen to transform American psychiatry’s approach to homosexuality.”¹³ To close this piece out, here is the insane story of how this small group, in the words of Reilly, “finally turned the tables on the DSM definition.”¹⁴ The story is courtesy of Alix Spiegel’s radio program 81 Words: The Inside Story of Psychiatry and Homosexuality. 

The Hawaiian Bar Bonanza

I will let Reilly provide some necessary context: 

First, for background, it is necessary to know that open homosexuals were not allowed to practice psychiatry at the time, so they remained “in the closet.” They began associating informally at APA conventions, however, calling themselves the GayPA. Dr. Robert Spitzer was a member of the APA’s committee on nomenclature, which oversaw the definitions in the DSM. He held the then-orthodox psychiatric view of homosexuality as a disorder. He met Ronald Gold, a member of the Gay Activists Alliance, when Gold disrupted a behavioral therapy conference. Dr. Spitzer decided to listen to his grievances and later sponsored Gold’s appearance at an APA convention. This led to a decisive meeting outside of the APA Honolulu meeting in 1973.¹⁵

With that now clarified, here is the story. I believe it is most vividly told in unedited form. The following is a transcript from Spiegel’s program:

ALIX SPIEGEL: According to Ronald Gold, [what] finally convinced Robert Spitzer to sit down and redraft the 81 words in the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual … took place in a bar later that night in one of those campy Hawaiian lounges with bamboo furniture, grass skirted waitresses and a three page menu of exotically coloured drinks. This is where the GayPA had decided to hold its annual party, naturally after his speech at the conference Ron Gold got an Invitation.

RONALD GOLD: I got invited to it but I was told, you know, keep it all very quiet and don’t say anything and just come to this bar and we’ll all be there. So I decided to invite Spitzer to come to this because he had told me essentially that he didn’t know any gay psychiatrists and wasn’t quite sure there were any. And I said, you just come along.

ALIX SPIEGEL: Ron warned Spitzer not to say anything, he was instructed not to speak, or stare, or indicate in any way that he was anything other than a closeted gay man.

RONALD GOLD: But once he got there and saw that the head of the Transaction Analysis Association and the guy who handed out all the training money in the United States, and the heads of various prestigious psychiatry departments at various universities were all there, he couldn’t believe it. And he started asking all these dimwitted questions.

ALIX SPIEGEL: At the time members of the GayPA were still completely hidden. They hadn’t been active in the struggle to change the DSM; they were too fearful of losing their jobs to identify themselves publicly. So when Robert Spitzer, an obviously straight man in a position of power at the APA, appeared at the bar the men of the GayPA were completely unnerved.

RONALD GOLD: So the grand dragon of the GayPA, whoever he was I can’t remember now, came up to me and said, “Get rid of him, get him out of here! You’ve got to get rid of him.” And I said, “I’m doing nothing of a kind, he’s here to help us and you are not doing anything.”

ALIX SPIEGEL: And that’s when it happened. There in front of Robert Spitzer and the grand dragon of the GayPA. There in the midst of neon coloured drinks and grass skirted waitresses a young man in full army uniform walked into the bar. He looked at Robert Spitzer, he looked at Ronald Gold, he looked at the grand dragon of the GayPA. And then the young man in uniform burst into tears. He threw himself into Ron’s arms and remained there, sobbing.

RONALD GOLD: Well I had no idea who he was. It turned out he was a psychiatrist, an army psychiatrist based in Hawaii who was so moved by my speech, he told me, that he decided he had to go to a gay bar for the first time in his life. And somehow or other he got directed to this particular bar and saw me and all the gay psychiatrists and it was too much for him, he just cracked up. And it was a very moving event, I mean this man was awash in tears. And I believe that was what decided Spitzer, right then and there, let’s go. Because it was right after that that he said, “Let’s go write the resolution.” And so we went back to Spitzer’s hotel room and wrote the resolution.

ALIX SPIEGEL: That night?

RONALD GOLD: That night.¹⁶

Conclusion

Having now read about how the “austere” American Psychiatric Association went about declassifying homosexuality as a mental illness, did any part of that process feel guided by “The Science?” Was the normalization movement actually triggered by brave scientists who, clinging lovingly to the truth, challenged entrenched bigotries and gallantly led the way into an age of reason?

The answer to both of these questions, clearly, is no. Rather, it was irrationality, self-serving rationalizations, and persistent denial of reality that led the scientific establishment to throw its brain in the garbage. One usually tends to find irrationalities, self-serving rationalizations, and persistent denials of reality when the LGBT movement is investigated even with the mildest scrutiny.

The AdamoZone is a column by Luca Adamo, Vice President of Marketing at The American Postliberal. Published every Friday at 5:00pm EST.

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1. Cited in Brown, A Queer Thing Happened to America, 457.

2. “Panelists Recount Events Leading to Deleting Homosexuality as a Psychiatric Disorder from DSM”, Psychiatric News, accessed July 31, 2013, http://www.psychiatricnews.org/pnews/98-07-17/dsm.html.

3. Donn Teal, The Gay Militants (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), 272-73.

4. Peter LaBarbera, “ ‘Gay Rights’ Icon Frank Kameny Says Bestiality OK ‘as Long as the Animal Doesn’t Mind’ ”, Americans for Truth about Homosexuality website, accessed August 2, 2013, http://americansfortruth.com/2008/05/31/gay-icon-kameny-says-bestialityok-as-long-as-the-animal-doesnt-mind/.

5. “The Militant Homosexual”, Newsweek, August 23, 1971, 47.

6. Tobin and Wicker, The Gay Crusaders, 130-31.

7. Eric Pollard, “Time to Give Up Fascist Tactics”, Letters to the Editor, Washington Blade, January 31, 1992.

8. “Panelists Recount Events Leading to Deleting Homosexuality as a Psychiatric Disorder from DSM”, Psychiatric News, accessed July 31, 2013, http://www.psychiatricnews.org/pnews/98-07-17/dsm.html.

9. Robert R. Reilly, “How Gay Became Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior is Changing Everything”, 125.

10. “81 Words: The Inside Story of Psychiatry and Homosexuality (Part 1 of 2)”

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Robert R. Reilly, “How Gay Became Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior is Changing Everything”, 129

15. Ibid.

16. “81 Words: The Inside Story of Psychiatry and Homosexuality (Part 2 of 2)”, on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National program All in the Mind, August 11, 2007, http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/81-words-theinside-story-of-psychiatry-and/3228820#transcript.