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American Psychiatry and Homosexuality: An Oral History, Edited by Jack Drescher, M.D. and Joseph P. Merlino, M.D., Harrington Park Press, New York & London, 2007,299 pp., $49.95.
Rarely is a psychiatric book described as captivating and inspiring, but American Psychiatry and Homosexuality: An Oral History is definitely both. In this wonderful collection of verbatim interviews with seventeen courageous individuals who contributed to the 1973 APA decision to declassify homosexuality as a psychiatric illness, the editors Jack Drescher and Joseph Merlino have provided a glimpse into a struggle for civil rights that has been largely unappreciated. As Barbara Gittings stated in her Preface to the book:
It's difficult to explain to anyone who didn't live through that time how much homosexuality was under the thumb of psychiatry. The sickness label was an albatross around the neck of our early gay rights groups-it infected all our work on the other issues. Anything we said on our behalf could be dismissed as "That's your sickness talking." The sickness label was used to justify discrimination, especially in employment, and especially by our own government.
Some brutal methods for curing us in vogue at one time included incarceration in mental hospitals, lobotomies, and aversion therapy. The latter is where they show you pictures of the "wrong" kind of sexual partner and give you an electric shock, and then show you pictures of a person you should like...