Contents:
“GAY IS GOOD”: HISTORY OF HOMOSEXUALY THE DSM AND MORN PSYCHIATRY
While Spzer, who passed away 2015, is often creded wh the classifitn of homosexualy as a mental illns (as chairman of the DSM-III Task Force), another psychiatrist—Thomas Szasz—voiced his disagreement wh the medilizatn of homosexualy at least twenty years earlier. My ntentn is that the psychiatric perspective on homosexualy is but a thly disguised repli of the relig perspective which displaced, and that efforts to "treat" this kd of nduct medilly are but thly disguised methods for supprsg (pp.
There is a fundamental siary between the persecutn of dividuals who engage nsentg homosexual activy private, or who gt, ject, or smoke var substanc that alter their feelgs and thoughts—and the tradnal persecutn of men for their relign. Bee Szasz did not lim his argument to homosexualy (he asserted that mental illns general is merely a metaphor)—and bee he remas perhaps the most ntroversial figure the history of psychiatry—his posn on homosexualy is often ignored. Nearly 50 years ago, LGBTQ+ activists achieved what was lled the “greatt gay victory” of the time: succsfully phg members of the Amerin Psychiatric Associatn (APA) to remove the diagnosis of homosexualy om the official classifitn of mental illns, the Diagnostic and Statistil Manual of Mental Disorrs (DSM).