When, in 1952, the APA published the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, they classified homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” To be sure, some researchers disagreed. Among these were psychologist Elizabeth Hooker and the Czech physician Kurt Freund, known to posterity as the inventor of a machine that measures male arousal called the penile plethysmograph. (If I weren’t such a grown-up, I’d call it a “bonerometer.”) But as long as the APA was committed to the belief that homosexuality was a mental illness, the chances of wide-scale acceptance and equality for gay people remained bleak.
When lobotomies went out of fashion in the mid-1950s, in came A Clockwork Orange–style behavioral treatments, involving nausea-inducing drugs and electric shocks to the brain or the genitals. Forced institutionalization was common, and hysterectomies and castration were deemed legitimate medical “remedies.”
The fight against the pathologizing of homosexuality was led by two activists, Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameny. Gittings, raised in a religious Catholic home, had found herself struggling to come to grips with her attraction to women while a student at Northwestern University in the late 1940s, eventually spending so much time researching homosexuality in the campus library that she neglected her classwork and failed out.
A trip to San Francisco introduced her to a “homophile” organization called Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian civil rights group in America. She soon started a New York chapter, became editor of its journal, and began to organize public demonstrations for gay rights.
Kameny, meanwhile, had been born to a Jewish family in Queens, New York. He attended college at 16, served in the army during World War II, and earned a PhD in astronomy from Harvard. Soon after getting his doctorate, however, he was arrested in a police sting operation in a men’s room in San Francisco. (Because California was the first state where gay bars were legal, local police departments frequently sought to entrap gay men there in the 1950s.)
When the arrest came to light, Kameny was fired from the United States Army Map Service; President Eisenhower had barred gays from federal employment. Kameny’s dismissal roused him to activism, and he founded a Washington, DC, chapter of a gay rights group called the Mattachine Society. (Gay rights organizations had such great names back then.) He fought against DC sodomy laws and became a leader in the 1960s gay liberation movement.
Kameny recognized that as long as doctors pathologized homosexuality, changing wider social attitudes would be difficult. When Gittings heard Kameny talk at a 1963 convention of gay rights groups, she was fired up by his rejection of the medical establishment and his insistence that he and other homosexuals were perfectly healthy. Appearing on David Susskind’s popular talk show in 1971, Gittings challenged the host when he invoked “a great body of medical research” that regarded homosexuality as an illness.
For her, the real sickness was not homosexuality but the hatred of it. As she said to Susskind: “Your attitudes toward us are the problem. There’s nothing wrong with homosexuality. The only thing wrong with it is that you people are upset about it. Why are you upset?” As she put it, it was the supposed science that had to be questioned.