EP37: Homosexuality and the DSM: From Marginalization to Recognition

Unlock the complex history of how queerness was pathologized in our latest episode, where we promise to guide you through the transformation from criminalization to medicalization of LGBTQ identities. Explore with us the pivotal role activists like Carl Ehrlich and Carl Westphal played in shaping this narrative. We'll reflect on the challenging journey the queer community faced as we delve into the original intentions behind medicalizing homosexuality, the subsequent stigmatization, and the powerful acts of defiance that led to a reevaluation of queer identities within the mental health system.

Sigmund Freud's theories, once considered radical, now open a window into the shift in perception of homosexuality that laid the groundwork for acceptance and change. We analyze the nuanced implications of his views alongside Alfred Kinsey's groundbreaking research, which brought once-taboo conversations into the mainstream and sparked a sexual revolution. The episode is punctuated with personal accounts revealing the deep-seated impact of societal norms on gender and sexuality, providing insight into the emotional and mental toll these norms have historically taken on individuals from a young age.

Our conversation culminates in a stirring homage to Dr. John Fryer's courageous 1972 speech, which played a crucial part in the removal of homosexuality from the DSM's list of mental illnesses. We honor the stories of those who fought against the tide of discrimination, from the Lavender Scare to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and recognize the ongoing battle for equality within the LGBTQ+ community. This episode is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the continuous advocacy needed to ensure the medical field evolves in understanding and representing LGBTQ identities authentically and respectfully.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:24

we are ingrained to feel shame and to want to ridicule anyone we see falling out of the gender binary one of my friends suggested that I had a penis that's not okay. Hate is taught and passed down and inherited you want to go see my penis?

Speaker 2: 0:43

Let's go.

Speaker 1: 0:49

So we're going to be discussing how homosexuality was inserted into the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders at its inception in 1952 and its process of removal, and how it wasn't removed all the way until 1973 and how that impacted the queer community throughout those decades heavily.

Speaker 2: 1:07

Yeah, fun fact, I actually have two degrees in psychology, a bachelor's and a master's which I thought I'd be using the DSM more professionally, but to date, as a chiropractor, I don't use it heavily, though I do reference it on a personal level these days heavily, though I do reference it on a personal level these days.

Speaker 1: 1:29

That's so fair. As a frequent patient to the mental health system, I like to joke sometime that I went to the backyard school for psychology. Okay, because you kind of just learn as you're a patient in certain fields. I remember teaching certain therapists about things like gender dysphoria and stuff like that back in 2014, when they had no idea what they were doing with a trans patient. So, like it's, therapy is one of those fields that I always feel like is we're all learning from each other in a lot of ways.

Speaker 2: 1:57

Yeah, and there's different forms of therapy. When we talk about talk therapy versus music therapy or art therapy or things like that, there's many forms.

Speaker 1: 2:06

Yeah, and all of that is very different from things like psychiatry, which has to do more with like medication and things like that, whereas talk therapy is kind of the other side of that coin, both sides of which help.

Speaker 2: 2:17

Yes. So diving into the history of queer people and I was going to say us, but them or just as a people being institutionalized, goes far back in history and even prior to World War II.

Speaker 1: 2:30

So for centuries, due to the overtaking of religion throughout different governments, homosexuality was looked at as an unnatural act and through that, was very often criminalized. As a direct quote from the AGLP website, which was a textbook about the history of queerness being medicalized basically, we will include the links to these resources on our Patreon coming soon. Hint, hint y'all. All of those links are going to be available soon. So a direct quote from that website the medical literature on homosexuality that grew rapidly in the late 19th century was largely written by medical legal experts concerned with determining whether certain people accused of criminal sexual behavior should be considered innocent because of the constitutional deficit or mental illness. Yeah, although such pathologization may seem stigmatizing at the time, it could also serve liberatory aims, since it wrestled the issues of sodomy away from police and courts. So basically, the whole idea behind medicalizing homosexuality was done with a kind intention. It was done in order to keep people accused of sodomy away from the courts and police and into doctor's offices where it could be medicalized rather than criminalized, which, at the end of the day, is a kinder way of going about things. It just also leads to heavy stigmatization, which we will touch into later. Oh, yeah, so it's someone we might recognize.

Speaker 1: 4:13

Perhaps one of the first pathologized queerness is someone we know and love here on this podcast, carl Ehrlich, who is also remembered as one of the first queer activists and pioneers of the Western world. Ehrlich described himself or themselves as a psychosexual hermaphrodite, and people like them so that's. They would describe homosexuality as a jerk more than anything else. So they themselves, as a queer person, were part of their activism was medicalizing queerness because it was so heavily ingrained in the court system at the time when they were an activist yeah, uh, and.

Speaker 2: 4:53

And they went on to inspire, noted german physician carl westphal, who in 1869 published an article about homosexuality in both men and women, calling it a congenital condition. He about homosexuality in both men and women, calling it a congenital condition. He argued homosexuality should come under psychiatric care instead of legal persecution.

Speaker 1: 5:12

Yeah, so it's done with a kind intention, but you know, as everyone loves to say, the road to hell tends to be paved with the best of intentions. The term sexual inversion was popularized throughout Germany and the English world in the 19th century. So throughout this time, rather than homosexuality I mean at this point homosexuality wasn't even really a term it was terms more like unnatural acts or sexual inversion, and sexual inversion was probably the kindest at that point in time that point in time, and we know it got a lot worse down the line.

Speaker 2: 5:48

This thinking around homosexuality would dominate the medical field through most of the 20th century. Um sigmund freud, who one of my favorites um in the literature, considered the father of psychoanalysis. Freud is considered to have four prevailing theories about homosexuality or inversion as he saw it, each insulting in their way they're a little insulting like having read them there.

Speaker 1: 6:11

It's a little like that's not like you're trying, but that's not. But even he would go on to later say that it should not be cured. Homosexuality is not is something that the person can just live with, even if it's caused by one of these relatively insulting things. It's something that can be lived with. And he was, I would say, one of the first to actually even state that, like this isn't something we need to try to cure. We can just leave them alone.

Speaker 2: 6:42

Yeah, I think Freud, we can get into some deep-rooted things that he talked about, and the episode would be very long if we really dove deep into his work. Um, but yeah he pushed our podcast episode yeah, but he also pushed homosexuality from the world of religious immortality and crime into psychiatry, which is just so important.

Speaker 1: 7:07

It was really really vastly important at that time period, because that's what eventually got us from being medicalized to where we are now like. There are steps, and that was the next step of the process, and that's what this point in time is. What early medical and psychological studies of homosexuality mainly led to and this is again from the AGLP the removal of responsibility for defining homosexuality from the realms of morality and religion and securing it within science and medicine. The creation of a category of the person, the homosexual, who stood in contrast to the moral, religious belief that homosexuality was a behavior rather than a source of identity. The perpetuation of homosexuality's social stigma by taking it out of the realm of sin and immorality and placing it within the realm of pathology and immaturity. However, these developments eventually set the stage for the normalization of homosexuality that began to occur in the mid-20th century.

Speaker 2: 8:12

It took some time.

Speaker 1: 8:15

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 8:17

The expansion of discourse about sexuality from the domains of law and theology into medicine, psychiatry and psychology was considered a sign of progress by many at that time because it offered the hope of treatment and cure rather than punishment. You know for the phenomena that society generally regarded as problematic from the National Library of Medicine website, the article title the Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People Building a Foundation medicine website, the article title the health of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people building a foundation for better understanding that's another one of those links that will eventually be available on our patreon y'all.

Speaker 1: 8:52

So if you want to give these things a deeper read, they are fascinating reads like genuinely and kit talk a little bit about 1948 and Alfred Kinsey. Yes. So the Kinsey Report, I'm sure we all remember at least in my demographic. We all remember being in middle school, high school and being asked by kids on the playground what you get on the Kinsey scale test, because it was available online and everyone was having each other take it to see how gay you were.

Speaker 1: 9:25

That was like the at least in my high school and middle school because I mean, I'm from an area in new jersey that is often described as the alabama of new jersey.

Speaker 1: 9:36

So at least in my area of town that was the thing was everyone trying to see how gay we all were through the Kinsey test.

Speaker 1: 9:42

So in 1948, alfred Kinsey published the first Kinsey report discussing male homosexuality. Kinsey was a biologist and sexologist at the Indiana University, and this report and the one on female sexuality that would come later in 1953, along with the scale that Kinsey developed, would assist in bringing about the sexual revolution of the 60s in two main ways. First, by merely opening the door to talking about sex and sexuality outside of a heteronormative marriage as just normal and innate to like the human experience, like we, we like pleasure that and that's okay, that's not a bad thing. And this was like the first time that the majority of the public was reading something that told them that that was a huge step forward toward the sexual liberation movement of the 60s, the free love movement as we like to remember it. And this was also the first report to interview and publish such a comprehensive list of American sexual desires and practices. So like never had something like this been done before due to, you know, any number of things Colonization, imperialism, catholicism, christianity, a whole number of things, anglo-saxon bullshit, if you will.

Speaker 2: 11:00

Yeah, my Kinsey test or evaluation was kids because I was very inclined to play sports and just hang out with everybody. One of my friends suggested that I had a penis and I said, oh really, okay, well, we're in gym class and after gym class we can go right in that locker room and if you really are that interested, we can take a peek, and that shut down the idea of me having a penis, because I don't have a penis. But when you mentioned all the middle school being in middle school and taking that assessment online I thought, hmm, I wonder if we just have that available. I mean, that was available at the time when I was in middle school, but you made me think of.

Speaker 1: 11:41

That's so interesting how young we are, ingrained to feel shame and to want to ridicule anyone we see falling out of the gender binary. That's fascinating.

Speaker 2: 11:55

It was ninth grade now that I'm thinking about it, so not quite middle school. We were, we were, we were nearing, we were basically in high school at that point.

Speaker 1: 12:04

That's just I, I, still just I. It boggles my mind like hate is taught, and you can see that in interactions like that yeah like that those kinds of things are so deeply taught and passed down and inherited and that it is just a prime example of it. Because, like man, that's how young we are, that we're taught Like, if you see X, y and Z, if you see someone falling out of this strict one or two, zero or one, you know binary, that's not OK.

Speaker 2: 12:42

Yeah, it's just like I mean, hey, I think I shut them all down Right, I think I did a pretty good job. I stood up for myself and I shut them all down. But these are the girls. I call them girls because at the time we were all girls but we went on to play softball together, soccer, but it was always sort of a running joke the entire time through high school. It would be referenced.

Speaker 2: 13:05

But I showed her up, she tried to, I don't know, make a suggestion and I just I called her bluff and uh, yeah, it was, I think for me. I like I kind of chuckle about it because it wasn't offensive to me. I just was like I was like sure you really you want to go see my penis, let's go. Yeah, I can't imagine fast forward to now because I think we we've come a little bit of a way with bullying and things like that in the schools to some degree, but in some environments, not everywhere. But yeah, it's really interesting. It's just, you just made me think about a lot of things in this piece from 1948.

Speaker 1: 13:39

Yeah, no, that's, that's actually like literally just came back to me reading his name like, oh, the kinsey scale, yeah, everyone, when I was doing the research, it was all coming back to me like, oh my god, they can. And that was right around the time where, like I was kind of questioning sure, so I? I was like I, I don't have internet, I can't do. I did everything I could to get out of taking that test because I was scared, right, I was like'm going to accidentally out myself with this bullshit.

Speaker 2: 14:09

Yeah, fun fact about Dr Van she was not aware at all, by any means, that she was gay until the end of high school, like very end of high school. Just wasn't aware, accepted everybody, hung out with everybody, boys, girls, everyone in between. Yeah, just, I was not aware. I didn't have that self-awareness. Looking back hindsight, like I, definitely I. There were, like I've had, I had crushes and I had these feelings that were just I couldn't quite explain or just understand what that meant. They meant from a very young age, like three, I thought it was just like, oh, that person's great or that person is pretty and vibrant and beautiful, and not really truly understanding that what I was feeling was what I was feeling. But yeah, it's cool to reminisce on that stuff.

Speaker 1: 15:03

But without further ado, I love that so much.

Speaker 2: 15:07

Yeah, I'll talk a little bit about 1952 through 1973. In America the APA was created in 1844 by 13.

Speaker 1: 15:18

Just so people remember that's the American Psychiatric Association, because I know sometimes, when things like that are just spouted out without a reminder of what that is, I'm like, wait, wait. What the fuck are we talking about as a reminder?

Speaker 2: 15:28

Yeah, I know we kind of were a little all over the place. But yes, the American Psychiatric Association was created in 1844 by 13 superintendents of the American mental health institutions and ballooned in the post-World War II era once the GI Bill allowed men, mostly white, to go to college. The APA was a white, male-dominated organization through the classification and declassification process for homosexuality.

Speaker 1: 15:57

That does absolutely affect how they're going to make their decisions. These are people who they themselves have not experienced marginalization in general through being a marginalized identity identity. They are very quick to not understand the consequences to a marginalized identity through their own actions. When the board is made up of just you know people like that, like it is a recipe for things like homosexuality being classified as a mental illness.

Speaker 2: 16:30

Yeah, and this is an interesting episode for me to partake in because this also hits home for me in a lot of ways, not only as a gay woman but I was in high school, I was an ROTC, which is preparing you to go into the military post high school, and I was in heavy consideration of joining the military at a time Now, granted, this is fast forward from where we are now in discussion.

Speaker 2: 16:52

Now, granted, this is fast forward from where we are now in discussion. But I inevitably did not enter the military because at that time, back in 2003, 2004, 2005, realized I was gay and here I was looking at an institution to be a lifelong commitment for which my family wouldn't be recognized or accepted or me myself could be dishonorably discharged for reasons of loving. And so, in 2004, I made a decision at that time not to enter into the military and then, soon thereafter don't ask, don't tell was lifted. But just to say, along the path of my own life, I've experienced many, like all of us experienced some difficulty in decisions and just because of that classification in a organization such as the military, yeah, it all stems from the APA's decisions here.

Speaker 1: 17:47

It all stems from the American Psychiatric Association choosing to label homosexuality as a mental illness, and we'll get into that a little bit later as to the consequences that something like this had on so so many people. Right, I do appreciate like that is. It's one of those things like Don't Ask, don't Tell got repealed when I was so young. Yeah, it feels.

Speaker 1: 18:15

You were a baby, was so young it, it it feels, yeah, like it feels it. I remember being young and learning about it and not knowing any of the why behind it, and that was the moment that I was like I don't think I want to be in the army. Yeah, that sounds that's dumb. Why is that? Because I had I was around a lot of queer people from a very young age. My godmother loved that woman to death. She has. She met my mom in beauty school before I was born. That's how they and the salon that both of them worked at together was owned by my uncle frank, and you know, my uncle frank and my uncle nelson and their two teeny, teeny, tiny babies, carmen, carmen and liza, who are these little it's a chihuahua and my Uncle Nelson, and they're two teeny, teeny, tiny babies, carmen and Liza, who are these little it's a chihuahua and a Yorkie and they're both teacups and they're so cute.

Speaker 1: 19:00

And they were from the same litter, but you wouldn't believe it, because one looked just like a chihuahua and one looked just like a Yorkie, but their parents were a Yorkie and a chihuahua.

Speaker 2: 19:09

That's pretty cool, it was so cute.

Speaker 1: 19:11

They wore the cutest little booties and I love the book. I've known my Uncle Frank maybe since I was born. At least I have memories of him when I'm three years old curling my hair in the salon. It's one of those things where it was never queerness was never the other. For me, Queerness was always just there, right, yeah, so when I learned about don't ask, don't tell, I was like the army sounds kind of stupid. What are they?

Speaker 2: 19:40

doing like what is this?

Speaker 1: 19:42

this is kind of dumb yeah well, the interesting thing for me.

Speaker 2: 19:47

Yeah, the interesting thing for me was, like I said I, I definitely knew that wasn't right, but at the time, as I was going through ROTC in 2001, two and three I didn't even realize, I think in 2002, I kind of thought maybe there was something there for me. I was, I had a little crush on on my very best friend and there may have been a kiss involved in there somewhere, but it was. It was a little. I had a little confusion. I was like what is this feeling that I'm feeling? I don't really quite know what it is, but going the route of the military was always just something that that was my plan In 93, I know we're jumping a few years, but the order is not lifted until 93 when Clinton replaces it with don't ask, don't tell or sorry. That's not the way to say that.

Speaker 1: 20:33

It's fine when don't ask, ask, don't tell. Was put into place because we'll get later.

Speaker 2: 20:37

We'll get into the how and why of all of that, yeah yeah, but kind of going back to 1952. Homosexuality is added to the dsm by the apa as a sociopathic personality disturbance that can be treated like, yeah, like, let that sink in a minute.

Speaker 1: 20:53

It is added as a sociopathic personality disturbance, so it is basically considered on the same level of disorders like narcissistic personality disorder, psychopathy, sociopathy disorders that are considered debilitating and, at this point, I believe, are considered treatable but not curable and, at this point, I believe, are considered treatable but not curable. That's basically what homosexuality was considered on par with in the DSM, which is absurd. So the same exact year as homosexuality being added to the DSM, congress passed and Truman signed into law the Immigration Act which barred immigrants afflicted with sociopathic personality disorders, epilepsy or mental defects from entering the country. Congress was clear that this was done to exclude homosexuals we do not want homosexual people immigrating here that this act was passed for the sole purpose of excluding homosexual people.

Speaker 2: 21:51

Further to that, in April 1953, an executive order was issued by Eisenhower, and it was put into effect which banned all LGBTQ plus people from working in the federal government due to a perceived security risk. This security risk is, in parts, connected to homosexuality being considered a sociopathic personality disorder.

Speaker 1: 22:14

More than it being connected to homosexuality being in the DSM, the order was connected to the direct link people in Congress were making between communists and being queer. So they were. This is something we're going to go into at a later date. We're going to do an entire episode about this. It's known as the lavender scare. This was something scare, this was something that this was a a years-long campaign by numerous people in congress to associate communists with queer people in the eyes of the government, in the eyes of the public, in the in, just in the eyes of people, and it. That, and homosexuality being labeled a sociopathic personality disorder, definitely contributed to the April 27th order, which is known as Executive Order 10450. And, yeah, it was replaced in 1993 with Don't Ask, don't Tell, which was basically if you don't let us know you're queer, we're not going to do anything to you. But if we find out, then we're going to go back on executive order 10 450 and we're going to fire you, which is crazy yeah and uh, frank, I was going to say, is it frank camney?

Speaker 1: 23:29

I think it's frank cam to me, camney. Okay, I think it's camney, camney, he's. Okay, camney, I think it's Camney.

Speaker 2: 23:33

Camney. He's one of the many victims of this law. 1957, when he was fired from his job as an astronomer for the US Army Map Service. He graduated from Harvard and taught at Georgetown. So very smart, very intelligent, very well, probably read and spoken.

Speaker 1: 23:49

Yeah, and in the aftermath of being fired, camni would go on to open the DC chapter of the Machi. I can never pronounce this one. The Machanti Society, machanine Society.

Speaker 2: 24:04

Machine. I think it's.

Speaker 1: 24:06

Machine. It's a society that's very well known. They had multiple chapters throughout the United States and their whole purpose was battling anti-queer discrimination on any level on the level of your job, on the federal level, on housing level, on whatever level needed it needed to be fought. That was their whole thing, and he ended up opening the DC branch, which is pretty cool, and he also. He fought his termination all the way up to the Supreme Court. There is a case of Frank Kamney versus the US Department of Defense, basically discussing over his being fired, and the Supreme Court unfortunately ended up siding with him being fired due to the executive order and him being queer year yeah Many states also passed sexual psychopath laws that applied to homosexualities as well as rapists, pedophiles and sadomasochists is the word I was going for but wasn't quite matching up in my brain and my lips.

Speaker 2: 25:03

But just to say that not only on a government level, but it went down to a state level to cause disruption and to further perpetuate this cycle of homosexuality being a bad thing.

Speaker 1: 25:18

In an effort to prevent these alleged sex crimes, some psychiatrists encouraged the state to confine sexual nonconformists, including homosexuals, until they were declared cured. During this time, many psychiatrists and psychologists attempted various cures, ie attempts to change homosexuals into heterosexuals, including and again trigger warning, including psychotherapy, hormone treatments, adverse conditioning with nausea-inducing drugs, lobotomies, electroshock therapy and castration. And this is a paraphrased slash, direct quote from again, the National Library of Medicine's article the health of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people building a foundation for better understanding.

Speaker 2: 26:03

Yeah, by the early 60s the fight to remove homosexuality from the DSM started gaining serious traction with the growing civil rights and women's rights and gay rights movements.

Speaker 1: 26:17

Yes, and the gay rights movement at this time was mainly known as the homophile movement. It involved gay, lesbian and trans activists in major cities across the country, pressuring elected officials for queer visibility and rights, and the declassification effort was one major part of this liberation movement.

Speaker 2: 26:35

Soon enough, activists were taking their efforts from outside pressure directly into the APA conference panels and discussions of mental health practices.

Speaker 1: 26:44

Yes. Lesbian activist Carla Jay, who participated in disrupting a panel about sex problems which advocated for shock therapy to cure homosexuality, said protesters shouted at APA board. Wow, Can you imagine?

Speaker 2: 27:05

Often, these protesters and disruptions were met with the weaponization of homosexuality as a mental illness.

Speaker 1: 27:12

Yes, and it's unfortunate because it's one of those things where you're battling your identity, being labeled as an illness. How do you fight against it without just being called crazy From a scholar named Abram J Lewis who writes in the Journal of the History of Sexuality. He said conference attendees in San Francisco summarily dismissed protesters as maniacal and schizophrenic.

Speaker 2: 27:34

In 1968 when the DSM-2 manual so some revisions there when it came out it reclassified homosexuality as a sexual deviation and sexual deviancy was no longer considered a sociopathic personality disorder as the same year.

Speaker 1: 27:50

Yeah, so they basically just moved both down on the ladder. They didn't remove them entirely, but they made them not quite so dangerous.

Speaker 1: 27:59

In, in classification in stigma, I would say yeah, and not quite so dangerous in stigma. Around the classification because, mind you like, not all narcissists are dangerous people, not all sociopaths are dangerous people, not all psychopaths are dangerous people, and I do not want to make it seem like that's what we're portraying here. There are narcissists who are great people, there are psychopaths who are great people and there are sociopaths who are great people. It's all about what you choose to do with the cards you're dealt no-transcript we realized we needed someone like that.

Speaker 1: 29:01

Without someone like that that first wall would not come down. So in 1972 the call for the wall breaker was answered.

Speaker 2: 29:12

Uh, the apa's first panel to feature a discussion on homosexuality led by lgbtqia plus p, and that that really takes the helm with mr john fryer yeah, fryer, who was a gay practitioner, testified anonymously using a mask and microphone to distort his voice for the declassification campaign he presented as dr henry anonymous. Pull your courage up by your bootstraps and discover ways in which you, as a homosexual psychiatrist, can be appropriately involved in movements which attempt to change the attitudes of both homosexuals and heterosexuals toward homosexuality, for all of us have something to lose I love that line, for all of us have something to lose.

Speaker 1: 30:02

Like that I'm gonna cry. Like that is so powerful because, like it's true, at the end of the day, even if you yourself are not queer, there's that whole idea of they came for the gays and I did nothing, for I was not gay. They came for someone else and I did nothing for that was not me. And then they came for me and there was no one else left to help me because I didn't help them. And you start to realize that we are all in this together. We all have a duty and a responsibility to one another as human beings on this rock floating through space.

Speaker 2: 30:39

Yeah, and really what we did to really overcome or to be successful in declassifying homosexuality as a mental illness or defect was to really begin pointing out the flaws in the APA's methodologies and of what mental illness is.

Speaker 1: 30:54

Yeah, so again from Abram J Lewis, the historian from earlier. In fact, the controversy over the homosexuality diagnosis was able to reach such heights of publicity in part because the APA had never had cause to reach a consensus on a standard definition of mental illness. They hadn't defined what a mental illness is at this point, like at all. Like, even now we're still a little bit like things, you know, like we still kind of have a very I'm gonna call it goopy definition of what mental illness is. It's messy, you know it's a messy field.

Speaker 1: 31:37

And we're only now really starting to admit how messy it is, because we're finally starting to see doctors not be so damn prideful, you know, like it's messy. Just admit that it's messy, it's okay and we're finally starting to see that. But at this point in time they had no standardization of any idea of what a mental illness is whatsoever. So in classifying homosexuality as a mental illness, it kind of became like okay, then what's heterosexuality? Then what's this, then what's this, then what like it? It started, they, it started to come apart at the seams because they didn't even really know what a mental illness was.

Speaker 2: 32:15

And along with this, a large part of the homophile movement worked to show that homosexuality does not impair their lives in any way. Hoping to improve it is not abnormal by proxy. This included displaying employment, long-term relationships and the ability to assimilate into heteronormative society and culture outside of their relationships.

Speaker 1: 32:35

So again from Lewis, who I love this man's I want to read his book. I really appreciate the way he thinks about every aspect of all of this. Lewis notes that these efforts, while successful, did have unintended consequences, such as distancing the mentally ill, neurodiverse community and behaviors from the movement. We are more powerful when we work together as marginalized people and identities. Intersectionality is the kryptonite of imperialism. All of us working together, that's the thing. That's the thing that they want anything to stop. That's why you see so much fucking rage bait and so much to just make you hate someone else.

Speaker 2: 33:24

It's because the idea of us connecting and finding similarities even though we are so different, terrifies them ironically, lewis also went on to say that the class, the declassification campaign, eventually helped expand and enshrine the authority of the very text that gay reformers initially sought to critique they defined mental illness.

Speaker 1: 33:48

I mean, look at it now, like now that the dsm is extremely respected, and part of the reason it's so respected is because they were forced to get their shit together because the queer community said, hey, what is a mental illness? My guy, someone who themselves has been misdiagnosed, undiagnosed, has ended up being self-diagnosed because I've been so jerked around by the medical, by the mental health field. I mean, I, oh, I have stories. Listen, let us know if any of y'all want to hear some stories, because, oh boy, do I have we could definitely do story time.

Speaker 2: 34:31

We could definitely have a story time I have stories.

Speaker 1: 34:35

So, as someone who is a victim of a poorly running mental health industry, it could have been done so much better. I understand why it was so necessary to declassify mental illness. I am so heartbroken that, in order for that to happen, the neurodiverse and mental illness communities and the LGBTQ community had to be distanced from one another and had to be separated, especially when so many of us belong to both communities, just, you know, by being a person, because this shit's hard yeah being a person is a is a lot yeah it.

Speaker 1: 35:16

Just it sucks to see that. I mean, I understand why it had to happen and why it happened the way it did. It just sucks to see that it went down like that yeah.

Speaker 2: 35:27

Do you have a fact for tonight's episode or?

Speaker 1: 35:29

today's. So usually we call these fun facts. But I mean, this one is fun, but I feel like we might just change the fun fact section to interesting facts. Let me know what y'all think of that, because sometimes these facts aren't too fun, they're just a little sad.

Speaker 1: 35:46

But yeah, this is this one's an interesting fact. At least so our main man's, dr John Fryer, who took the stage in 1972 as Dr Henry Anonymous, used a wig, a tuxedo three times his size, so three just big ass tuxedo and a garnish Richard Nixon mask mask he and his partner modified to hide his identity.

Speaker 2: 36:09

Wow.

Speaker 1: 36:10

And so it was a Richard Nixon mask. Wow, yeah, so it was a richard nixon mask. If anyone wants a good fun fact for their next queer party, the mask that helped save the queer community from being in the dsm is a garnish modified richard nixon mask Outro Music.