Columbia Magazine
The story begins in 1952, when Spitzer was an undergrad at Cornell, and the APA introduced the DSM, a 130-page coil-bound pamphlet designed to standardize psychiatric conditions. The DSM covered 106 diagnoses, among which was “homosexuality,” classified as a “sociopathic personality disturbance” alongside pedophilia and sadism. To the psychiatric establishment, this was progressive: Non-procreative sex, or sodomy, was unlawful in every state, and here was the DSM, casting gay people not as criminals but as victims of mental illness who needed treatment. But to those who had this “illness,” the DSM was catastrophic: Society already saw gays as morally and legally at fault; now the psychiatric field, through the DSM, had pathologized them.