Original subtitles

"To suggest that a person comes voluntarily

to change his sexual orientation

is to ignore the powerful environmental stress

that has been telling him for years he should change.

To grow up in a family

where the word 'homosexual' was whispered,

to play in the playgrounds

and hear the words 'faggot' and 'queer.'

To go to church and hear of sin

and then to college and hear of illness.

And finally, to the counseling center

that promises to cure

is hardly to create an environment of freedom

and voluntary choice.

What brings them into the counseling center

is guilt, shame

and the loneliness that comes from their secret.

I suggest you first desensitize them

to their guilt.

I think their choice would be more voluntary and free."

Charles Silverstein, 1972.

- Morning. - Morning.

Well, can you tell me what brings you in here?

Yeah, I--

I was kind of having trouble.

Personal problems, you know?

I'd like to, uh, outline for you

a-- a kind of assessment procedure.

Uh, if you should try to, uh, uh,

say, masturbate to a female image,

uh, what do you think your reaction would be?

What do you think would happen?

Nothing.

It'd be like, uh, masturbating

to the thought of a chair.

This is what I-- I'd like you

to, uh-- to try in the coming week whenever you masturbate.

I'd like you to

just set a Playmate picture.

And I want you to, uh, stimulate yourself,

to masturbate with your, uh, homosexual image.

And then at that point of inevitability,

what I'd like you to try to do

is just to switch your eyes,

open your eyes and look at the picture

and focus on the picture visually.

And-- And have your climax.

No.

Look-- Look, I came here to make a decision

and to get myself moving in the right direction.

This sounds like a game

and I just don't want to get involved with games.

I-- This is important to me.

Sure, I understand.

But I look at it, rather,

as a way of-- of gathering some useful information

and, uh... uh, I'd like you to try it for just a week.

And I'll see you next week at the same time.

Everything that I'd been doing was wrong.

It was-- It was unethical. It was immoral.

And it was really wrong.

Well, I grew up, uh, in a lower

middle class suburb of Boston

called Dorchester, also in Roxbury

in the early '40s.

Kind of a poor family

in a Jewish ghetto part of the city.

I was pretty much a Boston boy until

I got out of college.

I would say sometime at Harvard in my sophomore year

is when I got interested in psychology.

I didn't start out that way.

I started out as a government major, poli sci,

and then I was a German lit major for a while,

but I was always interested in people and myself,

what's going on with me,

and I just sort of fell into

the intro course at Harvard in my sophomore year.

My main influence was reading Freud's introductory lectures

that he gave at Clark University

in the early 20th century.

In the summer between my freshman and sophomore year,

I worked the swing shift,

the graveyard shift at a ham factory,

helping out on an assembly line,

packing hams.

Uh, to fill the time in those early hours

when there weren't many people around on the train,

I read Freud's lectures.

I found Freud's thinking irresistibly annoying.

It was kind of, "How can he say such things?"

Like, if someone dreams of a train going into a tunnel,

why does this mean something sexual

with regard to the person's mother?

How can he understand

what people are really thinking and feeling

on the basis of slips of the tongue

or things that they say

that don't have any obvious relevance

to their psychological condition?

And I found this really,

really interesting, but I also--

Not understanding what his reasoning was,

I attributed, really, more to myself than to him.

I thought, "Well, I'm not really cut out

for studying clinical psychology."

But still, it was, uh, fascinating and it helped me.

I think it played a role in my going to that

first introductory course

quite by accident in the fall of my sophomore year.

Interestingly, at Harvard,

there was very little discussion

of behavior therapy at all.

The emphasis there was really on Freud

and variants of Freud.

By the time Freud visited Clark University

in Massachusetts during the fall of 1909,

he had written almost 40 publications,

most notably The Interpretation of Dreams

and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.

Before reaching the States,

he wrote to his close friend

and fellow psychologist, Carl Jung, stating,

"When Americans discover the sexual core

of our psychological theories, they will drop us."

Instead, his words and theories intrigued

the people in the audience, and psychoanalysis

would become a regular practice in the United States

through the 1970s.

Before Freud, um...

there wasn't as much attention to, uh, psychopathology

and what made people do the things they did

and how to help them.

He did not invent that,

but he developed it more fully than anybody else.

He really gave a tremendous impetus

to this and generated an intellectual whirlwind

of interest in Western Europe and then in this country.

The essence of Freud, in my view,

is the unconscious and repression.

The notion that we unconsciously

push out of our awareness

things that are really troubling to us.

And you may want to say, ironically,

these are the things of most importance

to the development of-- Of the human being.

Before then, psychology was primarily a laboratory science.

It started in the 19th century in, uh, Germany,

or, in Leipzig and Poland.

There wasn't a-- really wasn't a field called

clinical psychology, actually, until after World War Two.

People were beginning to criticize Freud

in the '50s and the '60s

o-- on the basis that his explanations

could not be experimentally validated,

that psychoanalysis is not a very good science,

and the structure and content

of psychoanalytic theory and related theories

makes it very hard to make clear predictions.

Sometimes up is down and sometimes up is up.

What you say you're afraid of

is not really what you're afraid of.

This is what began to bother people a great deal.

In particular, Hans Eysenck in England

and Joseph Wolpe in South Africa.

They were developing this field called behavior therapy,

later it became called cognitive behavior therapy,

where the emphasis was not to infer unconscious motivation,

but to try to deal with things more or less

at the conscious level.

When I went to graduate school at Stanford,

this is what I encountered.

In the, uh, fall of my second year, 1963,

Arnold Lazarus from South Africa

happened to come to Stanford,

and he was perhaps the most famous practicing

behavior therapist in the world.

I spent most of my second year

sitting in with him while he was seeing patients

and watching what we call a master clinician

deal with patients and work with patients,

seeing things in action.

Let's assume that I said to you,

you could just use one word

to describe whatever is bothering you.

What would that word be?

Take your time to think,

but you're just allowed one word.

What would that be?

Thought of it already.

Closed.

Closed? - Yeah.

To say that that enriched my perspective

is an understatement.

I suddenly saw the challenges

of applying behavior therapy

or experimental principles

to trying to deal with a-- a suffering human being.

Can you give me one sentence with "closed" in it

that will really reflect the feelings?

I have chosen to lead a closed-off life.

The kind of people Lazarus was treating

were really the kind that I began treating

when I began as a licensed psychologist myself.

Namely, the folks who are anxious and depressed.

These are people who are

coping with life but are really unhappy about it.

These people who are-- are are beyond sad.

They're really sad.

They're very unhappy.

They see no hope for the future.

They are sometimes suicidal.

Their functioning is-- is very marginal.

Lazarus taught me desensitization,

taught me other ways of helping people expose themselves

to things that they are very much afraid of.

But the emphasis was really on the,

"What can we do right now

to help the people move forward?" Rather than doing

an historical, archeological dig,

which was a-- a way to think about what

Freud and the Freudians, uh, have been

preoccupied with, and still are to a very large degree.

In the late '40s and early '50s,

experimental methods such as ice pick lobotomies,

hormonal injections

and the use of psychedelics

gained popularity as methods

to influence sexual orientation.

By the late 1960s,

the best known treatment was electroshock therapy.

Professionals believed

they could decrease homosexual desires

by administering an electric shock to a patient

when shown a pornographic image of the same sex.

Homosexual women also suffered

the full range of conversion efforts,

from hormonal shock therapy to genital mutilation.

But since more societal importance was placed

on fixing gay men's so-called lack of masculinity,

women's sexual desires and needs

were largely ignored.

Aversion therapy

you can think of as attaching

negative feelings

to things that have positive value for people

and they don't want it to.

Sometimes the aversion is induced by electrodes.

Sometimes it's induced by very disgusting imagery

and a technique called covert sensitization.

And sometimes it's induced

by actually injecting a nausea-inducing medication.

I think it was called apomorphine.

M.P. Feldman wrote a book sometime in the early '60s

on aversion therapy, and he and a man named

McCulloch were very well-known.

And he came to show a 16 mm film

showing gay men being shot

while they're looking at pictures of men.

I was in the audience and I was kind of his host.

In fact, I have a vivid memory.

The-- The-- We couldn't find a good place

to put the movie projector.

I remember literally holding

the 16 mm movie projector in my lap

so I could show it on the screen.

And I watched this film.

And I thought, "Gosh, that's really awful.

Those poor patients."

He genuinely believed

that this was the best way to help people get better.

I never criticized him as a person or his motivations,

but what he did, I certainly took issue with.

For one thing, I should make clear

I've never shocked a patient.

I've never literally applied electrodes

or shocked them.

And this happened, I would say, in the late '60s,

and it began helping me to rethink,

"Is this really the route that we should be going?"

I had also been reading in the literature

on the development human sexuality

and reading, among other things, the Kinsey Reports.

Homosexuality was thought to be

a comparatively rare phenomenon

until Kinsey came along

and provided very good evidence

that actually there were, of course, roughly,

20 million gay men and women.

And that was important.

They, for the first time,

realized that they were not a tiny minority,

but actually a very sizable proportion of the population.

In the Kinsey Reports, they talked a lot

about the pairing of sexual arousal

with certain kinds of stimuli, if you will,

to endow these stimuli with, uh, positive sexual properties.

This helped me move towards the so-called Playboy therapy

or orgasmic reorientation treatment,

sometimes it's called.

The story of orgasmic reorientation

has a lot to do with the Playboy Forum.

By the time Jerry arrived at Stony Brook,

Playboy had established itself as

one of the most progressive magazines in the country.

Hugh Hefner was amazed by Kinsey's report

describing men's sexuality

and the finding that 35% of men

had experienced orgasm from a homosexual encounter.

From that,

Hefner wanted to question the thinking of old morality.

He began writing monthly essays

on issues including capitalism,

religion and the history of sex.

These essays eventually became known as

The Playboy Forum.

In the forum,

some of the first open discussions of homosexuality

occurred in America.

While the photos of naked women

were the main selling point,

the majority of pages were filled with articles

and advertisements,

allowing the American public to both observe

and interact with new perspectives and ideas.

A perfect place for Jerry to introduce his therapy.

In The Playboy Forum was sort of letters to the editor.

People were writing in,

seeking help for their homosexuality

other sexual problems they had,

and they were not being given very encouraging information

as to how these things could be changed.

I wrote a letter to The Playboy Forum

and told them that there's this new-- the new development

that can be very effective in helping gay people change.

It created a heated, rather lively exchanges

among readers in The Playboy Forum.

"Many of the letters published in your forum

relate to sexual deviations.

Judging from the advice usually given,

it is probable that your staff is unaware

of new therapeutic methods."

I began to kind of tie it together in thinking that,

since I didn't want to do the aversion thing,

I would use Playboy photographs as material, if you will,

that gay men could use at home to focus on

while they were getting aroused by their "deviant" stimuli,

and then moving-- Literally moving their eyes

towards the scantily clad women.

And that came to be called Playboy Therapy.

It was a good try.

But the most important factor

for my change of heart was Charles Silverstein.

I'm Dr. Charles Silverstein.

I'm a psychologist in practice

in New York City.

Born and raised in Brooklyn.

It was more or less the average childhood

of a kid growing up in a working class family.

My father drove a truck for a living.

He worked delivering newspapers at night.

I was intrigued with, uh, the--

A kind of mystic aura that existed

about being a therapist.

At the time, uh, psychoanalysis was

the predominant field in psychotherapy.

We studied Freud Talmudicly,

going from paper to paper,

arguing about word after word, and...

I concluded after doing all of that,

that this was a bunch of horseshit.

We chose the person to demonstrate against

based upon deadlines of newspapers.

So, you have to be very smart about this.

No one knows that the demonstration went on

if it doesn't get into the media.

We were very good about that.

I think it was in the October of '72 or so...

...at the Hilton.

And Chuck had attended a meeting of the Association

for Advancement of Behavior Therapy.

I had suggested to the Gay Activist Alliance in New York,

a radical gay organization,

that we "zap" --

That was the term we'd use for a demonstration.

That we zap the convention,

because psychologists

and psychiatrists were making presentations

about their use of aversion therapy to cure gay men.

We thought that a rather heinous thing to do.

I looked at it as sadomasochistic behavior.

The-- The results always showed that there were no cures.

But that didn't stop people from

publishing more papers about it.

There were a number of presentations that day.

There was a fellow by the name of Dr. Quinn

who had just come from Ireland.

And I introduced myself

as both a psychologist and a gay liberationist.

And I said, "Look,

there are bunch of us in the audience,

and we're here to demonstrate against you.

And we hope that you will not interfere with our doing it

because it's going to happen.

So, don't make a fuss.

There's not gonna be any violence.

We're just going to talk."

I said, "Well, you have ten minutes

and at the end of the ten minutes we're going to..."

I put it in that way because

I have found that when you put it in that context

and you don't threaten violence,

the professionals fold up instantly,

and he did. He said, "Okay."

And so he talked and at ten minutes,

uh, one of our officers, Ron Gold, got up and--

And said, "Now we're taking over."

While Silverstein's demonstrations

remained peaceful,

the growing tension would soon reach a tipping point.

In Los Angeles on New Year's Day, 1967,

police officers beat and arrested

14 patrons over same sex kissing

at a bar called The Black Cat.

On June 28th, 1969,

police raided the Stonewall Inn,

a gay club located in New York City.

Resistance to the police brutality erupted into

a full blown riot,

led in large part by members

of the trans community.

For the next six days,

thousands of protesters gathered in solidarity

to fight for their rights.

The Stonewall uprising brought national attention

to the gay liberation movement.

Around the same time, activist Frank Kameny,

who had been fired from the U.S. Army Map Service

for his sexual orientation,

coined the slogan, "Gay is good,"

shining a light on workplace

and housing discrimination across the country.

But still, gay men continued to volunteer

for therapy in large numbers,

thankful for the opportunity

to be made what society deemed... normal.

During the early '70s, it was absolutely mainstream

to help gays change.

Absolutely mainstream.

And Chuck came to a workshop that I was giving one morning

on what I regarded as new ways

and more humane ways to help gays change.

I remember he sat down front,

I-- to my left. I remember-- I can visualize it.

A very pleasant fellow, smiled a lot, very polite.

At the time, I was, um,

graduate student in psychology at Rutgers University.

I was also a member of AABT.

I had had helped to organize this demonstration,

but I also wanted to meet Jerry Davison,

because Jerry had been doing some work.

He had his Playboy Therapy

in trying to cure someone of, uh, sadomasochistic fantasies.

I think if Jerry wanted to write-- write that up today,

he would write it up differently than-- than he did.

He says, "Who the hell cares?"

I was one of the good guys.

I was the non-aversion sexual reorientation

behavior therapist.

It was a different approach.

It was not punishing people.

Uh, which is what the aversion therapists did.

And I thought that he understood that punishment

was not... a good way of helping people with anything.

In that sense, he-- he was-- He had broken from the pack.

And so, this was someone I could talk to.

And I did. And he listened.

And we started talking.

We haven't stopped talking.

Jerry made his presentation to a group of people.

And afterwards, I went up to him.

Uh, to meet him and...

want to engage him in some schmoozing.

And as I walked up, he immediately said to me,

"I know who you are."

He had some fliers.

And the fliers advertised

a symposium that he was gonna chair on Sunday,

the last day of the convention.

And he said, "Would you mind if I handed this out to

the workshop participants?

They might be interested in this symposium,

and maybe you take one for yourself.

Maybe you'd like to come." And I looked at the flier.

My reaction was, "Oh,

it's gonna be one of these radical gays

that give us trouble. They're gonna zap us."

Literally, people standing up

and yelling at you while you're talking.

Swearing at you.

Calling you a Nazi, a fascist,

a terrible person.

Happened to me a fair amount.

That's what zapping was.

And it was very much in the air.

Remember, this was the early '70s,

people taking political action,

but they were doing it very much so

in professional settings.

So, when Chuck showed me this brochure,

I said, "Of course you can hand it out."

Frankly, I didn't think I had much choice.

I thought he was gonna do it anyway.

But he was such a polite, pleasant guy,

I figured, "Oh, what the hell?"

And I stuffed one in my pocket.

And on Sunday I had packed up my stuff

and was on my way to leave the hotel--

It was the-- The New York Hilton,

to go down to Penn Station,

catch the Long Island Railroad,

back out to Stony Brook and Port Jefferson, where I live.

Knowing a lot of people in the association,

I kept running into old friends and chatting,

and before I knew it,

I looked at my watch and I said,

"I'll never make it to Penn Station.

I think I'll just hang around the hotel."

And this, I think, a very fateful event.

I'm not a believer in fate too much, but...

I reached into my pocket and I found this brochure.

"Oh, Silverstein gave me this brochure.

I'll go to his symposium."

Which I did.

And what it was, it was a large lecture hall ballroom.

There were probably a few hundred people there.

And it was very ruckus, a big ruckus.

And there was Chuck, who was chairing the symposium.

And he was being zapped

by his brothers and sisters in the movement, if you will.

And I thought, "Wow, if they're zapping him,

God knows what they'd do to me."

And what he was saying was that these behavior therapists,

they need to stop what they're doing.

Uh, they need to modify what they're doing

because what they're doing is really not good.

To suggest that a person

comes voluntarily to change his sexual orientation

is to ignore the powerful environmental stress--

Oppression, if you will,

that has been telling him for years

that he should change.

To grow up in the family

where the word "homosexual" was whispered,

to play in the playgrounds

and hear the words "faggot" and "queer,"

to go to church and hear of sin

and then to college and hear of illness.

And finally, to the counseling center

that promises to cure

is hardly to create an environment of freedom

and voluntary choice.

What brings them into the counseling center

is guilt, shame

and the loneliness that comes from their secret.

If you really wish to help them freely choose,

I suggest you first

desensitize them to their guilt.

After that, let them choose.

But not before.

I don't know any more than you what would happen,

but I think their choice would be more voluntary

and free than it is at present.

Yes, those are my words.

Can you tell me what your feelings are

about homosexuality?

They-- They should be shot, if you ask me.

When you're up in the front trying to do your job

and you find you get a fruit beside you,

it's not the greatest.

Do you know any people who are homosexual?

No, thank heavens.

Gay people were taught that they were horrible,

that they were shameful.

That they belonged in jail.

And when you teach people that,

they want to change and they...

go to the psychoanalyst to be changed.

And the psychoanalysts were making money off...

people feeling shame about their sexual behavior.

I was stunned.

I literally do not remember the rest of the symposium.

I left soon after that to get down to Penn Station.

I remember getting on the train

and I remember sitting, looking out the window

and just thinking.

To grow up in a family where

the word "homosexual" is whispered.

To play in the playgrounds and hear the words

"faggot" and "queer"...

If there's such a thing an-- an-- an intellectual,

emotional em-- epiphany,

that's what I had.

The following day, I went to school.

And I just sought people out.

I had to tell people about this.

Most of them were very upset by my change of heart.

"How can you say you're wrong?"

"You've made important contributions."

"You've helped so many people." I said, "I don't think so."

And I found, in general, the graduate students

were much more open

to, we shouldn't try to change them,

than my faculty friends.

So, I began teaching on this and I began to develop

an argument that I believe

moved a little bit further, even, than Chuck's.

But when he talked about,

"We should desensitize gay people to their guilt

that's been inf-- Inflicted on them,

and then they'll be more free to choose,"

I took the position that,

"No, their negative reactions

are function of the-- of society,

and I will not help them change.

I will not desensitize them to their guilt."

But that's separate from whether I should be doing it.

And I could hearken back

to my readings earlier

of the Ki-- The two Kinsey Reports.

Kinsey was very liberal in his view

of the development of human sexuality.

And he saw that conditioning had a lot to do with it.

He took a non-judgmental view of human sexuality,

uh, and this was in the '40s and '50s.

So, I began to think more and more about

"No, because of the social context,

that's where our efforts should be directed.

Now, how can I best help my colleagues,

starting with them first,

begin to think about the social

and psychological implications are of what they're doing?"

Well, the way to do it

is to cut off that avenue of intervention.

We're not gonna do that anymore.

And that's what caught people's attention.

Freudians were not allowed to, uh...

consider contributions from other areas of science

and even history.

And they remained narrow-minded about all issues.

Here in the United States,

we got what was called

the phobic theory of homosexuality.

That was-- It would be in the '30s, the 1930s.

Uh, an analyst by the name of Rado at Columbia.

And he had some students-- Of the most famous students,

Socarides, Hatterer and Bieber.

They continued this theory of homosexuality being

a reaction to the-- what was called the vagina dentata,

a man who's gay is gay because...

he's afraid of the teeth in the vagina of a woman.

Gobbled him up. Now, of course,

every gay man sas, "Why do I always want a blowjob?"

I-- It didn't make any sense.

But the point is, it was theory that drove all practice,

instead of learning about the behavior

of people like gay men.

They knew nothing about the behavior of gay men.

It came to the point when whenever some radio program,

or television program, would, um...

have one of these debates about whether homosexuality is...

normal or abnormal

the only psychiatrist they could get

to argue that the homosexuals were sick

was Socarides. He was the only one left

because he was sort of a bull in a china shop.

Doctor, according to this book,

the American Psychiatric Association Manual

of Mental Disorder,

homosexuality is a-- a mental illness,

a mental disorder. Is that justified?

Yes, I-- I think so. You notice in that--

In the manual, um, we talk about, uh, disorders,

and disorders are much more than, uh, strict illnesses,

but they're illnesses just as much because they involve

a failure of functioning.

I've had many debates with that asshole.

Charles Socarides was a well-known

psychiatrist, psychoanalyst,

who took the usual Freudian

view that by definition,

homosexuality is sick

and they have to be changed.

Homosexuality is, in fact, a mental illness

which has reached epidemiological proportions.

Homosexuality, it militates against the family,

and it produces individuals who care very little

about their role in a particular family.

A man is either-- First is a male or female

or-- or he's an intersex.

And most-- We're ta-- not talking about intersexes.

A man must be a man and a woman must be a woman.

One of the things he didn't say

that-- that he-- he usually does say is homosexuals are so

damaged that they cannot get into

long-lasting love relationships.

Most homosexuals must seek and strive

and look for numerous partners

in order to try and find themselves

or replicas of themselves.

I was on the program where he repeated that.

And I said, "Well, tell me, Dr. Socarides,

how many wives have you had?"

I knew the answer.

And he said, "That is personal

and I don't discuss that here."

And I said, "You've had three wives

and I've only had one lover.

How do you explain that?"

And wouldn't touch it.

Wouldn't touch it. - The homosexual

that is, an exclusive homosexual--

And there are various types of homosexual:

the homosexual behavior,

which is not true homosexuality,

is a person who, out of inner necessity,

must engage in homosexual relations,

other-- otherwise, he experiences a great deal

of anxiety. He's a product, really, of a process of very,

very bad child-rearing practices, which have--

Which have caused certain difficulties

in his own sense of identity.

Certain types of anxieties

and certain other inner conflicts which make him,

on many occasions,

have an equilibrium which is quite unstable.

Socarides was only one example

of a psychiatrist pushing a false narrative

void of any reputable scientific proof.

Other damning publications arose from authors

such as Edmund Bergler, Lawrence Hatterer

and Irving Bieber,

who believed that homosexuality

was undoubtedly tied to a mother's

overbearing relationship with her son.

In response to these theorists, Evelyn Hooker,

a scientist and psychologist,

sought to prove that there was, in fact,

no pathological difference

between homosexuals and heterosexuals

by using the Rorschach test,

among other psychological exams.

She enrolled 60 anonymous individuals,

30 straight men and 30 gay men

who were similar in age and IQ.

After removing herself from the study,

she employed several of the best Rorschach readers

to blindly calculate the results.

Not only were the findings between

the two groups extremely similar,

the judges were unable to distinguish the gay men

from the straight men.

Hooker concluded that homosexuality

as a clinical entity simply does not exist,

as its forms are as varied just as much

as those of heterosexuality.

Although Hooker's findings were crucial,

the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual

still listed homosexuality as a mental disorder

for years to come.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual

allowed mental health professionals

to diagnose gay people as sick.

It was listed as a perversion, sexual deviation, paraphilia.

You didn't want to be viewed as having--

Having a paraphilia.

It's not a normal thing to have.

There was the whole idea that-- That-- that lust created,

um, a deterioration of the brain.

There was an interaction, they said.

And certainly, uh, if you're going to, uh, be lustful

or have intercourse,

it should only be for the purpose of reproduction.

Having sexual intercourse with your wife,

uh, was a-- acceptable once a month.

That-- That wouldn't be dangerous.

But if you did it a lot...

um, you would-- You would get crazy.

You'd end up in an institution.

And certainly, something like homosexuality,

where you waste your seed--

And these were called vital fluids

that, you know, you masturbate and you ejaculate--

Then your vital fluids would be spent.

And that would...

cause the brain to deteriorate.

So, it had a medical contribution as well.

And a lot more that I would bore you to death

if I talked to you about.

Masturbation, per se,

it was listed as a disorder, I think, until 1942.

If you let these guys have their way,

sex would be a mental disorder.

Sex has a bad reputation.

The practitioners of, um, psychotherapy

are ill-trained, uh, about sex.

They don't know anything about it.

They go through doctoral programs.

They don't take a course, one course,

not one in human sexuality.

So, they get their PHDs

and come out with no more knowledge than their own

limited experiences.

What would be the effect

of changing the nomenclature

and simply saying that homosexuality

is another form of normal behavior?

In the first place,

if you do "normalize it," in quotes,

you will produce a situation in which men and women

will fly away from each other even more than now.

And we know that's already a difficult problem.

The one hurt the most.

So, when the psychiatrists

were going to eliminate homosexuality,

they were hurting the pocketbooks

of the analysts who were out to...

keep gay people in therapy because it enriched them.

And when we in gay liberation fought

to eliminate homosexuality as a mental disorder,

we had in mind the pocketbooks of all these people

making money off others feeling shameful

and horrible about their lives.

Now, Chuck, we became good friends

in the, uh, early '70s,

and as I was developing

what would be my presidential address for AABT,

we had dinner out at Port Jefferson,

and I told him what I was thinking of saying,

based very heavily on what he had said

a couple years earlier.

And he said, "That's terrific."

He liked it. But then he cautioned me...

- as a friend. - I said, "Jerry...

it's a great idea

and I'd be very proud for you to say those things

because they're true.

But you're going to pay a price.

You're going to find colleagues who say,

'Hmm, I wonder why he's on their side.

Maybe he's a closeted one of them.'

And people are going to... whisper to each other."

So, I said, "Well, number one, I don't happen to be gay,

but it wouldn't bother me if people thought I was."

I said, "You'll lose friends,

so be prepared to pay the price."

"I'll take my chances.

I think I can develop a good enough

logical argument

that will be steeped in philosophy

and sociology and politics.

People will see me not as a kook,

but as someone who's thought carefully about this."

So, he-- he listened to me and he said, "I don't care.

This is the right thing to do."

I continued to develop my presidential address,

which I ended up giving in November of 1974.

He knew more than

that it was the right thing to do.

He had the balls to do it.

There were lots of people in AABT

who knew it was the right thing to do.

But they wouldn't do it.

I wish today to voice some concerns

I have been wrestling with for some years

concerning the way behavior therapists,

and for that matter, all other therapists,

have been approaching homosexuality.

As Silverstein put it

at the AABT Convention two years ago,

in a discussion of male homosexuality,

and let me quote,

"To suggest that a person comes voluntarily

to change his sexual orientation

is to ignore the powerful environmental stress,

oppression, if you will,

that has been telling him for years

that he should change."

I was...

in a way, felt embarrassed that he used my--

My words, and also prideful at the same time.

I remember writing those words sitting at my desk,

in my old typewriter-- Clunky typewriter,

my lover, William, just a few feet away from me.

And I remember thinking to myself,

"This is a good paragraph."

Uh, that it had the emotional appeal I wanted it to.

And to hear Jerry, um...

say those words out loud, I...

was em-- embarrassed because...

they were so good.

And he read it so well.

And he showed that respect in me...

to speak them in f-- in front of the whole convention.

Continuing the quote

from Silverstein, "What brings them

into the counseling center is guilt,

shame and the loneliness that comes from their secret."

In other words, Silverstein suggests that we must go back

into the causal network

and ask ourselves, as determinants,

what are the determinants the client asserting to you

that he or she wants to change?

When I got to the point, said,

"So, therefore we should stop offering

change orientation, even people request it,"

my recollection is that the room got really quiet.

The room was about a thousand people.

Even if we could

effect certain changes,

there is still the more important question

of whether we should.

I believe we should not.

You have to understand, I was very nervous at the time.

I tape-recorded the speech mostly

because I wanted to be able to hear it afterwards

and hear what I said, even though I had--

Did have a script.

When the speech got over and people applauded--

I don't know how enthusiastic,

but they were polite--

A number of people came down to the front.

And-- both men and women.

And what I remember is,

uh, them tearfully saying something to the effect,

"I don't believe what I just heard.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I hope this makes a difference. Thank you, thank you."

When I left the room,

there was a reception area outside of a-- the ballroom.

And I remember walking into the reception area,

people drinking and having canapés or whatever.

And what I remember was that I kind of--

As I walked in, people backed away.

Sort of like Moses parting the Red Sea.

That's a little grandiose,

but people backed away and they-- they seemed embarrassed.

And then one-- One-- one person came over.

One of my colleagues, who I won't name,

he came over and he kissed me on the cheek.

And I knew exactly what he was doing.

And I basically uttered a profanity to him.

And, um-- And I remember that pretty vividly.

And, uh, then people talked

and I don't remember exactly what happened after that.

I was naturally emotionally drained

because I had been working up to this

for the better part of a year.

And my vindication for this, of course,

is that 45 years later,

a number of states have passed laws

against doing conversion therapy.

On March 2nd, 2020,

Virginia became the 20th state in America

to ban conversion therapy for minors.

The majority of the country, however,

still allows for children to receive the therapy,

mainly in the form of religious counseling

and Christian sleepaway camps

intended to save children from their same sex desires.

Although Title VII had prohibited discrimination

based on race, color, religion,

sex or national origin since 1964,

it did not prohibit discrimination

based on gender or sexuality

until June 15th, 2020.

The aftermath of Jerry's speech in 1974

prompted support and backlash,

both of which contributed to the positive change

that would follow.

My efforts to publish my speech were really interesting.

I made some revisions

and I sent it into the American Psychologist,

which is one of the publications

that every member of APA gets.

I got a letter back from the editor saying,

"I'm-- I'm not sending this out for review.

I'm rejecting it because it's not of enough

general interest to the membership."

And my reaction was,

"Of not general enough interest? I don't think so."

But I didn't appeal it. I didn't make a fuss.

I sent it to the leading clinical journal

that was edited by a man named Brendan Moore,

and he said, "Jerry, uh...

I'm-- I'm not gonna send it out for review."

And I thought to myself, "Oh, not again."

He said, "Because I think it's so important

that I'm gonna accept it."

And I th-- I was just very happy.

Then he said, "But I'd like to invite three critiques.

Would you be okay with that?"

And of course, my reaction was,

"Okay, I'd love that."

'Cause there's nothing better

than having your paper critiqued

because it's a signal that it's-- it's important.

One of the people who critiqued it was--

In my recollection, I believe it was Socarides.

And it's predictably very damning,

and I think even calling it dangerous,

what I was saying. I mean, it was extremely negative.

And I wasn't surprised by it.

Brendan Moore got another manuscript

from a couple of colleagues of mine

at University of Georgia who critiqued the paper,

and the basis of their critique was,

"There are ways to change orientation,

and would you write a critique of their critique?"

And I said, "Sure."

The title of the article was,

"Not Can, But Ought."

"It is one thing to say

that one should not treat homosexuality.

It is quite another thing to suggest

that one should not treat homosexuals."

My colleagues were arguing,

you really can do it if you just try harder.

And I was saying, "No, that's beside the point.

There are a lot of things we can do that we shouldn't do."

Even that general halfway measure of, "You're not sick,"

that is not widely accepted.

We like to think that it is.

But I don't believe in most parts of the country

that it is widely accepted.

It's accepted on the Northeast and on the West Coast.

The people in the city are

a little more accepting to

the gay life in San Francisco.

There's not as much, um, police patrol.

They don't pick people up on the street.

They don't raid the bars as frequently in San Francisco

as they do in other areas of the United States.

Things for gay people in places like L.A., New York,

Chicago, Miami--

Things are pretty good.

The fact of the matter is, uh,

homosexuality is, uh, still dangerous

in many places of the United States.

One of the effects, I believe, that...

this getting away from sexual orientation treatment

when you're consulted by

an openly gay person,

is that there are a whole host of other problems

that you can work on.

It's not as if being gay

means you're paragon of mental health any way--

Any more than being straight.

You have people who have problems.

And when the salient characteristic is

people who happen to be gay have these problems

or people have these problems,

footnote, "They may be gay or may not be gay,"

becomes less of an issue.

And why did the psychiatrists

eliminate homosexuality?

Most of them had nothing against gay people.

Professional associations are basically political groups.

And they change according to

the waves of politics that go on.

And they change the same way our society changes.

And that's because something about the old way

no longer works.

And they came to the conclusion

that damning homosexuality no longer works.

We had-- at that point, had a women's movement.

We had a Black movement.

And only lastly did we have the gay movement.

And they had to go along with the politics of the time.

And that's why they eliminated homosexuality.

I believe that, for the most part,

this, if you will, battle,

that gays have been waging

and we've made a great deal of progress--

I believe we're way far from the goal.

This is ingrained in all orthodox religions.

All of them.

Scientific communities were accepting homosexuality

and they were saying that it's not a disorder anymore.

Christians have to fight the battle.

Christians have to fight this battle of homosexual sin

because the professional counseling community

won't do it anymore.

I remember when I was on a book tour many years ago,

for a book of mine,

and happened to be there on a Sunday.

And all the television programs were church services.

All of them-- for the whole day.

Homosexuality is one of those that could be coupled

with, uh, murder and other sins,

but it would be the government who would be

executing the homosexual.

The-- These are, I think,

live issues still for our society.

And I always caution people about that.

We are saying, "Okay, we are gay and..."

We're-- we're telling everyone about it.

We're making ourselves known,

we're "coming out of the closet," quote-unquote,

and, uh, we're not hiding anymore.

It's a very complex thing and a very powerful thing,

just being honest and-- And open around your friends.

I want to be accepted as a human being.

I want-- say, if I want

to walk down the street with my arm around my lover,

I do it, still feeling that maybe people are looking at me

and thinking, "Oh, look at that queer."

Today, gay people in big centers are out,

they're open, uh, their families know.

But in those days,

if you were exposed as a homosexual,

all sorts of things could happen.

Some who were caught committed suicide.

I have a friend who, at the age of 16,

uh, he came out to his parents

and his father threw him out of the house

right then and there with only the clothes on his back.

That story was repeated a number of times--

- by a number of, uh, gay men and lesbians.

What is a homosexual?

Is he or she a person who has simply chosen

an alternate sexual life,

or a sick-- a mentally sick person who, like any other,

should be treated by whatever resources

the psychiatric profession has?

That question, that debate, has generated

a small civil war in the psychiatric establishment.

60 Minutes did a program on nomenclature change

and wanted to interview me.

Now, we're talking...

December, January of '73, '74.

And they were coming over

the same day that my mother was coming up from Florida.

She arrived. And being the Jewish mother she was,

she insisted on doing my laundry,

which, of course, I didn't want her to do

because I had something to talk to her about.

Finally, when she did my laundry

and she came back and settled down,

I told her that 6-- uh, 60 Minutes crew was coming

over and she asked why,

and I told her it's about doing this program

on homosexuality. And she said,

"Well, why are they gonna interview you?"

She still didn't have a clue.

And I said, "Because I'm gay, I'm a homosexual."

And she got all upset.

And then the door opens

and the camera crew arrived early,

and they brought in cameras, which are bigger--

In those days they were bigger than cameras we have now--

And giant cables and lights and all,

while she's sitting there. And she went bonkers.

And she said, "Well, if-- if that's the case,

I'm going-- I'm leaving here

and going to visit your brother instead."

Uh, much to the chagrin of my brother.

Uh, and that's how I came out to my mother.

Charles Silverstein led the fight

to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic Manual.

He appeared before the association's

nomenclature committee

to argue that, inherently,

homosexuals are no more disturbed than heterosexuals.

We spoke with Silverstein and with Ronald Gold,

the spokesman for the Gay Activist Alliance of New York.

If you want to call me a deviant, you can.

If you want to say I'm immoral, you can.

But there's a very important difference

between saying I'm immoral and saying I'm sick.

We both had some choice things to say about

some figures and about psychoanalysis, I think that--

I think, by and large, has been a very destructive force

in a lot of ways, uh, in our field,

but particularly with regard to, uh, issues of sexuality.

Not-- Not just homosexuality,

but all-- issues of all sorts of sexuality.

I had argued of-- some years ago that...

eliminating homosexuality as a mental disorder

should bring down the whole house of cards

of using societal morality

as the basis of diagnosis.

And I said that, um, the para--

All of the paraphilias should also be eliminated.

The paraphilias are kinky sex.

And in the last, uh, edition of DSM,

what they did, they-- they said that-- that...

if you have a paraphilia, you're into feet,

let's say, or leather or, you know,

you do-- want to do strange things with another person,

it could only be diagnosed if you were unhappy about it.

But if you were pleased about it,

it couldn't be diagnosed.

While that's a stupid solution,

it does represent an advance because...

professional organizations move at a snail's pace, you see.

And so, I would expect that,

uh, a later addition will be eliminated completely.

Since 1979,

Jerry has been a professor of psychology

at the University of Southern California.

Through his research, teaching and scholarly publications,

he has continued to argue against conversion therapies.

His arguments have emphasized

the often unexamined values and biases

that therapists inevitably impose

on all of their patients,

not just those who happen to be gay.

To use the phrase of one of his mentors, Perry London,

"Therapists, whether they like it or not,

are society's secular priests.

They play a significant role

in guiding patients to a life worth living."

As for Charles, he founded two LGBTQ counseling centers,

The Journal of Homosexuality,

and published eight books about LGBTQ people

and the treatment of their problems without prejudice.

He now gives workshops on human sexuality

for the New York State Psychological Association

and has a small private practice in New York City.

He is a frequent commentator

on the medical and psychological bias

against people who practice kinky sex,

but is most well-known

for his contribution of eliminating homosexuality

as a mental disorder.

"To suggest that a person

comes voluntarily to change his sexual orientation

is to ignore the powerful environmental stress--

Oppression, if you will--

That has been telling him for years

that he should change."

"Even if we could effect certain changes,

there is still the more important question

of whether we should.

I believe we should not."