This weekend on This American Life, a replay of 81 Words:

The story of how the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness.

In 1973 I was a young runaway still in Harrisburg, PA. After a serious auto accident that my parents used as an excuse to try to commit me, a psychiatrist threw his card on my hospital bed and said I could get help if ever I wanted it. Months later I went to that clinic and cried, “I’m a homosexual, please fix me.”

The psychiatrist answered, “Why do you think you need fixing?”

Dumb luck Good fortune had me sitting with a founder of New York City’s Identity House, an organization set up in 1971 to find the few therapists who knew even then that homosexuality was a normal, healthy human expression, not a “neurotic adaptation.” Decades later I would myself become an Identity House counselor and serve on their board.

Once before when This American Life reran the episode, I was moved to transcribe this section, on the pioneering work of Dr. Evelyn Hooker:

[35:34] …Until Evelyn Hooker met Sam From. Evelyn was a psychologist at UCLA and Sam was her student. He was also a homosexual. They started spending time together in the mid 1940s and Sam introduced Evelyn to his group of friends most of whom, like Sam, were gay.

Now, as I said, everyone in this group was homosexual but curiously, none was in therapy. They were all well-adjusted young men who utterly failed to conform to the traditional psychiatric image of the tortured, disturbed homosexual.

This, naturally, got Evelyn thinking.

Now, prior to Evelyn Hooker, all of the research on homosexuality – all of it – was done on people who were already under serious psychiatric treatment. Let me repeat that: In the history of psychiatric research, no one had every conducted a study on a homosexual population that wasn’t either in therapy, in prison, a mental hospital, or the disciplinary barracks off the armed services.

Evelyn thought about this and decided that this kind of research was distorting psychiatry’s conclusions about homosexual populations. To test her theory, Evelyn came up with an experiment. Through her former student she located 30 homosexuals who had never sought therapy in their lives and matched those homosexuals with a group of heterosexuals of comparable age, IQ and education.

Evelyn then put both groups through a battery of psychological tests including a Rorschach Test, the famous ink-blot test. After disguising her subjects, Evelyn gave the results to three experienced psychiatrists and asked them to identify the homosexuals. She figured that if homosexuals were inherently pathological, the psychiatrists would be able to pick them out easily. But the judges were completely unable to distinguish the homos from the hets.

Equally important was the fact that the judges categorized two thirds of the homosexuals and the heterosexuals as perfectly well-adjusted normally functioning human beings.

Hooker’s study challenged the idea that homosexuality was a pathology in the first place, and in doing this it not only called into question an entire generation of research on homosexuality, it also challenged psychiatry’s basic concept of disease. If you believed Hooker’s data the only conclusion you could come to was that psychiatry was deciding that certain behaviors were diseases, not out of any sort of scientific proof, but based on their own prejudices.

Beside Evelyn Hooker, psychiatrists who wanted to change the DSM really had only one other scientific study on their side: Alfred Kinsey’s famous 1948 sex survey which found that a whopping 37% of all men had had physical contact to the point of orgasm with other men, a finding which – besides shocking the hell out of 63% of the American public – seemed to suggest that homosexual acts were too common to be considered a disease.

In spite of all this work, psychiatry continued to maintain that the homos were sick and steadfastly refused to reevaluate the DSM. And then luck, or maybe fate, intervened.

When I finally made my way to film school in the late 1980s, I worked as an intern on the documentary Before Stonewall with my friend Greta Schiller. I was lucky to meet and interview a good number of the pioneers of the early gay rights movement in America. Evelyn was in that film. While I did not have the opportunity to meet her, she became a hero of mine. She remains one still.