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Bonus Episode: When Being Queer Was A Mental Illness · Political Junkie Podcast

0:01
SPEAKER_01: Come on, let's go.
0:03
SPEAKER_01: By shortwave broadcast direct from important overseas capitals,
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SPEAKER_01: we are about to broadcast this moment in our history.
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SPEAKER_01: Hello and welcome to the History Workshop podcast.
0:20
SPEAKER_01: I'm Mary Beth Hamilton.
0:22
SPEAKER_01: Fifty years ago,
0:23
SPEAKER_01: on the 15th of December 1973,
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SPEAKER_01: the American Psychiatric Association's Board of Trustees voted unanimously to
0:32
SPEAKER_01: remove what it called homosexuality per se from the Diagnostic and Statistical
0:38
SPEAKER_01: Manual of Mental Disorders.
0:41
SPEAKER_01: That act of declassification was by any standard an astonishing reversal of decades
0:47
SPEAKER_01: of medical theory and a stunning victory for the still-nascent gay liberation movement.
0:54
SPEAKER_01: As the activist Frank Kameny put it,
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SPEAKER_01: it marked the moment when millions of gay men and women went to bed suffering a
1:01
SPEAKER_01: mental illness and woke up to find themselves cured en masse.
1:07
SPEAKER_01: This week,
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SPEAKER_01: as we approach the 55th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots,
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SPEAKER_01: we take a fresh look at the relationship between queer life and psychiatric power.
1:18
SPEAKER_01: For much of the 20th century,
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SPEAKER_01: American psychiatrists defined homosexuality as a diagnosable,
1:26
SPEAKER_01: treatable mental disorder,
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SPEAKER_01: a disease that was amenable to psychiatric cure.
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SPEAKER_01: That claim gave them enormous authority as arbiters of gender normativity,
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SPEAKER_01: a fact that recent historians haven't been slow to point out.
1:42
SPEAKER_01: Yet,
1:43
SPEAKER_01: in building that critique,
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SPEAKER_01: historians by and large have had to rely on their reading of psychiatric literature.
1:50
SPEAKER_01: Far more elusive,
1:51
SPEAKER_01: far less recoverable,
1:53
SPEAKER_01: have been the decades of real-life encounters between queer and gender-variant
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SPEAKER_01: people and the psychiatrists they willingly or otherwise turned to for treatment.
2:04
SPEAKER_01: Pretty much by definition, those encounters ordinarily left no trace.
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SPEAKER_01: That heretofore inaccessible history of psychiatric encounters is the subject of a
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SPEAKER_01: new book titled In the Shadow of Diagnosis,
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SPEAKER_01: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life,
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SPEAKER_01: written by the historian Regina Kunzel.
2:27
SPEAKER_01: The book examines the history,
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SPEAKER_01: dynamics,
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SPEAKER_01: and lingering impact of the psychiatric pathologization of homosexuality as a
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SPEAKER_01: mental illness,
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SPEAKER_01: its impact both on the psychiatric profession and on the queer and gender variant
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SPEAKER_01: people who ran up against it.
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SPEAKER_01: At the heart of the book is a newly discovered archival collection,
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SPEAKER_01: the files of Benjamin Cartman,
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SPEAKER_01: a Washington DC psychiatrist who treated queer patients by encouraging them to write.
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SPEAKER_01: What resulted were thousands of pages of detailed accounts of their lives,
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SPEAKER_01: their histories,
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SPEAKER_01: their response to their treatment,
3:08
SPEAKER_01: and their sense of themselves as human beings.
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SPEAKER_01: The lives and subjectivities opened up by those documents allows the book to raise fresh,
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SPEAKER_01: provocative,
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SPEAKER_01: and sometimes unsettling questions about what it means to live with pathology and
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SPEAKER_01: stigma
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SPEAKER_01: about the links between queer and disability histories,
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SPEAKER_01: about the enduring afterlife of the psychiatric equation of queerness and sickness,
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SPEAKER_01: and about some of the costs of gay liberation rhetoric predicating gay people's
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SPEAKER_01: worth and entitlement to full citizenship on assertions of their mental health.
3:50
SPEAKER_01: I sat down with Regina Kunzel to talk about this complex and surprising history.
3:57
SPEAKER_01: I began by asking her about the extraordinary document collection that lies at the heart of the book.
4:04
SPEAKER_00: So I've never begun a project with sources rather than a historical question.
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SPEAKER_00: But that was the case with this book.
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SPEAKER_00: And my access to those sources were just a stroke of great luck.
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SPEAKER_00: I just started a new job.
4:19
SPEAKER_00: at the University of Minnesota.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: And I got a call one day from a guy named Gene Tretter,
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SPEAKER_00: who was the founder of the LGBT studies collection in his name at the university,
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SPEAKER_00: the Tretter collection.
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SPEAKER_00: And Gene was really interested in acquiring a collection for the library.
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SPEAKER_00: And he said he needed my help making the case that it was historically significant.
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SPEAKER_00: And so he came to my office and he showed me
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SPEAKER_00: just a sample from it.
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SPEAKER_00: And it was a file about an inch thick.
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SPEAKER_00: It was a big file of somebody who he told me had been institutionalized at St.
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SPEAKER_00: Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C.
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SPEAKER_00: for being gay.
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SPEAKER_00: St.
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SPEAKER_00: Elizabeth's is the only federal mental institution.
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SPEAKER_00: And he told me, Gene told me that it was one of over 100 such files that had been discovered by
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SPEAKER_00: a contractor who'd been hired to salvage the ruins of the hospital looking for
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SPEAKER_00: historically significant materials.
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SPEAKER_00: The contractor was really looking for material in Ezra Pound,
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SPEAKER_00: who'd been a patient there for over a decade.
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SPEAKER_00: But instead, he found this file cabinet full of these files.
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SPEAKER_00: His name is Jim Kane,
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SPEAKER_00: and he understood the significance of what he found and really worked to find an
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SPEAKER_00: appropriate home for them.
5:38
SPEAKER_00: And so he had read about the Treader Collection and contacted Gene.
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SPEAKER_00: And it,
5:42
SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: it took some persuading and some working out with how to handle these very
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SPEAKER_00: sensitive materials.
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SPEAKER_00: But eventually the files were acquired by the University of Minnesota and I was
5:51
SPEAKER_00: invited to be the first to look at them and essentially to process the collection.
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SPEAKER_00: I also never processed an archival collection before.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: And so it was in that sort of first pass that I realized that the collection,
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SPEAKER_00: the thing that held the collection together was that they were all patients of this psychiatrist,
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SPEAKER_00: Benjamin Cartman.
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SPEAKER_00: They had all either sought or were compelled to undertake psychiatric treatment of
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SPEAKER_00: some kind for gender and sexual difference.
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SPEAKER_00: And then the truly extraordinary thing about the collection is that Cartman was
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SPEAKER_00: invited his patients to write.
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SPEAKER_00: And so they wrote autobiographies, sometimes very long ones.
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SPEAKER_00: They wrote diaries.
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SPEAKER_00: They recorded their dreams.
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SPEAKER_00: They answered questionnaires.
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SPEAKER_00: They wrote reviews of psychiatric texts.
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SPEAKER_00: Just an extraordinary body of sources that,
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SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: for historians,
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SPEAKER_00: lets us get at questions that are so often completely elusive to us,
6:54
SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: which is out of marginalized subjects experience.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: experience things like this.
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SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, those sources, the book eventually widened its consideration.
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SPEAKER_00: Those sources, though, are right at the heart of it and the thing that inspired the book.
7:10
SPEAKER_01: Right.
7:11
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
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SPEAKER_01: Extraordinary.
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SPEAKER_01: And was this,
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SPEAKER_01: I mean,
7:14
SPEAKER_01: this subject did,
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SPEAKER_01: it wasn't a departure from you in the sense that it took you into an entirely new area,
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SPEAKER_01: but it gave you a different sort of access to it than you might otherwise have had,
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SPEAKER_01: right?
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SPEAKER_00: It gave me a kind of access that I never could have imagined having.
7:31
SPEAKER_00: I've worked on 20th century queer history in the US,
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SPEAKER_00: but it wasn't immediately clear to me how this was related to other work that I'd done.
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SPEAKER_00: Although the carceral aspects of the history started coming into view for me,
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SPEAKER_00: some of the people in the collection
7:51
SPEAKER_00: You know, we're carcerally committed in the most literal sense.
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SPEAKER_00: And even those who weren't formally incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals often
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SPEAKER_00: experienced them as carceral.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: And,
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SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: in the course of my research beyond the files,
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SPEAKER_00: I came to realize that these most sort of violent cases,
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SPEAKER_00: methods of psychiatric treatment, you know, in lobotomy and electroconvulsive shock.
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SPEAKER_00: Usually those happened in carceral settings rather than clinical ones.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: And so,
8:23
SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: a story that I initially thought would be,
8:25
SPEAKER_00: you know,
8:26
SPEAKER_00: in conversation with history of medicine or the history of gay politics is also,
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SPEAKER_00: also ended up being a story about U.S.
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SPEAKER_00: state and carceral power.
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SPEAKER_00: And so that's, I guess, I guess carcerality is a, is a connection I can
8:40
SPEAKER_00: draw across my work.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: You know,
8:42
SPEAKER_00: there's probably a stronger connection is that it really extends my interest in
8:49
SPEAKER_00: people who are stigmatized in some way,
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SPEAKER_00: so who are defined as social problems.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: And then the way that people sort of inhabit those spaces and navigate stigma and exclusion,
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SPEAKER_00: try to figure that out.
9:01
SPEAKER_01: So,
9:02
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
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SPEAKER_01: Benjamin Cartman does sound like an extraordinarily,
9:06
SPEAKER_01: I don't even know what the word is,
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SPEAKER_01: certainly unusual clinician,
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SPEAKER_01: practitioner.
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SPEAKER_01: What do you know about him?
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SPEAKER_01: And more generally,
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SPEAKER_01: I mean,
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SPEAKER_01: what can you infer about the assumptions that he was making in terms of,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: especially in terms of how it contrasted with his peers?
9:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00: Cartman was a Russian Jew who immigrated to the U.S.
9:30
SPEAKER_00: in the early 20th century.
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SPEAKER_00: He earned a graduate degree at the University of Minnesota,
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SPEAKER_00: which is just a kind of weird,
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SPEAKER_00: very weird and lovely coincidence for me,
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SPEAKER_00: since that's where his papers are.
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SPEAKER_00: landed.
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SPEAKER_00: He was hired at St.
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SPEAKER_00: Elizabeth's Hospital by psychiatrist William Allen White,
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SPEAKER_00: who was one of the first American psychiatrists to really embrace psychoanalysis
9:51
SPEAKER_00: after Freud's visit,
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SPEAKER_00: and to imagine that psychoanalysis might be practiced in state institutions as well
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SPEAKER_00: as private clinics.
9:57
SPEAKER_00: And so Cartman wouldn't have been unusual in that.
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SPEAKER_00: There were people doing that.
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SPEAKER_00: Cartman was immediately intrigued by psychoanalysis.
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SPEAKER_00: He traveled to Vienna and was analyzed by Wilhelm Steckel.
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SPEAKER_00: And then he spent the rest of his career treating patients at St.
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SPEAKER_00: Elizabeth's and in his own private clinical practice until he retired in the early 60s.
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SPEAKER_00: He described himself as a kind of unorthodox, eclectic Freudian.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: And in that way, he was not unusual at all among psychiatrists and his enthusiasm for psychoanalysis.
10:29
SPEAKER_00: This was a time of huge excitement about psychoanalysis.
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SPEAKER_00: really the ascendance of psychoanalysts in American psychiatry.
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SPEAKER_00: And so the most intellectually ambitious or intellectually curious psychiatrist
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SPEAKER_00: would have gone into psychoanalysis,
10:45
SPEAKER_00: would have gone that route.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: What was unusual about Cartman,
10:48
SPEAKER_00: I think,
10:49
SPEAKER_00: and as far as I can tell,
10:51
SPEAKER_00: maybe unique,
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SPEAKER_00: was his practice of asking his patients to write.
10:56
SPEAKER_00: And
10:57
SPEAKER_00: I don't really have a sense of how he came up with that method.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: One of his patients referred to it not very charitably as therapy by correspondence,
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SPEAKER_00: but it means that this dynamic,
11:08
SPEAKER_00: these relationships between psychiatrist and patient,
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SPEAKER_00: which would ordinarily leave no historical trace at all,
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SPEAKER_00: end up producing boxes and boxes of archival documents.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: I guess the other thing that I would say about Kirtman that was striking to me about him
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SPEAKER_00: and may or may not have distinguished him from other practitioners at the time,
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SPEAKER_00: is that he really evolved in his thinking about homosexuality in particular through
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SPEAKER_00: his work with gay and gender-variant people.
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SPEAKER_00: So Cartman, of course, lived and worked in Washington, D.C.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: That was really ground zero for what historians have called the Lavender Scare,
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SPEAKER_00: happening at the same time as purge of gay men and lesbians from federal employment,
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SPEAKER_00: kind of wave of post-war violence.
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SPEAKER_00: Repression that linked communism and homosexuality in these years.
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SPEAKER_00: And so Cartman's patients would have been people who experienced that kind of
12:03
SPEAKER_00: terror and the real dramatic increase of policing of gay life in DC.
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SPEAKER_00: And you can see in his work,
12:11
SPEAKER_00: mostly in his unpublished work and the memos that he wrote to patients,
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SPEAKER_00: you can see that he's aware of the conditions.
12:18
SPEAKER_00: under which they're living.
12:19
SPEAKER_00: You can see that he's critical of them.
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SPEAKER_00: He calls what's happening a witch hunt.
12:23
SPEAKER_00: And then you can also see in his writing the kind of diminishing of either his
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SPEAKER_00: belief that he can cure gay people and convert them,
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SPEAKER_00: or maybe his faith in the wisdom of it or the ethics of it.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: And so,
12:38
SPEAKER_00: you know,
12:39
SPEAKER_00: I came across this extraordinary line in one of his memos in which he wrote about
12:44
SPEAKER_00: gay people,
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SPEAKER_00: perhaps the best way to treat them is to leave them alone.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: And that does seem unusual among his peers.
12:53
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
12:54
SPEAKER_01: you're already kind of alluding to it,
12:55
SPEAKER_01: but I think one of the things that really struck me about the book is that these
13:01
SPEAKER_01: documents make it possible for you to focus on encounters,
13:05
SPEAKER_01: on psychiatric encounters,
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SPEAKER_01: and you highlight that in your
13:08
SPEAKER_01: your introduction and encounters by definition involve two people.
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SPEAKER_01: And you've already spoken about the way that he was changed by these encounters.
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SPEAKER_01: But I wondered if you want to elaborate on that and just what,
13:21
SPEAKER_01: well,
13:22
SPEAKER_01: first of all,
13:22
SPEAKER_01: what an encounter is as you are setting it out in the book and what it generates,
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SPEAKER_01: what looking for that kind of scenario generates for you.
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SPEAKER_00: So I started using the word encounter,
13:34
SPEAKER_00: I think,
13:35
SPEAKER_00: pretty unreflectedly without thinking about it very much.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: I knew I wanted a term that was pretty capacious,
13:42
SPEAKER_00: that could capture,
13:43
SPEAKER_00: you know,
13:45
SPEAKER_00: literal encounter of the literal meeting of queer and gender variant people with
13:49
SPEAKER_00: actual psychiatrists.
13:51
SPEAKER_00: and treatment,
13:52
SPEAKER_00: but I wanted a word that could also capture,
13:54
SPEAKER_00: you know,
13:55
SPEAKER_00: people who encountered those ideas in other ways,
13:57
SPEAKER_00: people who read about them.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: And,
14:00
SPEAKER_00: you know,
14:00
SPEAKER_00: unlike,
14:01
SPEAKER_00: say,
14:02
SPEAKER_00: in the late 19th century,
14:03
SPEAKER_00: when there is medical writing about homosexuality,
14:06
SPEAKER_00: it would have been really easy to avoid knowing about,
14:11
SPEAKER_00: to remaining ignorant of that literature.
14:15
SPEAKER_00: I think it would have been impossible to avoid learning about psychoanalytic ideas, in particular,
14:21
SPEAKER_00: in the 40s, 50s, 60s.
14:23
SPEAKER_00: So I wanted a word that would capture that.
14:27
SPEAKER_00: Then I thought,
14:27
SPEAKER_00: well,
14:28
SPEAKER_00: I should really actually think more about what an encounter is,
14:31
SPEAKER_00: what I mean by that.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: And the writing that was most helpful to me in that were historians of imperialism
14:38
SPEAKER_00: and colonialism who often use the word encounter to capture a meeting that is often violent,
14:45
SPEAKER_00: that is certainly shaped by radical asymmetry.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: But also,
14:50
SPEAKER_00: you know,
14:51
SPEAKER_00: some historians of imperialism and colonialism also argue are also these sites
14:58
SPEAKER_00: where new knowledge is formed,
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SPEAKER_00: new forms of subjectivity are forged,
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SPEAKER_00: new strategies of resistance are made.
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SPEAKER_00: Historian Gil Joseph writes about colonial encounters.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: He says that they're fraught with inequality and conflict,
15:13
SPEAKER_00: but also he says with interactive improvisational possibilities.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: And so that was super interesting.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: intriguing to me.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: And I could see that at work in some of these psychiatric encounters that I was
15:23
SPEAKER_00: writing about,
15:23
SPEAKER_00: you know,
15:24
SPEAKER_00: so encounters change people,
15:25
SPEAKER_00: historians tell us,
15:26
SPEAKER_00: and that seemed very useful to me.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: Tara Ahmed writes that encounters also involve surprise.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: And so I tried to be alert to, you know, surprise as I read about them.
15:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
15:39
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
15:39
SPEAKER_01: it's clear that these documents are full of surprises in the way that people found themselves.
15:46
SPEAKER_01: And that it, you know, almost immediately as a reader for me, and I'm sure as a historian myself,
15:54
SPEAKER_01: for you encountering the documents,
15:55
SPEAKER_01: that you're seeing the ways in which queer people navigated all kinds of positions
16:04
SPEAKER_01: in response to the treatment that they were having,
16:07
SPEAKER_01: the texts that they were being offered to read in terms of their self-understanding,
16:13
SPEAKER_01: and that these documents are very varied in terms of what you get and how you read them.
16:18
SPEAKER_01: Some of the responses seem to be
16:21
SPEAKER_01: Well,
16:21
SPEAKER_01: they're all situational,
16:22
SPEAKER_01: but some of them are strategic and some of them seem to be actually working things
16:28
SPEAKER_01: out within themselves and resisting the terms that they're being offered.
16:32
SPEAKER_01: It truly runs the gamut, the responses that you describe.
16:37
SPEAKER_00: It does indeed.
16:38
SPEAKER_00: And,
16:38
SPEAKER_00: you know,
16:39
SPEAKER_00: among the conclusions that I came to is that it's really impossible to strip modern
16:45
SPEAKER_00: queer life from its contact with these ideas and with this pathologizing diagnosis.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: There aren't queer and trans people about whom these judgments are made.
16:56
SPEAKER_00: People are made within the context of them, and they shape them as people.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: And that's true for people who internalize them, and many of them do.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: And it's true for people who resist them because they're still reckoning with them.
17:11
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's really clear.
17:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
17:14
SPEAKER_01: so I guess that does take me to what you're already touching on now is how these
17:21
SPEAKER_01: materials encouraged,
17:24
SPEAKER_01: allowed,
17:25
SPEAKER_01: gave you the opportunity.
17:25
SPEAKER_01: I don't know quite what the right verb is,
17:28
SPEAKER_01: but the end result in your book is a lot of rethinking of key narratives of
17:36
SPEAKER_01: 20th century,
17:37
SPEAKER_01: particularly second half of the 20th century queer history,
17:40
SPEAKER_01: particularly and most dramatically in terms of the triumphalist narrative about
17:46
SPEAKER_01: getting homosexuality.
17:49
SPEAKER_01: What's the term?
17:50
SPEAKER_01: Declassified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the DSM.
17:55
SPEAKER_01: So stricken from the list of mental illnesses.
17:59
SPEAKER_01: And you make it
18:01
SPEAKER_01: Well,
18:01
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
18:02
SPEAKER_01: maybe I should back up a little bit and talk about how did that reckoning on your
18:07
SPEAKER_01: part come out of these documents?
18:11
SPEAKER_00: The reckoning with a less triumphant story?
18:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
18:15
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was just impossible to sustain it.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: So the book,
18:17
SPEAKER_00: the sort of chronological arc of the book is that it starts in about 1940 when
18:21
SPEAKER_00: psychiatrists first start making this pretty novel claim that they can treat
18:25
SPEAKER_00: homosexuality and cure it in their terms.
18:30
SPEAKER_00: And then it goes through the very celebrated 1973 decision on the part of the APA
18:37
SPEAKER_00: to remove homosexuality from the DSM.
18:40
SPEAKER_00: And then a little beyond that and how that continued to sort of reverberate in gay and trans politics.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: But I knew I didn't want the book to really wholly retrace the steps of that story
18:53
SPEAKER_00: that is not news to historians,
18:55
SPEAKER_00: right?
18:56
SPEAKER_00: I knew I needed to sort of dwell in those decades that I don't think we've reckoned very much with.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: And that is what, how did it matter?
19:05
SPEAKER_00: Did it matter that these attributions of mental disorder were made and how did they matter?
19:12
SPEAKER_00: And I came to conclude that they didn't just matter in basically creating a new
19:17
SPEAKER_00: kind of modern gay politics that would fight it.
19:20
SPEAKER_00: They also mattered to the way that people thought about themselves and
19:24
SPEAKER_00: And those, frankly, were harder things to reckon with, right?
19:28
SPEAKER_00: Because I think that queer history,
19:31
SPEAKER_00: like a lot of history of other marginalized people,
19:34
SPEAKER_00: tends to really value histories of resistance and resilience.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: And,
19:38
SPEAKER_00: you know,
19:39
SPEAKER_00: there is resistance and resilience,
19:41
SPEAKER_00: plenty of it in these records and in this book,
19:45
SPEAKER_00: I hope.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: But there are also these darker histories of shame and the effects of stigma that I
19:52
SPEAKER_00: felt like I needed to acknowledge.
19:55
SPEAKER_00: It seems to me you have to read the historical record very selectively if you only
19:58
SPEAKER_00: want to tell a story of resistance.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: And so I challenged myself to,
20:05
SPEAKER_00: and I guess the reader as well,
20:06
SPEAKER_00: to sit with some of these harder histories of shame and internalization and stigma.
20:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
20:16
SPEAKER_01: And you were helped in that rethinking by your own account,
20:22
SPEAKER_01: drawing on different critical lenses outside of queer theory.
20:28
SPEAKER_01: So you're particularly struck by the importance of disability studies and critical
20:33
SPEAKER_01: health studies in this question in particular.
20:36
SPEAKER_01: And I wonder if you could talk about that a bit.
20:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
20:40
SPEAKER_00: So disability,
20:41
SPEAKER_00: and this is the first,
20:43
SPEAKER_00: I think the first time I've engaged with disability studies in my scholarship I
20:46
SPEAKER_00: have in my teaching.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: So I was,
20:49
SPEAKER_00: you know,
20:49
SPEAKER_00: vaguely familiar with the field,
20:52
SPEAKER_00: but disability studies framings really allowed me to,
20:55
SPEAKER_00: to do and see a few,
20:57
SPEAKER_00: a few things that I might not have been able to do without it.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: You know,
21:01
SPEAKER_00: the first was to recognize queerness as,
21:04
SPEAKER_00: as it was experienced as at mid-century as,
21:07
SPEAKER_00: as a disability and,
21:08
SPEAKER_00: And that's a claim, that characterization that would not have been surprising to people at the time.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: Psychiatrists refer to the homosexual as an emotional cripple.
21:18
SPEAKER_00: They describe homosexuality very clearly as a form of mental illness.
21:22
SPEAKER_00: And then queer people invoke disability too,
21:24
SPEAKER_00: so often in a kind of more politicized sense to describe the disabling effects of
21:31
SPEAKER_00: queerness in a hostile culture.
21:33
SPEAKER_00: And so those...
21:35
SPEAKER_00: Kinds of observations led me to think about what it would mean if we thought about
21:40
SPEAKER_00: queer history as a part of disability history and not just like it.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: Queer history gets invoked by disability historians often as a kind of object
21:49
SPEAKER_00: lesson or a kind of analogy.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: But it became more and more clear to me that queer history is a part of disability history.
21:55
SPEAKER_00: And so that,
21:57
SPEAKER_00: as you mentioned,
21:58
SPEAKER_00: I think that was part of what made it possible for me to think more clearly about
22:03
SPEAKER_00: what it meant to live under the weight of medicalization and stigma.
22:07
SPEAKER_00: You know,
22:07
SPEAKER_00: disability studies scholarship also really critiques the concept of cure that's so
22:12
SPEAKER_00: central to the medical model of disability,
22:14
SPEAKER_00: and they expose the violence that's often done in the name of cure.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: And psychiatrists in this period so often framed their intentions
22:24
SPEAKER_00: of curing homosexuality and gender variance as humane and as progressive as helping people.
22:31
SPEAKER_00: And disability studies scholarship,
22:33
SPEAKER_00: you know,
22:33
SPEAKER_00: really brought into focus the violence at the,
22:36
SPEAKER_00: at the core of the aim of cure and also the,
22:39
SPEAKER_00: you know,
22:39
SPEAKER_00: the goal of eradication.
22:40
SPEAKER_00: It's not too much to say that psychiatrists wish to eliminate the existence of
22:45
SPEAKER_00: queerness and gender nonconformity.
22:47
SPEAKER_00: And then I guess the last thing is that disability studies scholars really
22:52
SPEAKER_00: encourage us to think about disability as a form of difference that can allow for
22:59
SPEAKER_00: an altered perspective or a source of insight or a diagnostic tool.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: And so I see in these files, I see people making those connections and using them to do exactly that.
23:12
SPEAKER_00: So disability studies was really important to me in writing this book.
23:18
SPEAKER_01: And I was really struck too by the way that that changes the gay liberation
23:26
SPEAKER_01: rhetoric about the health,
23:28
SPEAKER_01: the mental health of gay people as a kind of prerequisite for their,
23:33
SPEAKER_01: or prerequisite,
23:34
SPEAKER_01: that's not the right word,
23:35
SPEAKER_01: but as a kind of rationale for the fact that-
23:42
SPEAKER_01: And that there's collateral damage that happens that we, in many ways, is still surrounding us.
23:50
SPEAKER_00: So,
23:50
SPEAKER_00: you know,
23:51
SPEAKER_00: thinking generously about those politics,
23:54
SPEAKER_00: the stakes of having homosexuality listed as a mental illness in the DSM were high.
23:59
SPEAKER_00: And gay activists weren't wrong about that, I don't think.
24:02
SPEAKER_00: They pointed out at the time that the fact of a pathologizing diagnosis was at the
24:06
SPEAKER_00: root of nearly every form of discrimination.
24:09
SPEAKER_00: Frank Kameny, who was so central,
24:11
SPEAKER_00: to those politics said we have to attack this first before we can get anywhere else.
24:15
SPEAKER_00: Kameny,
24:15
SPEAKER_00: who is most interested in citizenship rights,
24:18
SPEAKER_00: just thought we can't even be legible as political subjects without getting rid of
24:24
SPEAKER_00: this charge of mental illness.
24:26
SPEAKER_00: And so,
24:27
SPEAKER_00: you know,
24:27
SPEAKER_00: given the consequences of that and of being labeled mentally disordered,
24:32
SPEAKER_00: it seems like it was probably inevitable.
24:35
SPEAKER_00: That if somebody is saying you're sick, that you meet that charge with the response, no, we're not.
24:40
SPEAKER_00: You know, we're healthy.
24:41
SPEAKER_00: And so one of gay activists really stock arguments.
24:45
SPEAKER_00: And one of their most persuasive arguments,
24:47
SPEAKER_00: I think,
24:48
SPEAKER_00: was that psychiatrists base their judgment that gay people were mentally ill on the
24:53
SPEAKER_00: basis of the people that they encountered in their own psychiatric practice.
24:57
SPEAKER_00: So people who were in some form of mental distress.
25:00
SPEAKER_00: And so gay activists would come to say, you know, this is not representative of
25:05
SPEAKER_00: of gay people as a whole.
25:07
SPEAKER_00: And so they charge psychiatrists with sampling air, you know, with bad science, basically.
25:14
SPEAKER_00: And they embrace that politics of insisting on the health of the gay majority.
25:20
SPEAKER_00: And so that was, in many ways, a really effective argument.
25:23
SPEAKER_00: But it came, as you suggested, with some very serious costs.
25:29
SPEAKER_00: Certainly it came at the expense of any queer person who experienced any kind of
25:33
SPEAKER_00: mental distress or uncertainty about themselves.
25:36
SPEAKER_00: Psychologist Evelyn Hooker,
25:38
SPEAKER_00: who did some of the first studies to assault the idea that homosexuality was a
25:43
SPEAKER_00: clinical category and that it was a form of mental illness,
25:46
SPEAKER_00: she referred all the time to what she called non-criminal,
25:49
SPEAKER_00: non-patient homosexuals.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: And that's a phrase that historians then pick up really admiringly to talk about Hooker's work.
25:56
SPEAKER_00: But for me,
25:57
SPEAKER_00: embedded in that expression,
25:59
SPEAKER_00: non-criminal,
26:00
SPEAKER_00: non-patient,
26:01
SPEAKER_00: is just an illustration of some of the kinds of exclusions that are affected by
26:05
SPEAKER_00: this new politics of health.
26:08
SPEAKER_00: It also,
26:08
SPEAKER_00: that insistence on gay health also really ended up making activists feel that they
26:15
SPEAKER_00: had to sever the ties between homosexuality and transness.
26:19
SPEAKER_00: So in the 50s and 60s,
26:23
SPEAKER_00: many gay activist types are already sort of policing gender nonconformity within
26:27
SPEAKER_00: their own ranks that they considered their own people.
26:30
SPEAKER_00: And they're also really working in their conversations with psychiatry and
26:34
SPEAKER_00: psychiatrists to make it clear that these are two ontologically different kinds of people.
26:40
SPEAKER_00: And in the process, they are not arguing for the health of trans people.
26:44
SPEAKER_00: They are arguing for their own health.
26:47
SPEAKER_00: And so,
26:47
SPEAKER_00: you know,
26:48
SPEAKER_00: as I point out,
26:49
SPEAKER_00: as other people have pointed out,
26:51
SPEAKER_00: the first edition of the DSM to not include homosexuality in it,
26:55
SPEAKER_00: published in 1980,
26:56
SPEAKER_00: the DSM-III was also the first one to include gender identity disorder as a
27:02
SPEAKER_00: diagnostic category.
27:04
SPEAKER_00: So it's hard not to see a kind of relationship there in the sort of depathologizing
27:10
SPEAKER_00: of one and the new pathologizing of another.
27:15
SPEAKER_01: When you were writing this,
27:17
SPEAKER_01: did you expect that that latter part of the history was going to become so salient politically?
27:26
SPEAKER_01: I guess that's a kind of broad question to talk about,
27:29
SPEAKER_01: to invite you to talk about how you see this history reverberating in the present.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
27:37
SPEAKER_00: You know, this book took a very long time to write.
27:40
SPEAKER_00: And so it began in what seems now like a very different time.
27:45
SPEAKER_00: I think I first encountered the files in 2008.
27:49
SPEAKER_00: Obama had just been elected.
27:53
SPEAKER_00: Very different moment.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't writing intensely that whole time,
27:58
SPEAKER_00: but as I was beginning work on this project,
28:01
SPEAKER_00: I sometimes worried that my interest in psychiatric power would seem antiquated.
28:07
SPEAKER_00: Like, that's not the thing that we're up against at the moment.
28:12
SPEAKER_00: And I didn't anticipate the things, you know, that would end up making it depressingly timely.
28:18
SPEAKER_00: But,
28:18
SPEAKER_00: you know,
28:19
SPEAKER_00: we're witnessing the sort of resurrection of psychiatry's claims about
28:24
SPEAKER_00: homosexuality as a mental disorder,
28:26
SPEAKER_00: even in the absence,
28:27
SPEAKER_00: and I should emphasize,
28:29
SPEAKER_00: in the absence of the support of most psychiatrists,
28:32
SPEAKER_00: certainly of mainstream psychiatry.
28:34
SPEAKER_00: But we're seeing the resurgence of those ideas in mainstream political discourse.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: We see that in narratives of grooming,
28:40
SPEAKER_00: I think,
28:41
SPEAKER_00: that kind of reanimate those kinds of toxic associations of gay men with pedophilia
28:48
SPEAKER_00: and sexual predation.
28:50
SPEAKER_00: We see it in efforts to censor school curricula.
28:54
SPEAKER_00: And we're witnessing this intense war on trans life.
28:59
SPEAKER_00: I just looked it up this morning, 586
29:02
SPEAKER_00: Anti-trans bills have been introduced so far this year, and we're not halfway through the year.
29:07
SPEAKER_00: 600 bills were proposed last year, 87 were passed.
29:11
SPEAKER_00: So the right is weaponizing this continued inclusion of gender.
29:16
SPEAKER_00: Now it's called gender dysphoria in the DSM.
29:19
SPEAKER_00: And they can still point to the DSM to support their claim that transgender is a form of mental illness.
29:27
SPEAKER_00: And we're seeing the effects of that
29:30
SPEAKER_00: position in this wave of anti-trans legislation,
29:33
SPEAKER_00: especially in arguments about,
29:35
SPEAKER_00: you know,
29:35
SPEAKER_00: that the right is making about the need to expand the role of psychiatrists and
29:39
SPEAKER_00: gatekeepers to gender affirming care.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: I just said the right, and I think it goes beyond the right in that way.
29:47
SPEAKER_00: So conversion therapy continues to be practiced, especially and routinely on trans children.
29:53
SPEAKER_00: And those ideas are just getting new traction.
29:56
SPEAKER_00: And so part of what I hope
29:58
SPEAKER_00: to have done in this book is to show the ways that,
30:02
SPEAKER_00: you know,
30:03
SPEAKER_00: psychiatry launched these new ways of thinking about homosexuality and gender
30:08
SPEAKER_00: variance as forms of sickness.
30:11
SPEAKER_00: And that those ideas are there,
30:14
SPEAKER_00: even given the formal disavowal of psychiatry,
30:17
SPEAKER_00: they are there and available for revitalization.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: And I think we're living through that at the moment.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: Many thanks to Regina Kunzel for taking part in this conversation.
30:30
SPEAKER_01: You can read more about her and her new book on the episode page for this podcast.
30:36
SPEAKER_01: Please visit our website, historyworkshop.org.uk.
30:41
SPEAKER_01: You can find us on X at History WO and on Facebook and Instagram as History Workshop.
30:49
SPEAKER_01: This is the History Workshop podcast.
30:51
SPEAKER_01: I'm Mary Beth Hamilton.
30:52
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening.