Independent Lens

In the 1950s and '60s, we have psychiatrists ultimately calling homosexuality a mental illness. That diagnosis was used in many ways against gay people. To be viewed as psychologically disturbed is to be treated as a second-class citizen. If you wanna call attention to an issue and you wanna make a change, take it to the streets. Gay rights... is the solution! There was this growing rebellion against psychiatry. Soon, at psychiatric meetings, there were demonstrations. Take the damning label of sickness away from us. "Cured", now only on Independent Lens. Oh no oh oh, oh oh Oh oh oh Oh oh Production funding for Cured is provided by J.P. Morgan Chase We stand proud, today and everyday with the LBGT+ community. They can be anywhere. They can be policemen. They can be schoolteachers. They can be judges, lawyers. We ought to know, we've arrested all of them. And if we catch you with a homosexual, your parents are going to know about it first. And you will be caught. And the rest of your life will be a living hell.

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Most Americans are repelled by the mere notion of homosexuality. Homosexuals should be barred from the police department, the fire department, and teachers in our city schools. Two out of three Americans look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort or fear. I had one friend who was beaten savagely by his father. He beat him in fact, with bricks. We discovered that Americans favor legal punishment. A vast majority believe that homosexuality is an illness. And what do you suggest we could do about them? Give them homes like they do for the mentally insane. Homosexuality is, in fact, a mental illness, which has reached epidemiological proportions. Many psychiatrists now believe that homosexuality is learned behavior. And like almost anything else that is learned, it can be unlearned.

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I charge the psychiatric profession with creating a poisoned line of thinking about homosexuality. To be viewed as psychologically disturbed is to be treated as a second-class citizen. And being a second-class citizen is not good for my mental health. -

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Gay rights! - What's the solution? Revolution! - What's the fight? Gay rights! - What's the solution? Gay rights! - What's the fight?

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This was a sort of the selfie of the generation. It's a self-portrait. But I set up the camera and used a self-timer. Trying to look very cool as one was supposed to look in those days.

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When I was 16, I knew that I was gay. I couldn't tell my parents. I couldn't tell religious leaders. If it was exposed, you'd bring shame on your family. The word meant you were mentally ill. As a kid, just scared

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. I was in junior high school, and the word got out that I was a lesbian. Well, my mother was very upset with what she had heard. And her idea was, "This is not normal." And if I didn't consent to get married, that I would go to Utica. That was the mental institution. I got married at 14.

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Most people in those days, that's what they thought, you know, you get married, okay, you'd be cured. Or we're going to put you in the mental institution. It is very hard nowadays to have any awareness of how different the world was for gay people. In the 1950s and '60s, we had church deciding homosexuality was sinful, governments deciding that it was criminal. And then we had psychiatrists state that we were sick. Both of my parents were psychoanalysts, So I read the psychiatric literature in my teens and 20s. It said, "Gay people are universally nasty, "pathetic, psychotic, manipulative, superficial, unable to form real relationships." As a young gay person, that was devastating. I was wondering if you think that there are any "happy homosexuals"? The fact that somebody is homosexual automatically rules out the possibility that he will remain happy for long, in my opinion.

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Many of these psychiatrists from in charge of the American Psychiatric Association, or the APA. This was by far the most important psychiatric organization on Earth. It was the biggest. It was the richest. It was the most influential. And they had the power, ultimately calling homosexuality a mental illness in the first edition of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual" in 1952. The "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual," "DSM," lists all of the mental disorders. It's that list that defines who is sick and who is not. And in there is a section of sexual deviations. And homosexuality was at the top of the list. That diagnosis was used in many ways against gay people. You couldn't keep your own children, if you were in a marriage and found to be gay. You couldn't be a teacher. You couldn't be a judge or a banker or a head of an industry. That meant you were open to blackmail, which was very common. I wanted to be a psychiatrist. The only way of doing that was to stay in the closet. I was suicidal for a while, and I certainly was heavily clouded by the idea that if my parents, my friends, and my teachers all think it's an illness, can I really be all right about thinking that it's not? I was among the many who got married, because all the authority figures in the culture, the health care people all said, "Well, this is undesirable. This is a illness. And what's more, you could change it." Thousands of gay people went to psychiatrists to be cured, as if that were the main thing wrong in their life. The most typical treatment was talk therapy. But many gay people were subjected to more aggressive treatment.

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They were unable to cope with the fact that I was gay. And so they looked for a doctor who was going to cure me. And when I first saw him, I recall his statement to me that, "Well, we could castrate you. But let's try some treatments and see what we can do there." Next thing, I was going into a mental institution and receiving shock therapy. It was very frightening experience. We would wait for maybe an hour or two for your turn. With utter terror the clock would go and you'd have people-- someone would come and call the individuals and you knew when your turn was coming and how each time that you would hope against hope that it wasn't your turn yet, that there would be one more time before you had to go into the little room. You would go into a fairly small cubicle. A little machine would be wheeled into the room.

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And you're aware constantly of this little box over there, and what it's going to do to you. It will help you to get well. - No. That would be the last thing that I would recall would be just spinning wildly out of control, till you lose total consciousness.

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Many of us did have various treatments, including shock. I personally don't know anybody who was a friend of mine who underwent a lobotomy, but that did happen. Ready? Why did you have that operation, do you know? I think it was something to do with my, uh, sexual intercourse. Mm-hmm. It takes away memories. Chunks of a person's life are missing--forever. I saw things that anybody who hadn't been through, who couldn't allow themselves to believe could happen in this country. But it was, it was like, you know, a horror movie. I will never forget The time that we met There was spring in the air... In 1961, I was living in Boston. I had already decided that the psychiatrists were wrong and that their theories were just hogwash. And that's when I found the Daughters of Bilitis. Founded in 1955, the Daughters is the only national lesbian organization. They were planning a meeting in Rhode Island. Wow, I was so elated. I drove down, and I thought there'd be a lot of people. There were eight women all together. And there was Barbara Gittings, the lone organizer of this tiny band of people. And some of the women told her she should go after me. I was a cute little package. Well, she turned out to be my life partner, and we were together for 46 years. Two, four, seven nine, Lesbians are mighty fine. We were just together every step of the way in terms of the movement. I did the photography. And she was out there very much in the forefront. Barbara was a born leader. She wasn't intimidated by the shrinks, or Frank Kameny.

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Frank was out before people were out. He was part of the Mattachine Society, which is the grandfather of gay organizations. And, well, he was-- he was a showstopper. He was just so damn full of himself, and sure that he was right. But he really was the biggest brain in the movement. I came to Washington in 1956. I had my degrees in astronomy, and was able to get a job with the government until one day they said, "We have information which leads us to believe you are homosexual." So I was fired. And that made clear to me that there were issues that had to be fought. Every American citizen has the right to be considered by his government on the basis of his own personal merit as an individual. Eventually, I met Barbara Gittings. And we initiated picketing and demonstrating by gay people in April of 1965. This was a very, very, very tiny group. Nobody was expecting to see a bunch of homosexuals with signs proclaiming gay is good. One woman said, "Oh, they're all actors." It took a lot of guts to stand up and risk your job, your family, knowing that somebody from a news syndicate could put your picture on the front page of your hometown newspaper. We were seeking equality. And it was obvious enough that you couldn't expect equality to be granted to a bunch of loonies, which is what the psychiatry of that day made of us. So I decided to look at the issue. And I was absolutely appalled with what I found. Just a lot of shabby, shoddy, sleazy pseudoscience masquerading as science, poor sampling techniques. I mean, why would a happy gay person go to a psychiatrist? So all they saw were gay people who had problems. Frank was adamant about our getting out from under the sickness label. And not all activists agreed with him. They viewed it as impossible to fight, to take on this behemoth called the APA. Not Frank. Frank realized that a lot of psychiatrists hadn't really given the issue much thought, in a formal sense. Gay people came to them with various symptoms, and the rubric of the day was, "Well, this must be related to the fact that you have this terrible mental disorder called homosexuality, and we're going to work on that. That opposed a couple of very important moments in the history of psychiatry. Freud was not optimistic about curing homosexuality. In the letter to a mother, who wrote him about her son, he gave this account of his own view, "Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, "but it has nothing to be ashamed of. It cannot be classified as an illness." Freud had a relatively benign view of being gay. But when he died in 1939, a lot of his pupils begin to have divergent points of view. And they were bold enough to publish the view that Freud was wrong. Homosexuality could definitely be cured. And that became the status quo until 1948. Whoo, whoo, Dr. Kinsey Whoo, whoo, Dr. Kinsey The estimate given by Dr. Alfred Kinsey-- 18% of all American men have as much or more sexual experience with other men as with women. In other words, approximately 15 million men in this country have prolonged homosexual histories. No wonder Bill was always strange And kissed me with such poise When I asked him where he'd been, he'd say "Oh, out with the boys" Hey, hey, Dr. Kinsey He documented that there's a spectrum. And it went from straight to bisexual to totally gay. And we were all somewhere from zero to six on a Kinsey scale. Well, the conservative psychiatrists were horrified.

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Kinsey was pretty much discredited by psychiatry. At the time, we were a very conservative society. Citizens were expected to follow a very regimented path. You couldn't be gay and still be...normal. In the '60s, I was working as a fifth grade teacher in Westchester. I absolutely loved it. The kids loved me. But no way was I going to tell anyone that I was gay, because there was no question they would have thrown me out. And so I had to go to be cured. I decided to go see a psychiatrist three times a week, talking about how I should date women and go to bed with them. I continued to see analysts for about seven years. Nothing changed. And so I really started feeling pretty lost. But fortunately, the tidal wave was coming in. I think this must be the time For the revolution

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Think this must be the time for the revolution I called 1969 "The Next Frontier." There was a civil rights movement. The women's movement. People fighting against the war. And I was involved with a lot of the protests. I wasn't married anymore. And I was raising five children as a lesbian mother. Eventually, I became a minister. And then I started to get involved in the gay community. By that time, I knew that if you want to call attention to an issue, and you want to make a change, you're going to take it to the streets.

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Stonewall was a gay bar, and in those days, it was just a known fact that the cops could just come and raid the bars whenever they felt like it. But this night, there was so many of us that were at the same point, you know, enough is enough. We're not gonna take it anymore. Period. It was the people against the police. Black, white, Puerto Rican, transgender, drag queens. This was not a riot. This was an uprising. This went on right through the weekend. And that was when a lot of gay people started saying, "Yeah, we can do something. Yes, we can stand up. Yes, we can." Through demonstrations and political and educational pressure, the gay liberation movement is challenging a society that have abhors homosexuality. -

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Gay power! Gay power! Gay power! Very suddenly, the movement became bigger. We had some, what you call Young Turks, who started organizing different groups, helping the cause. Nearly everyone who is involved and had been active in civil rights or anti-war movement or the women's movement, so we were all experienced street activists. Gay people have the same right to protection as the minority, as any other minority in this city. I don't want you in my schools. I don't want you in my home. We had learned that you have to have righteous anger. It's essential to get what you want. We had to rise above our differences. I was always saying, you know, "Look, you're having a tough time over here 'cause you're gay, we're having a tough time over here 'cause we Black and gay."

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Gay rights! - What's the solution? Gay rights! - What's the fight? But we learned to stand up and fight together. And to see so many people get courage enough to come out of the closet-- that was, like, amazing.

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One day, I read in the "Village Voice" that the Gay Activists Alliance had dances at the firehouse on Wooster Street. Absolutely terrified. I drove down. And there was this long line of people. Okay, so I went in. It was absolutely wonderful.

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Everybody was having a good time. I'm laughing and joking. I realized, you know, "There isn't anything wrong with them. So there can't be anything wrong with me." And my world changed. I dropped my analyst, identified with the gay movement, and started fighting for our rights. I saw that there was this growing rebellion against psychiatry. There was a lot of resentment and fury about having to suffer that way. And gay liberation wanted to remove homosexuality from the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual." We knew nothing would ever change, as long as we were burdened with the sickness label. We had to go up against psychiatry and fight.

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In the spring of 1970, we became aware that the APA was going to have their convention in San Francisco. Someone from the inside got us press passes and we were able to get in the door quite easily. The APA convention was very intimidating. They were more than 10,000 psychiatrists. We went through the program, and there were two panels that caught our attention. The first was Dr. Bieber, who is a notoriously homophobic psychiatrist. We just let him proceed with his lecture. At a certain point, we started getting up and shouting at him, telling him he was barbaric and, you know, he was a mother

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. I think he was a little taken aback by that. And the other panel was a presentation about a treatment that was becoming more popular-- aversion therapy--which sometimes was gentle shock. Testing. For gay men, they would show slides of females and they wouldn't get a shock. And then, they'd show slides of males, and they would get a shock.

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And that would presumably make them attracted to females and adverse to males. There were people in our group who had been a victim of aversion therapy. These are the demands from the Gay Liberation Movement to the APA convention. "There is no cure for that which is not a disease. Psychiatrists who promise cure with lobotomies, castration and brainwashing techniques are sadistic. And the system that supports them must be abolished. It had an impact, and soon at psychiatric meetings, there were demonstrations, if not, in fact, riots. In every major city, something happened. In Chicago. In Atlanta. And New York. And Boston. At one convention, I was with Barbara Gittings, and our people all came in and proceeded to invade the ordination of all the new psychiatrists. Well, there was a group of elderly psychiatrists, and they were wearing honorary gold medals and ribbons. And they proceeded to attack the invaders and beat them over the head with their gold medals. Literally. And chase them all back out the door. The whole thing was going to fade away if something wasn't done. So I marched up, climbed up on the platform, and I proceeded to denounce them while they shook their fists at me and called me a Nazi. And I said I'm a scientist by training and background, and if they felt it was a disturbance or disorder or a pathology, fine, let them present their good sound, solid scientific evidence to show it, and they never did. The demonstrations shocked the American Psychiatric Association enormously, and organized psychiatry was scuttling for safety. Well, they didn't realize, "Well, to some people, this is a matter of serious, serious concern in their lives." When gay liberation came along, I was a doctoral student at UCLA. And there was some sense that something was gonna change for me. In October of 1970, this big conference was happening in Los Angeles. I got up and walked up to the front of the room, to the stage, and I took the microphone. The doctor takes it back. What they didn't expect was me to grab that from him, and we were going to talk, not them. We're going to be talking about what you are going to do to clear up your own

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minds.

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We have been listening to you for years. Now, you listen to us! Mental institution? Bull

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! Shock Therapy? No, thank you. What is very clear to us today, what you people out there call "free speech," in fact, has been a monologue for over a half century. We explained we would break down into small groups because they had never sat down and talked with gay people. Where the shrinkologists weren't in charge. Gay and lesbian people. We're saying, "We are the experts in our lives, and we will tell you what it's like being gay." And the shrinkologists are listening to these gay people. There was true dialogue taking place.

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To the avenues of protest, confrontation and dialogue, gay activists have had success in persuading some well-respected psychiatrists to reevaluate their thinking in relation to homosexuality. I don't believe that psychiatry should come through to individuals in a moral, judgmental, or religious way. We are interested in helping the individual homosexual. The despair you create, sir, in burying the homosexual and taking him out of the realm of medicine and psychiatry, I would say is much worse. I am for civil rights. I was the first psychiatrist-- Charles Socarides became the most vigorous proponent of homosexuality as an illness that's treatable and curable. And he would say often that he's for civil liberties and equal protection of people who are homosexual. But the fact of the matter is, his own writings were precisely the arguments used by people who want to deny homosexuals equal protection. Charles Socarides had a very thriving private practice treating gay people and offering them the cure. His first book on the subject was called "The Overt Homosexual," and it was dedicated to me and my sister. Charles Socarides was my dad. We lived in a townhouse on East 78th Street, and his office where he saw patients was in the downstairs and my bedroom was on the top floor. When he was three flights below, attempting a cure for homosexuality, you know, I was upstairs being a young homosexual, experimenting along the way as high school students do with early sexual experiences. And it never occurred to me that this was something you could alter or change. It just was. I was very careful and quiet about it. I felt that if my homosexuality became public, it could be embarrassing to him and it could bring unwanted, you know, notoriety to me. I mean, I was as much afraid for him as I was for myself. I suggested to the government that a National Center for Sexual Rehabilitation be started, in which a great deal of research and treatment and training must be done.

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Activism lit the spark. But it was clear that a huge majority still agreed with Socarides. Somebody somewhere had to start within the American Psychiatric Association to advance the idea that being gay or lesbian should be taken off the terminology and not be considered a mental illness. We formed an unofficial group of sort of Young Turks, who decided we will try to help reform the APA. This was a very small number of psychiatrists from around the country, who were mostly very young and unknown. Our first priority was to make some allies who were senior, smart, recognized. Then we started figuring out how to get some of those people elected to the Board of Trustees, which had the ultimate power in the APA. And that was essential to getting anything changed. Less than a decade ago, a national poll showed that 2/3rds of the American people feared and hated homosexuals. But now if the success of books, magazines and movies about homosexuals is any indication, that attitude is changing.

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Do you know what the word homosexual means? They say it's a sickness that has to be cured. I don't want to talk about it. Damn it, look at me. Does that change me so much? I'm still your father. Ben and I aren't getting married. He's not my type. He's not your type? He's witty, he's attractive. He's successful. He's gay. By being so open about it, by the media publicizing it, it helped to bring a fresh breeze into the movement and to people so that they could talk about it.

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Good evening and welcome. My name is David Susskind. Tonight, our subject is homosexuality. Is it a sickness or a preferred lifestyle? Oh, David. Because it's one of those human illnesses that I don't choose to educate my children to detail that. - David. Why do you have such a vested interest in trying to channel people? Narrow down? To program them for this one thing, this one way of life? To conform? I'll told you why several times, and the audience hoots and howls and you refute it and deny it, and that has to do with the body of medical evidence suggests---

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Isn't it possible that the body of medical evidence could not, have made a mistake? It is possible, yes. Not only possible, I'm almost sure of it.

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David... See, that was always where I was coming from. I'm not gonna allow you to dictate to me about who I am. I know who I am. Yes, maybe it makes you feel good to be able to say that we're a sickness. Does it make you feel good? - Of course not, Reverend Kennedy. - And I say that the body of knowledge which claims sickness for homosexuality has to be challenged.

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At that point in time, we started pressing for meetings in public forums where we could challenge the sickness label. Some well-regarded psychiatrists started to go to bat for us. So the APA finally agreed. They gave us a really good platform at their annual meeting in Dallas. There would be two psychiatrists, and they invited Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings. Well, when I heard about the plans for this, I said, "Well, you know, what you need is one person who is both a psychiatrist and gay." I got a call from Barbara Gittings. She said, "John, I'm looking for a psychiatrist to testify what it is like to be a gay psychiatrist." My first reaction was, "No way." He said, "I will lose my job, my medical license. "There's still a lot of homophobia in the American Psychiatric Association."

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John came to Philadelphia in 1964 to start a residency at the University of Pennsylvania. He ran into terrible homophobia there, and he got fired for being gay. He wanted to help with the 1972 meeting in Dallas but had to protect himself. He said, "I'll do it only on condition "that I can wear a wig and a mask, and use a voice distorting microphone." And Dr. John Fryer became Dr. H. Homosexual Anonymous. And I could hardly believe it. I could have fallen off my chair. And we thought he would have a nice little mask like Lone Ranger. No, he was in this grotesque, big mask. A big wig on. It looked more like Halloween than anything else. We were all very concerned about how this would go over. I thought this tape was lost to history. I'm a homosexual. I'm a psychiatrist. It's time that real flesh and blood stand up before this organization and ask to be listened to and understood. I am in disguise tonight in order that I might speak freely. What is it like to be a homosexual who is also a psychiatrist? Many of us work 20 hours daily to protect institutions who would literally chew us up and spit us out if they knew the truth. We're taking even bigger risks, however, in not living fully our humanity with all the lessons it has to teach all the other humans around us. This is the greatest loss, our honest humanity. He represented all the people who were hiding and invisible. And it turned out to be just enormously powerful. It was a game changer. It really got some of the psychiatrists rethinking their position. According to Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, the Gay Activists Alliance recently requested and received an opportunity to present their views before the APA Nomenclature Committee. I lit up like a incandescent bulb, because I knew that was the committee that decided what went in the DSM and what didn't. I was studying to get a PhD in clinical psychology. So I was asked to make the professional presentation on a theory and research about homosexuality. Dr. Silverstein was making the case that we had overlooked a great deal of existing research that contradicted the view that homosexuality was an illness. One part was about Evelyn Hooker's research paper from 1956. Evelyn Hooker was a psychologist. Her research consisted of giving a series of tests to some people who were gay and some who were heterosexual.

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I was using for the interpretation of those tests, the best experts I could find in the country whose capacity to interpret those tests was internationally known. And the experienced interpreters couldn't distinguish the gay people from the straight people. Which means there's no difference in the pathology between the gay men and the straight men. But this was the 1950s. Conservatism still dominated the country. But by the early '70s, things changed, and new psychiatrists listened with a more sympathetic ear. What we are saying is that you must choose between the undocumented theories that have unjustly harmed a great number of people or the control scientific studies cited here. He really caught the attention of everybody, because you could not dispute one word of what he said. The pressure within the APA built for some reassessment to happen. And Bob Spitzer became a crucial person in helping the APA debate the illness question. And it was his idea that we should have this big panel at the next convention, where, for the first time, all of the opposing sides in this fight were to get a chance to directly address each other and discuss their positions on homosexuality. Aloha, welcome to Honolulu and the 126th Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.

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A homosexual reported to me, "I've got to get this homosexual monkey off my back. I just frankly can't live with it." That is why some of us treat homosexuals. If our judgment about the mental health of heterosexuals were based only on those whom we see in our clinical practices, we would have to conclude that all heterosexuals are also mentally ill. The homosexuality is not a normal variant of sexual functioning. I have never seen a male homosexual who has an intact sense of masculinity. The worst thing about your diagnosis is that gay people believe it. Nothing makes you sick like believing that you're sick. Socarides and Bieber argued vigorously, but Ron Gold--I've never forgotten the title of his paper. He got up there, and he yelled out... "Stop it! You're making me sick!" -

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He gave a very amusing presentation, but had cold hard fact. He told it like it is. "The illness theory of homosexuality is a pack of lies concocted out of the midst of a patriarchal society for a political purpose." Psychiatry dedicated to making sick people well, is the cornerstone of a system of oppression that makes gay people sick. And my anger isn't turned inward. It's focused outward toward my oppressors, including those of you who think you have the right to decide that perfectly happy people who don't do the slightest harm to themselves or anybody else are sick. Take the damning label of sickness away from us. Take us out of your nomenclature. When the whole lot of them applauded and gave me a standing ovation, I was flabbergasted. That was a real debate. Major things were said. It was talked about in that tone of voice in Hawaii and for the next few months. At the same time, in parallel, we nominated people to be presidents of the APA, several vice presidents, several secretaries, several treasurers. Some of these people were then elected to positions of power. And we hoped that with a more reasonable board, we could get the APA to say, "Yes, you're right. We're not only wrong, but we've been harming people." Gay is good. Gay is good!

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Gay is proud! We are seeing, close to my heart, the psychiatrists on the run.

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Keep them running! Are homosexuals mentally sick? Or have they merely chosen an alternative lifestyle? The psychiatric profession will soon decide. A proposal to change the nomenclature has started its way through the American Psychiatric Association. This was one of the most considered issues in APA history. It was considered by councils, committees, other councils, district branch, assembly, back to district branches, back to assembly. And we needed an effort where we had to be tolerant of both politics and science. And the APA was trying to do that. The Board of Trustees was trying to do that.

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This was a revolutionary moment in which homosexuality per se was not a mental disorder. Millions were cured with a stroke of a pen. We were overwhelmed with joy. We couldn't believe it. I thought we'd be fighting forever. But then suddenly, boom. Psychoanalysts, especially Socarides and Bieber, thought that this was an assault on psychoanalysis and they started referendum by petition to overturn it. And they raised enough signatures so that the APA had to poll the members. Socarides' idea was that most psychiatrists still believed that gay people were sick. And of course, the irony of his own son being gay didn't deter Socarides at all. Years later, I finally had to corner him into seeing him in his office. I said, "Dad, you know, "this is something that we both known for a long time, "but I need to, like, actually tell you that I'm gay. That I'm attracted to men." And he had a momentary violent reaction where he pulled out a gun and put it to his head. He didn't pull the trigger. I'm sure it wasn't loaded. But said like, you know, "You can't do this to me." What I needed to do I accomplished by telling him. And that was it. The vote really concerned us because no one was sure whether most psychiatrists were in favor of dropping homosexuality from the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual." The American Psychiatric Association announced today that its membership has voted to remove homosexuality from the Association's list of mental disorders. In the mail referendum, 58% of the membership upheld the earlier decision by the APA's board. Homosexual organizations see the referendum vote as a landmark decision. In the words of one such organization, "The greatest gay victory." This albatross that had been around our neck was finally lifted. It was as though the world had dropped off our shoulders. The word spread very quickly and the effect was electric. And of course, when we got the result, we hooted and hollered and jumped up and down. I heard it on the radio. Then I went out and bought a bottle of champagne. I thought it was time to celebrate. Yeah.

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Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the CEO and Medical Director of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Saul Levin. The fact that I'm here truly shows that APA is way past that discrimination that they did all those years back. I'm a psychiatrist, and I'm a homosexual. I go where it's not even mentioned that I'm gay, you know. It's if anything, that's the accent that gets mentioned more than anything else. And isn't that the real ultimate victory of what all those heroes back there did? Being in a social change movement, you always hope that what you're doing will be significant and will live on and lead to better things. But you don't know for sure. You're taking a chance. Was surprising how important it turned out to be. It has allowed laws to change, people's attitudes to change, and people's tolerance to change. Through all of this, we didn't want kids growing up feeling bad about themselves. And I think we all felt that. That we were doing it for younger generations, not just for ourselves. We've lived through the fire We've run through the rain We've walked on a wire We fought through the pain We'll accept every step Till the death of desire We'll persist through the twists With our fists we are fire I know That we ain't gonna slow or stop Until we go-oh To the other side of the rainbow Oh We'll be there with the clouds on top The day we go-oh To the other side of the rainbow

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