Charles Silverstein, 87, Dies; Helped Destigmatize Homosexuality
In February 1973, when it was his turn to speak before an American Psychiatric Association panel on why it should stop classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder, Charles Silverstein chose an unexpected tool for his response: humor. “What I did,” he recalled decades later in an interview for the Rutgers Oral History Archives, “was write a parody, a satire, of all the absurd things that the American Psychiatric Association had diagnosed” — illnesses like “syphilophobia” (irrational fear of syphilis). “I threw back at them their diagnoses over the decades and how funny it all sounds now, and pointed out that their fun had hurt a lot of people,” Dr.
Silverstein told The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy in 2003. “I ended by saying to them, ‘Don’t do it anymore.’” The testimony of Dr.
Silverstein, who at the time was completing his Ph.D. work in social psychology at Rutgers University, helped persuade the psychiatric association to change the language in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders later that year.
That revision, while not completely ending the profession’s pathologizing of homosexuality, was a watershed moment that led to further reassessments. “A.P.A.’s 1973 diagnostic revision was the beginning of the end of organized medicine’s official participation in the social stigmatization of homosexuality,” Dr.
