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Drescher and Merlino's American Psychiatry and Homosexuality: An Oral History offers readers a new experience. Earlier books
narrated the history of the depathologizing of homosexuality—sometimes as a political process (Bayer, 1981), and other times as a scientific paradigm shift (Rosario, 2002). Kenneth Lewes's (1988) masterwork, Psychoanalysis and Male Homosexuality, comprehensively integrated both perspectives. Yet this volume provides access to 17 verbatim interviews, enabling the reader to “visit” with activists—both gay and straight—who coalesced at a particular moment in social history. These men and women disturbed the medical establishment and provoked a leap in civil rights.
For instance, the book includes an interview with Robert Spitzer, who chaired the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Nomenclature Committee. He recalls the professional climate prior to 1973: “Pretty much everybody who was trained in those years took it for granted that homosexuality was not just an illness, but it was a very severe illness. It was considered not just an illness of sexual functioning, but really a widespread personality disturbance” (p. 99).
Gay psychoanalyst Bertram Schaffner describes how that belief system fostered a climate of distrust and fear. Homosexual physicians could lose their jobs, as Shaffner once did. He recounts that gay physicians could also lose their medical licenses for what was then called “moral turpitude” (p. 200).
We read the story of Stuart Nichols, Director of New York Beth Israel's Detoxification unit in the mid 1970s. Nichols recalls an evening when a distraught “macho” patient came to him in tears with a new awareness that he might be gay. Fearing his own exposure, Nichols recalls being unsympathetic, cold and nonreassuring to the patient. Nichols recalls feeling tormented two days later after learning that the patient had committed suicide.
In the book's pages we also learn of the secret community created in the midst of such danger. Prio