Treatment for homosexuality
It is dangerous to be different, and certain kinds of difference are especially risky. Race, disability, and sexuality are among the many ways people are socially marked that can make them vulnerable. The museum recently collected materials to document gay-conversion therapy (also called "reparative therapy")—and these objects allow curators like myself to search how real people encounter these risks. With the help of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., Garrard Conley gave us the workbook he used in at a now defunct religious gay-conversion camp in Tennessee, called "Love in Action." We also received materials from John Smid, who was camp director. Conley's memoir of his time there, Boy Erased, chronicles how the camp's conversion therapy followed the idea that creature gay was an addiction that could be treated with methods similar to those for abating drug, alcohol, gambling, and other addictions. While there, Conley spiraled into depression and suicidal thoughts. Conley eventually escaped. Smid eventually left Love in Action and married a man.
In the United States,
In , Regina Kunzel learned of an extraordinary collection of case files that had been salvaged from Saint Elizabeths Hospital, a federal institution for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C. These were records of people who had been in treatment with one of the hospital’s psychiatrists, Benjamin Karpman, for being gay or gender-variant, primarily in the s and ‘50s.
What made the files so valuable to Kunzel as a historian was Karpman’s unusual treatment method: He asked his patients to document . Write their experience stories, including details of their sexual encounters. Keep journals. Practice free-associative writing. Together, these thousands of pages of patient accounts offered key insights into how patients who were “treated” for being gay or transgender experienced psychiatric scrutiny.
The files inspired Kunzel’s new book, “In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Authority and Queer Life” (University of Chicago Press), which delves into the apply of psychiatry to treat queer and gender-variant people in the midth century.
“At a time when homosexuality was understood to co
The Lies and Dangers of Efforts to Change Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity
Organizational Positions on Reparative Therapy
Declaration on the Impropriety and Dangers of Sexual Orientation and Gender Culture Change Efforts
We, as national organizations representing millions of licensed medical and mental health care professionals, educators, and advocates, come together to express our professional and scientific consensus on the impropriety, inefficacy, and detriments of practices that seek to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, commonly referred to as “conversion therapy.”
We stand firmly together in support of legislative and policy efforts to curtail the unscientific and dangerous rehearse of sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts.
American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry
"The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry finds no evidence to endorse the application of any “therapeutic intervention” operating under the premise that a specific sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or gender statement is patho
Conversion Therapy and LGBT Youth
Polling also indicates that many people do not believe conversion therapy is effective; only 8% of respondents to a national poll said they thought conversion therapy could change a person’s sexual orientation from gay to straight.
Current Laws
Conversion Therapy by Licensed Health Care Professionals
As of June , 18 states and the District of Columbia had passed statutes limiting the use of conversion therapy: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. The laws protect youth under age 18 from receiving conversion therapy from licensed mental health care providers. California was the first articulate to pass a conversion therapy ban in Four states—Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, and New York—passed bans in In addition, a number of cities and counties in states without statewide bans have passed bans at the local level.
All of the state statutory bans allow licensing entities to discipline he