If anything proves the element of subjective non-scientific quackery that’s always been present in the psychiatric profession it was the American Psychiatric Association’s long-held opinion that homosexuality in all its forms was a disease. And only as late as 1973 did that disreputable association finally relent, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, and remove the stigma of mental illness from gay lifestyles. This new documentary, co-directed by Patrick Sammon and Bennett Singer, explores the real-life consequences that the APA’s pseudoscientific claims about homosexuality for so many decades before a group of gay activist psychiatrists took it upon themselves to unyoke their particular sexual orientation from the influential bigots and homophobes that headed the APA for so long.
Cured reminds us just how deeply damaging the APA’s stance on homosexuality had been for so long. As we learn from some of the interviewees in the film, the social stigma passed down from the APA in the 1950s and 1960s meant that you either got married to a member of the opposite sex, or there was a good chance that treatment in a mental institution would be in your near future—quite possibly shock treatment. Around the time of the Stonewall uprising in New York in 1969, gays in the medical profession had seen enough, and gay psychologists like Charles Silverstein and Lawrence Hartmann and activists like Ron Gold confronted the APA at official meetings and argued their case. Also important to this struggle was psychologist Evelyn Hooker, who is featured in the film through archival clips: it was her research that essentially refuted the APA’s homosexuality-as-disease line and exposed the anti-gay bias driving the association. Hooker simply pointed out that if the APA’s criteria for diagnosing gay patients as being mentally ill had been applied to straight patients, then heterosexuality would also have to be a disease. Case closed? You’d think so. Yet it would still be some years before the APA’s longtime official diagnosis of gays being sexual deviants would become a minority view in the broader culture. Cured‘s workable mix of historical footage and recent talking-head interviews ensures a lively presentation from beginning to end. Codirectors Singer and Sammon have done cinematic justice to a long-unheralded but all-important grassroots political victory in LGBT history. Highly recommended.