50 years ago, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness

 

Headline:  New York Times, 5/2/2022

On the second day of the annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association in 1972, something extraordinary happened. 

While the assembled psychiatrists, mostly white men in dark suits, settled into rows of chairs in the Danish Room at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, a disguised figure had been smuggled through the back corridors. At the last minute, he stepped through a side curtain and took his place at the front of the room. 

There was an intake of breath in the audience. The man’s appearance was grotesque. His face was covered by a rubber Nixon mask, and he was wearing a garish, oversized tuxedo and a curly fright wig. But the outlandishness of his outfit diminished in importance once he began to speak. “ 

I am a homosexual,” he began. “I am a psychiatrist.”

A year later, the APA decided otherwise.

New York Times, 12/16/1973