“Well, we thought it was hopeless, but we had one name left, and that was John Fryer.”Īs Dr. And they couldn’t possibly do that kind of thing,” Lahusen said. Gittings and Lahusen wrote letters to everyone in the Gay-P-A they could reach and asked if they would speak. There was an underground group at the time called the Gay-P-A, which was made up of mostly gay psychiatrists who met in secret, at the same time as the association’s annual conference. “But then I said to Barbara, ‘Well, it doesn’t seem right that we have two of the one, two of the the other, but we don’t have a psychiatrist who’s also gay.’ And I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have that reflected on the panel?’” The two gay people were Gittings and activist Frank Kameny. “They put on two psychiatrists, and they put on two gay people,” Lahusen said. The 1972 panel, at the conference in Dallas, was called “Psychiatry: Friend or Foe to Homosexuals? A Dialogue.” The association invited the activists to its annual meeting in 1972 as a concession to gay protesters who had stormed the conference in San Francisco in 1970 and Washington, D.C., in 1971. Lahusen spoke to NBC News in 2019, two years before her death last year.
And their science was poor,” said Kay Tobin Lahusen, an early gay rights activist who helped to organize Fryer’s speech with her partner, Barbara Gittings, a pioneering lesbian who would come to be known as the mother of lesbian and gay liberation. And that was totally wrong to begin with. “As a class, we were mentally ill - no exceptions. Fryer Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists via AP Homosexual desire was considered an affliction, and acceptable “cures” included treatments like chemical castration, electroconvulsive therapy and lobotomy. The classification meant people could be institutionalized against their will, fired from their job, denied a mortgage or have their rights otherwise limited.
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Homosexuality was first classified as a disorder in 1952, when the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (commonly known as the DSM, the bible of the psychiatric field and the book from which all diagnoses are recognized) was published. Removing the classification of homosexuality as a mental illness had been a mission of gay activists since at least the mid-1960s. Both of them are hugely important moments in terms of LGBT civil rights,” said Malcolm Lazin, executive director of Equality Forum, an LGBTQ organization that has long supported the scholarship and recognition of Fryer’s work. “From my viewpoint, Fryer’s testimony on May 2, 1972, is at least equal in significance to Stonewall. It has been 50 years since Fryer’s speech, a moment that was central to removing homosexuality from the list of mental disorders, the impact of which contributed to the progression of LGBTQ rights through the next several decades.