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As we grow up gay or lesbian, one of our
greatest losses is not having any rich stories
and instructive tales passed down to us by those
before us. Usually our parents, grandparents,
aunts, uncles and other elders pass on family
jokes, fables, and stories about their own
pasts—and our own, when we were younger. They
tell us things like where nicknames came from,
why they changed their last names after arriving
from the old country, how their parents behaved
in the old days—family lore like that.
But now bookstores are offering an increasing
number of titles archiving past events and the
recent evolution of homosexuality. As a gay
psychotherapist, I have always been interested
in the history of how my profession handled—and
mishandled homosexuality.
American Psychiatry and Homosexuality: An Oral
History provides one excellent resource
for gaining this knowledge.
This book contains numerous interviews of those
who pioneered the depathologizing of
homosexuality and helped remove it as a mental
disorder from the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders, which mental health
professionals use to diagnose the clients we
treat.
Each time I sat down to read this book, I chose
to imagine that I was sitting at the feet of
those being interviewed, and that they were
telling me stories the way my grandmother and
other family elders did with me as I grew
up—stories that intrigued me, angered me, made
me cry and made me laugh out loud. Without this
kind of oral history, our pasts would be lost,
individually and collectively. This book sets
the gay record straight.
The front cover illustration is haunting,
bearing a photo of a man wearing a mask that
resembles something from the horror movie, The
Hills Have Eyes. Under the mask is Dr. John
Fryer, M.D., a psychiatrist who in 1972 spoke at
a psychiatry panel on homosexuality, appearing
as “Dr. H. Anonymous,” disguising his true
physical identity—and even his voice. In those
days, to come out as a gay psychiatrist meant a
ruined career.
Fryer came to this meeting to depathologize
homosexuality, telling about those gays and
lesbians who were not troubled and did not seek
out therapy. John Fryer took the first public
step for us all, clinicians and laymen alike.
I knew that homosexuality was removed from the
DSM in 1973, but was not aware that gay
political pressure played no role in the APA’s
decision to have it removed—as anti-gay
therapists Drs. Irving Bieber and Charles
Socarides later claimed. In reality, the
decision was “influenced by the weight of
scientific studies” and a vote by the APA’s
Board of Trustees, with two abstentions.
I first learned about Bieber when I was in
college, writing a paper on why homosexuality
was a disorder and should be considered so. I
was then in my own early stages of coming out
and, not wanting to be gay, sought out
literature to support my denial and write that
paper. I still have that paper, to keep and
archive my own personal journey.
Just as the pioneers transcribed in this book
have something to teach those of us coming
up—and out—behind them, so do we, the younger
generation, have something to teach them as
well. In an interview, Charles Silverstein,
Ph.D., psychologist and well-known author of
The Joy of Gay Sex, speaks out against
other gay therapists who, he says, “condemn
other gay people’s sexual behavior” by
diagnosing sexual compulsivity. He says that gay
therapists using that diagnosis are doing the
same to other gays as heterosexual therapists
did, which is to “diagnose these people as
suffering from some illness because you’ve
identified with society’s rules.”
On this area of expertise, Silverstein could not
be further from the truth. As one who
specializes in treating sexual addiction and
compulsivity, I use this diagnosis very
carefully with men and women, both gay and
straight, who suffer from compulsive sexual
acting out, without experiencing pleasure. This
is not based on my “moral views” as Silverstein
claims, but my recognizing compulsive, dangerous
and life-threatening sexual behaviors resulting
from trauma in early childhood, not on being
gay. But I appreciate Silverstein’s concern and
hard work to restore homosexuality to its
rightful place of normalcy.
There are also details in this book that will
make you laugh, at how insane things were in the
1970s and before. For example, one interview
subject—Robert Jean Campbell III, M.D.,
well-known for Campbell’s Psychiatric
Dictionary— recalls how anti-gay analysts
Bieber and Socarides were at it again, trying to
keep homosexuality diagnosed as a disorder in
the DSM. Asserting that some homosexuals
underwent an “identity crisis,” they invented a
diagnosis called “sexual orientation
disturbance” until someone pointed out that the
acronym for “sexual orientation disorder of male
youths” is sodomy.
For me, one very enlightening interview was the
one with author and psychiatrist Dr. Richard
Isay, M.D. who helped openly gay men and women
to be accepted in Analytic Institutes to learn
psychoanalysis. Before that, you were rejected
if you were openly gay. Early in my career,
Isay’s books,
Becoming Gay and
Being Homosexual inspired me in
developing my work with gay men, providing
psychotherapy to and facilitating retreats,
workshops and groups for gays. I enjoyed reading
how his beliefs about orthodox psychoanalysis
changed, and how he let himself grow and
re-think the assumptions he had learned and used
for years—creating change not only on the
outside, but on the inside as well. Isay lived
what he preached.
All of the pioneers in this book paved the
way for me so that today I could be an openly
gay clinician, publishing books on being gay by
both gay and non-gay publishing houses. I feel
honored and proud to stand on their shoulders,
knowing the pain they went through to help us
get to where we are today. |
