Are You Saying Homosexuality Is Normal?

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Charles Silverstein is a psychologist in private practice in Manhattan, New York. This paper is from the forthcoming book For the Ferryman.

Notes

¹ Editor's Note: According to sexual orientation disturbance (SOD) criteria, only those who were “bothered by,” “in conflict with,” or “wished to change” their homosexuality had a mental disorder. SOD, however, had two significant conceptual problems. First, the diagnosis could also apply to heterosexuals, a solution to APA's internal debate that did not quite concur with clinical reality. There were no reported cases of unhappy heterosexual individuals seeking psychiatric treatment to become gay or lesbian. This overinclusiveness was resolved in 1980's DSM-III where SOD was in turn replaced by ego-dystonic homosexuality (EDH). The name change, however, did not resolve a thornier conceptual issue, which was that of making patients' subjective experiences of their own homosexuality the determining factor of their illness. To rely upon patient subjectivity alone was now incongruous with the new evidence-based approach that psychiatry was embracing. This ultimately led, in 1987, to EDH being removed from the DSM-III-R. See Bayer, R. (1981), Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis. New York: Basic Books and Krajeski, J. (1996), Homosexuality and the Mental Health Professions. In: Textbook of Homosexuality and Mental Health, ed. R. P. Cabaj & T. S. Stein. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, pp. 17–31.