1972 APA Meeting Summary

Following much searching, Gittings had managed to convince a Philadelphia psychiatrist to participate in the panel under the condition that he be permitted to wear a mask and use a voice disguising microphone. The psychiatrist was Dr. John Fryer; he appeared for the panel in the persona of Dr. H Anonymous to represent the intersection of psychiatry and homosexuality in one person. Dr. Fryer had direct experience with homophobia in the field of psychiatry, as a psychiatric resident, he was expelled from the University of Pennsylvania on account of his homosexuality (Drescher and Merlino, 2012). Dr. Anonymous rose to speak; “I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist.”
Dr. Anonymous’ speech to the 1972 APA general meeting holds a position similar

Concurrently with the political pressures exerted on the APA, the chair of the Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics at the time, Dr. Robert Spitzer, had been attempting to reconceptualize and operationalize the definition of mental disorders. Spitzer’s viewpoint informed the discussion of the 1973 meeting of the Nomenclature Committee (Bayer,

He argues that the impact of distress or disability is readily apparent in diagnoses such as schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, and personality disorders, the same cannot be said of homosexuality. Homosexuality, as a general rule, does not create significant distress in the homosexual individual; although there are cases where the presence of a homosexual orientation is distressing to the individual—providing the impetus of later diagnoses of ego-dystonic sexual orientation—for the vast majority of homosexuals their orientation is not distressing. It is useful to compare this with the development of the DSM V diagnoses of gender dysphoria; previously Gender Identity Disorder, the gender dysphoria diagnosis underscores that the disorder is the distress caused by having a body that does not match the gender identity and not the cross-gender identity itself (American Psychiatric Association,