In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness. The impact was chilling. Typical “cures” included psychoanalysis, aversion therapy, castration, lobotomy, and electric shock treatment. In some states, being gay was reason enough to be committed to a mental hospital—for life. The mental illness designation, in effect until 1973, would be used to deny civil rights to LGBT people.
Diagnosis: Mentally Ill
“It’s difficult to explain to anyone who didn’t live through that time how much homosexuality was under the thumb of psychiatry. The sickness label was an albatross around the neck of our early gay rights groups . . . . Anything we said on our behalf could be dismissed as ‘That’s just your sickness talking.’”
—activist Barbara Gittings remembering the ’50s-’60s in a 2006 speech to the American Psychiatric Association
American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Washington, DC: APA, 1952). Courtesy of the Legacy Center Archives, Drexel University College of Medicine
This 1952 copy of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists homosexuality as a mental illness under section 302 on “Sexual Deviations.”
The doctor peels back the patient’s eyelid, inserts the thin metal pick, taps it with the hammer to enter the brain, wiggles it, and severs the frontal lobes. This radical measure—reserved for the most mentally disturbed—was one of the “cures” for homosexuality.
Lobotomy instruments. Photograph by Chris Lippa. Courtesy of College of Physicians of Philadelphia
Marquardt and Tadeo with an old family photo that includes Uncle Harry as a young boy
“Like me, my Uncle Harry was gay, but he grew up at a very different time. . . . As a young man, he was lobotomized, a procedure that deliberately damaged his brain to ‘cure’ him of homosexuality. It robbed him of a full life and the ability to relate normally to other people. He was permanently injured by a medical procedure in service to society’s prejudice.
“While Uncle Harry was much loved by nephews and nieces, his life’s path was unspeakably altered by an unnecessary medical intervention. In a climate of fear, intimidation and shame in the early ’50s, families acquiesced to such treatment from medical experts. And real harm was done.”
—Wayne Marquardt, 2015
The December 1953 issue of the men’s adventure magazine Real featured a sensationalized confession-style article called “I Was a Homosexual” in which the writer claims to have been cured.
“I Was a Homosexual,” from Real: The Exciting Magazine for Men, December 1953
“In the Eightieth Congress I was the author of the sex pervert bill that passed this Congress and is now a law in the District of Columbia. It can confine some of these people [homosexuals] in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for treatment.”
—Rep. Arthur Miller, Representative from Nebraska’s 4th District, 1950