Healing the gays: a brief history of how homosexuality became an illness (original) (raw)

In a Christian symposium about conversion therapy practices through a religious approach, a so called 'ex-gay' claimed about himself: 'I felt it [where 'it' stands for sexual conversion from homosexuality to allegedly gained heterosexuality] it was what I had to do in order to gain a right to live on the planet.' The necessity to find a cure to our sexuality is basically due to social consent to an heteronormative perception of reality, of a life that must be considered as conventional by society and, thus, far from any kind of 'diversity' (Haldeman, 1994). This means that homosexuality is perceived as an illness from that kind of society that stigmatizes it, or something undesirable. As psychiatrist Bieber in 1962 said, homosexuality must be considered as a pathology, and consequenty it cannot be compatible with a happy life, and again, Nicolosi later will say 'I do not believe that gay lifestyle can ever be wealthy nor that the homosexual identity can ever be completely ego-syntonic" (Nicolosi, 1991, p. 13). Since homoeroticism is then an undesirable condition, there have been many ways to contain it. Gay people are induced to feel uncomfortable with their sexual orientation, and this is because of many different reasons: the social stigma and devaluation of homosexuality, gender roles of wives and husbands, religious values that make their sexual orientation incompatible with their beliefs, low self-esteem due to their homoerotic impulses, etc. The scope of this essay is to give a general introduction to how the practices of sexual conversion have developed throughout psychiatric history and how homosexuality has become an illness to cure, but at the same time I will try to examine the progress obtained from LGBT rights in order to recognize homosexuality not as a deficit to medicalize, but as a variable in human sexuality. Furthermore, after this research I am induced to think that the mixture of the boundaries between those which were considered as medical practices of conversion (and also the political and religious beliefs of those who worked in order to enact these conversion) are the living proof of how this system of adequacy to an heterosexual society had rather more moral than medical necessities. Especially in a span of time that goes from the 40s to the 70s of 20 th century, many medical practices were enacted in order to cure homosexual men and lesbian women who felt inadequacy with their sexual orientation. These treatments, that will all be considered as being part of the project of the so called 'sexual conversion therapy' or also 'reparative therapy', seeked to 'bring back' to the norm all the gay subjects exposed to it. A lack of faithful empirical data and the declassification, in 1970's, of homosexuality as a mental illness will gradually reduce trust into these therapies from the mainstream medical establishment.