This paper is a brief 50th anniversary historical note. In December 1973, The American psychiatric Association, after much deliberation, removed homosexuality per se as a diagnosis from its diagnostic and statistical manual (DSM). This turned out to be an influential step in the de-pathologizing of homosexuality. This paper describes some of the climate around homosexuality before December 1973, and some contributions to that 1973 change, inside and beyond psychiatry and psychoanalysis, before and during the early 1970s. The paper also includes some notes on the workings of the APA and on the author’s participation in the change.