Why Was Homosexuality Considered a Mental Illness?

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association definitively removed homosexuality from the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) or, what is the same, the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. The date may seem absurdly close to us, but if we take into account that The WHO did not definitively remove homosexuality from the list of “official” diseases until 1990. our surprise will undoubtedly increase.

Homosexuality has long been seen as a disease and, long before, as a “sinful deviation” that violated what was “right.” But there is still a third classification that, unfortunately, is still in force in many countries around the world: that of “crime.” In Europe it is not too far away either: in England, for example, the death penalty was still effective against the “crimes” of homosexuality until the Offenses Against the Person Act of 1861 was proclaimed, which replaced capital punishment with prison and chain. life.

Homosexuality: from “sin” to “mental illness”

The history of how homosexuality has been perceived throughout the centuries is something complex that deserves to be examined carefully. In today’s article we will focus on the consideration of homosexuality as a “disease”, a label that began to take shape with the advent of nineteenth-century positivism and which, as we have seen, was not officially abandoned until the 1990s.

Homosexuality in history

We find records of homosexual acts in many cultures and, in fact, openly homosexual civilizations have existed, such as ancient Greece.

Although relationships between men were socially hierarchical and obeyed very strict rules (being the passive subject, for example, was a symbol of moral and social baseness), it is no less true that homosexuality was practiced in both Greece and Rome more or less official way. In fact, and perhaps this may surprise many, in the first centuries of the Middle Ages homosexuality was quite widespread in the medieval West and, although the Church did not view it favorably, it was not subject to any punishment (beyond of the imposition of religious penance), as it would be later.

The first centuries of the Middle Ages are quite lax when it comes to sexuality. We find priests living openly with their wives, monks maintaining relationships with other monks, and bastard sons and daughters filling the ancestral homes and living with their “legitimate” brothers. It is not by chance that we find, precisely in the Romanesque, an enormous profusion of capitals and corbels with sexual representations, and even openly homosexual ones.

The great repression

When does homosexuality (or sodomy, as it was called then) become a criminalized crime? We do not find evidence of this until the 14th century, when “sodomy” and “sodomites” began to be formally persecuted. In the Castile of the Catholic Monarchs, for example, the act was known as a “nefarious sin” and was harshly persecuted.

However, the Inquisition was more interested in the persecution of heresy and witchcraft, crimes that worried the Holy Office much more due to the condition of “social rebellion” that they entailed.

Actually, The term “sodomy” was a confusing and poorly defined word that encompassed more things than homosexual relations. In general, it referred to any sexual act that was “against nature”; in other words, that it was detached from reproduction. Thus, anal copulation, even between a man and a woman, was also “sodomy.” Also zoophilia, called “bestialism” at the time, was included in the definition.

In short, Anyone who did not follow a standardized and normative sexuality was put in the same bag. which could be summarized as follows: having sexual relations to procreate, only on the days designated for it (more than half of the liturgical calendar were days of abstinence), of course within marriage and, if possible, with the man situated above the woman.

It is after the Council of Trent (1545) when homosexuality begins to be persecuted in a strict and very harsh way. “Sodomy” is no longer just a “sin,” but it is also a “crime,” paid for by death. In the England of Henry VIII, in 1534, the Buggery Act o Law of Sodomy, according to which a man who had relations with another man was sentenced to death and his property was seized. More “benign” seems to be a law of 1583 from the Italian peninsula, which considers that “heinous sin” deserves a prison sentence.

The positivism of the 19th century: “deviance” as a disease

The 19th century was, in many ways, a direct heir to the strict morality of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Although there is an evident secularization of society, in many ways the dominant bourgeois class continues to maintain the moral precepts of the Modern Age. who, among other things, views homosexuality very negatively.

But at a time when religion is losing ground in the face of an atrocious positivism, “heinous sin” can no longer be considered as such. And yet, society continues to instinctively reject what is still considered a “deviance.”

The result is that homosexuality goes from being a “sin” to a “disease.” The situation, in reality, is the same: the individual in question suffers from social isolation and receives general ridicule and opprobrium. Thus, the former “sodomite” (the name ceased to be used in the mid-19th century) became a person with “physical and neurological problems” who needed “to be cured.”

In search of a “cure” for homosexuality

Thus, during the 19th century and much of the 20th, science tended to see homosexuality as a “disease” that needed to find a cure to return the patient to a “natural” state. By “natural” heterosexual copulation is considered, so any deviation is seen as something “against nature.”

For the positivist mentality of the 19th century, if something was “against nature” it was because there were certain physical functions of the individual that did not work properly. Among other crazy theories, it was thought that the brains of homosexuals must be different from those of heterosexual people, or that there must be certain congenital “defects” that resulted in something “defective.”

The supposed “cure” was a terrible pill for the patients which, of course, were not cured, because they had nothing to cure. From electric shocks to deep psychoanalysis, in search of supposed childhood conflicts, the majority of these people worsened psychologically for the simple fact of going through a similar trance and, above all, for seeing themselves as “imperfect” beings.

In a letter addressed to a mother who was concerned about her son’s homosexuality, Sigmund Freud wrote one of his most famous phrases, in which he said that homosexuality was “not an advantage, but neither was it something to be ashamed of.” . It is not a vice or a degradation; Nor can it be classified as a disease.” Some encouraging words, no doubt, but there was still a long (long) way to go before homosexuality was eliminated from psychiatric manuals. And, unfortunately, its decriminalization is not yet effective worldwide.