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"I think the main obstacle to LGBT people getting ahead in life is the stigma attached to being LGBT," said Steinke, a gay man, "and if that stigma is rooted in medical and mental health, it would be very hard to overcome. He testified to the Philadelphia Historical Commission about the significance of adding Fryer's home of 30 year to the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places. Paul Steinke, executive director of Philadelphia's Preservation Alliance, agreed the removal of the mental health stigma against LGBTQ people was a crucial step in LGBTQ equality. The DSM also dropped gender identity disorder that year, and introduced instead the term gender dysphoria, now commonly applied to people who identify as transgender. It was only in 2013 that even "persistent and marked distress about sexual orientation" was finally removed.
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Membership of the APA voted 58% in favor of the changes although, notably, 42% voted against them. In 1973, after much more work, the APA board of trustees voted to delete the designation of homosexuality as a mental disorder, although it maintained a classification for LGBTQ people distressed by their own homosexuality. Anonymous - the heavily disguised, deeply closeted Fryer - delivered his speech. The psychiatric organization agreed to hold a panel at its next convention in 1972, in Dallas. In 1970, gay and lesbian activists disrupted the APA's convention in San Francisco, and then again in 1971. That stigma also delivered horrendous "cures" such as lobotomies, chemical castration, electroshock, and aversion therapy.
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We would not have gained our equality to the degree we have had those stereotypes remained." "We were people that were criminally or mentally deranged so this was the beginning of changing the stereotypical narrative of homosexuals. "We were feared and loathed," Lazin continued. Lazin, a gay man, is the executive director of Equality Forum, a national and international LGBTQ civil rights organization based in Sarasota, Florida. "It was the first to knock away the underlying reasons for the way the official government treated gays." "The fact that the APA classified us as being mentally ill was used to buttress anti-gay statutes and regulations," said Malcolm Lazin, in a phone interview from Philadelphia.
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Late activists Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameny had staged public protests in the 1960s calling for equal treatment of homosexuals but had recognized that little would change for anyone until gays and lesbians were no longer treated as mentally ill, as described at the time in the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM.
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That speech, delivered to a fairly narrow audience - closeted gay psychiatrists and their straight colleagues - was the linchpin in a series of actions against the APA by other activists of the time.
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Yet, that speech, roughly 1,100 words in length and less than two full pages, did more to change the lives of LGBTQ Americans than, arguably, any other speech, protest, or action. That's a lot of recognition for a man who, really, doesn't have a lot of acknowledgment. Walnut Lane in Philadelphia was added last month to the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places. The anniversary is being marked with several observances and proclamations both in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., including proclamations issued by both the Philadelphia City Council and the governor of Pennsylvania, and resolutions being submitted to Congress, which are currently sitting in committee.
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May 2 will mark the 50th anniversary of the speech Fryer gave anonymously to an audience of his professional colleagues at their annual convention, calling for an end to the APA designation of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder. And very few people before then would know just who the man in the mask was, before he came clean at that year's APA convention in Philadelphia. With that speech, and within a matter of just a few years, gays and lesbians would be able to seize opportunities that had been denied them based solely on medical claims with no merit, and which had already been debunked but ignored 20 years before. Anonymous that would set in motion a massive sea change for people regarded by the APA - and most Americans - as mentally ill at best, dangers to society at worst. Those were the first words of a short speech given by a figure named Dr.
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A standing-room only audience packed the hall at the 1972 Dallas conference of the American Psychiatric Association, watching a man dressed in what many remember as a full-face rubber mask of then-President Richard Nixon, wearing a wig and an oversized tuxedo and, speaking through a voice modulator, tell the audience, "I am a homosexual.