The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States

The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability

in the United States
Regina Kunzel
The Oxford Handbook of Disability History
Edited by Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen

Print Publication Date: Dec 2018 Subject: History, Social and Cultural History
Online Publication Date: Jul 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190234959.013.27

Abstract and Keywords

Homosexuality has a complex history of entwinement with disability, marked most notably
by its long-standing designation as a form of mental illness. That attribution was antici­
pated by nineteenth-century sexologists and promoted by mid-twentieth-century psychia­
trists. In the years that followed, gay and lesbian activists worked to distance themselves
from that stigmatizing association, successfully lobbying to remove “homosexuality” from
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973. Revisited here
is the history of the gay liberationist battle against the psychiatric establishment as
viewed through the analytical lenses offered by critical disability studies and disability
history. Also tracked are the exclusionary and stigmatizing effects of the insistence on ho­
mosexuality as “healthy.”

Keywords: gay and lesbian rights movement, queer history, mental illness, Frank Kameny, Evelyn Hooker, Ameri­
can Psychiatric Association, DSM

In 1973, after years of sustained protest, gay and lesbian activists won an historic victory
when the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its offi­
cial catalog of mental disorders in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Man­
ual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The American Psychiatric Association had identified ho­
mosexuality as a pathological sexual deviation in the DSM’s first edition in 1952 and sec­
ond edition in 1968. But beginning in the early 1960s, and with increasing boldness
through the late 1960s and early 1970s, gay activists challenged reigning psychiatric or­
thodoxies and lobbied, ultimately successfully, to transform homosexuality from a clinical
category into a political and social identity. Activist leader Frank Kameny would later,
with sarcasm, cite December 15, 1973, as the date on which “we were cured en masse by
the psychiatrists.”1

The struggle against the medicalized stigma of psychiatric diagnosis and the gay libera­
tionist critique that proclaimed homosexuality an oppressed minority status rather than a
mental illness is often referenced by disability scholars as analogous to claims made by
disability activists and sometimes as an object lesson for similarly reconceiving disability.
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The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States

In her foundational book, Claiming Disability (1998), Simi Linton called for disability cri­
tiques “similar to those that have been done on the self-loathing homosexual figures in
Boys in the Band.”2 Anthropologist Emily Martin, in her ethnographic study of bipolar dis­
order, likewise analogizes the emancipatory reconceptualization of (p. 460) homosexuality
and the destigmatizing reconceptualization that she proposes for mania and depression.
“The word ‘gay’ went from a shameful whisper to a proud shout, as homosexual identity
became less stigmatized,” Martin writes. “I would hope that, somewhat differently, the
word ‘crazy’ could come to mark the ways that everyone belongs in one way or another—
even if only in their dreams—to the realm of the irrational.”3 More recently, in A Disability
History of the United States, Kim E. Nielsen writes that “[l]ike . . . gay and lesbian ac­
tivists, people with disabilities insisted that their bodies did not render them defective. In­
deed, their bodies could even be sources of political, sexual, and artistic strength.”4

These analogies hold understandable appeal. The gay liberationist triumph over the
American Psychiatric Association offers a powerful model of activism that worked to
transform the conception of homosexuality from an individualized, medicalized, patholo­
gized condition to an unfairly stigmatized social minority status. At the same time, it is
useful to recall the vexed history of analogical reasoning, and the promises and perils of
the use of analogized pairing of forms of social difference in particular, in liberation
movements past and present. Scholars attentive to that history have focused most closely
on “like race” arguments that compare the struggles of various groups to those of African
Americans. In their staging of likeness across forms of difference, scholars argue, such
analogies can work to erase profound distinctions and pose false equivalences. Analogies
can elide incongruences and disparities; they can also, paradoxically, create them: some­
thing posited as “like” something else, by definition, is not that thing. And so analogies
can also work to deny the rich intersections across axes of difference and oppression and
obscure the ways in which forms of difference work together, constituting and compound­
ing each other.5

Analogized accounts of the movements for social justice for gay people and people with
disabilities erase other less fully acknowledged and less easily celebrated aspects of the
entwined histories of homosexuality and disability. Perhaps most obviously, analogizing
the gay rights and disability rights movements neglects the long history of homosexuality
as disability, marked most notably by its long-standing imbrication with mental illness. In
his contribution to the collection Gay Shame, the crip theorist and queer studies scholar
Robert McRuer identifies the removal of homosexuality from the DSM in 1973 as “one of
the founding moments of contemporary gay liberation,” but also as “a distancing from
disability.”6 In the decades before that distancing, homosexuality was widely conceived
(and sometimes experienced) as a form of disability originating in pathological difference,
either somatic or psychic in nature.

Considering the complex history of homosexuality’s entwinement with disability and the
consequences of gay and lesbian activists’ efforts to distance themselves from that stig­
matizing association, I amend McRuer’s provocative insight to add that disability was not
simply distanced from homosexuality by gay liberationists, but, at least in part, was pro­

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The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States

duced and consolidated by those dissociating efforts. As disability studies scholars and
activists have taught us, disability is not simply an empirical attribute of certain bodies or
personages but is made—historically, culturally, socially, and politically—through active
encounter: encounter with architectures and the built environment, with (p. 461) medical
discourses, public policies, political economies, and ideologies, both conservative and
progressive. Histories that analogize LGBT and disability activism make it difficult to see
the complicity of gay activists in the construction of disability (and less visibly, but per­
haps even more overtly, in the construction of ablebodiedness). Looking at the history of
the gay liberationist battle against the psychiatric establishment through analytical lens­
es offered by critical disability studies and disability history highlights the interconnect­
edness between the rise of gay rights and the disavowal of disability.7

Homosexuality as Disability
In protesting the American Psychiatric Association in the late 1960s and early 1970s, gay
activists confronted a more than century-long history of stigmatized, medicalized under­
standings of homosexuality as a pathological form of human difference. Historians usually
locate the beginning of that conceptualization in the mid-nineteenth century, when Euro­
pean, British, and American sexologists began to theorize the origins and debate the eti­
ology of same-sex sexual desire and non-normative gender expression. Despite important
disagreements, sexologists shared an overarching assumption that homosexuality was
deeply rooted in an individual’s constitution, rather than a sin or acquired vice. By consti­
tution, sexologists referred generally to a broad collection of human conditions and dri­
ves, collapsing what would later be distinguished as the somatic and the psychic.8 In
1869, Karl Westphal defined “contrary sexual feeling” as the symptom of a “neuropathic
(psychopathic) condition.”9 In arguing for an innate, constitutional etiology of homosexu­
ality, sexologists promoted positions ranging from boldly affirming to harshly pathologiz­
ing.10 Havelock Ellis cast homosexuality as a “constitutional abnormality” analogous to
color-blindness, criminality, and genius, and ventured a theory of the “abnormal” distribu­
tion of male and female “germs” that occurred naturally, producing a person “who is or­
ganically twisted into a shape that is more fitted for the exercise of the inverted than of
the normal sexual impulse.”11 Although he used terms such as “abnormal” and “deviant”
to characterize homosexuality, Ellis tried to strip them of their pejorative valences, distin­
guishing, for example, between “anomaly” and “disease.” But the pathologizing effects of
the theory that homosexuality was a constitutional abnormality ultimately prevailed, bol­
stered as that theory was by its imbrication with theories of racial degeneration and eu­
genic ideas about the constitutional locus of a wide range of physical and cognitive dis­
abilities.12 When forensic psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing argued in 1893 that ho­
mosexuality was a symptom of constitutional degeneracy, passed from one generation to
the next, he referenced that layered history.13 In Krafft-Ebing’s understanding and that of
others, homosexuality was closely aligned with what was beginning around the same time
to be termed disability in its insistence on corporal otherness, individualized defect, and
medicalized pathology.

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The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States

Writing around the same time as Ellis and Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud contributed a
new understanding of homosexuality that would come to hold powerful sway in the
(p. 462) twentieth century. In contrast to sexologists who insisted on homosexuality’s con­

genital, possibly somatic basis, Freud posited a dynamic model of psychosexual develop­
ment in which individuals progressed through a series of stages, homosexuality key
among them, culminating ideally in mature heterosexuality. Freud characterized homo­
sexuality as a form of arrested psychosexual development or a perversion of its normal
course.14 Freud’s ideas about homosexuality were complex, evolving, and sometimes con­
tradictory, which made them available to those who wished to reframe homosexuality as a
benign form of human difference.

Some called upon Freud’s theory of universal constitutional bisexuality and his belief in
the compatibility of homosexuality with normal mental life and even artistic and creative
genius to argue against the more pathologizing aspects of psychoanalytic theories of sex­
uality. In perhaps his most famous statement on the subject, in a letter he wrote to an
American mother concerned about her son’s sexuality published in 1951 (sixteen years af­
ter it was written), Freud wrote that while homosexuality was “assuredly no advantage,”
neither was it something “to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classi­
fied as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by cer­
tain arrest of sexual development.”15

Beginning in the late 1940s and continuing through the early 1970s, however, American
psychoanalysts such as Edmund Bergler, Irving Bieber, and Charles Socarides drew on a
Freudian psychoanalytic framework (while rejecting many of Freud’s more progressive
ideas as well as his theories of homosexuality’s constitutional elements, and countering
what they took to be his “pessimism” about treating homosexuals) to popularize an under­
standing of homosexuality as a profound psychopathy and curable mental disorder. In his
1956 best-seller, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life?, Bergler weighed in heavily on
the side of “disease,” proclaiming homosexuality an “illness as painful, as unpleasant and
as disabling as any other serious affliction” and characterizing gay men as irrational, nar­
cissistic, depressive, megalomaniacal, malicious, infantile, and masochistic “injustice col­
lectors.”16 Charles Socarides declared homosexuality “a dread disfunction, malignant in
character, which has risen to epidemic proportions,” and proposed a government-support­
ed “national center for sexual rehabilitation.”17 From Bieber’s less bombastic and highly
influential 1962 study, Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals,
emerged the picture of homosexuality as a “pathologic biosocial, psychosexual adapta­
tion” to close-binding and overprotective mothers and detached or hostile fathers.18 In
summarizing the “party-line” of postwar psychoanalysis, psychotherapist George Wein­
berg reported in terms familiar to disability studies scholars and activists that “[t]here is
little illusion that the homosexual has been studied and found to be a freak.”19

The psychoanalytic approach to mental illness generally and to homosexuality in particu­

lar held powerful sway in the thinking and practice of psychiatry through the 1950s and
1960s, and shaped the first edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1952. Homosexuality bore its formal status

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The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States

as a mental illness for about two decades—a surprisingly short length of time considering
the pall that status cast over several generations and the weight of (p. 463) that judgment
in the cultural memory of LGBT/queer people. The early lesbian activist Barbara Gittings
writes that “[i]t’s difficult to explain to anyone who didn’t live through that time how
much homosexuality was under the thumb of psychiatry.”20 Jonathan Ned Katz denounced
psychiatric treatment as “one of the more lethal forms of homosexual oppression” and de­
voted a chapter of his foundational book, Gay American History (1976), to documenting
the use of lobotomy, insulin and electroconvulsive shock, aversion therapy, hormone ther­
apy, and psychotherapy to cure homosexuality.21 Psychoanalysis, especially in its iconic
and expensive private outpatient form, was probably more central to the experience of
men than women and certainly to white people than to people of color. But the reach and
power of its construction of homosexuality as a treatable mental illness extended far be­
yond the few who could afford formal analysis. The courts often imposed carceral institu­
tionalization and psychotherapy, and low-income people and people of color were then, as
now, disproportionately caught up in the carceral net.22 The weight of psychiatric stigma
bore down on people, whether or not they were hospitalized or analyzed. African Ameri­
can transwoman Cei Bell recalled “reading psychiatry books” as an effeminate teenage
boy and learning that “a favored treatment for homosexuality was electroshock
therapy.”23

Queer people did not have a universal response to the punitive and pathologizing atti­
tudes of midcentury U.S. culture, politics, and medicine. Historian George Chauncey chal­
lenges the assumption that pre-Stonewall gay men internalized the shaming attitudes of
the broader culture, arguing that “the truly remarkable thing about 1950s queers was
their refusal to play the role assigned them by the hostility of their own time and the con­
descension of history.”24 But while some surely resisted the mid-twentieth-century ortho­
doxy that homosexuals were sick people in need of treatment, many others located the
source of their oppression within themselves rather than the social and political order. In
seeking to understand the apparent complicity of some queer subjects with the patholo­
gizing forces of medicine in the early decades of the twentieth century, historian Jennifer
Terry proposes that many consulted psychiatrists and volunteered to be subjects for med­
ical research in search of answers to “questions of the self,” questions “by which the sub­
ject must account for herself as an anomaly: ‘Who am I?’ ‘How did I come to be this way?’
‘How and why am I different?’ ‘Is there something wrong with me?’ ”25 Such encounters
could be instigated by a sense of difference and a desire to understand it; they could also
create and consolidate that sense of difference. John S. Brown wrote that after his admis­
sion to Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, in 1933, he “answered something
like three, four, or five hundred questions” posed by a psychiatrist, many of them focused
on homosexuality, which “giv[e] one a feeling of being some kind of monstrosity.”26
Historian Martin Duberman has written about his experiences with psychoanalysts, be­
ginning in 1955, characterizing his turn to psychotherapy’s promise of “conversion” to
heterosexuality as “my only hope for a happy life.”27 Duberman remembers internalizing
the psychiatric establishment’s judgment that he was “a disabled person,” “defective,”
and “crippled in my affective life.”28 Writer Edmund White sought out therapy in the

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The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States

1950s “because I was in such terrible pain, driven by desires I wanted to eradicate be­
cause I felt they were infantile, grotesque, damaging, and isolating.”29 For (p. 464) these
observers and many others, homosexuality was not like disability; rather, it was deeply
saturated with, and for some indistinguishable from, an experience of disability.

The medicalized understanding of homosexuality as a form of mental illness was under­

mining to the sense of self and sometimes devastating for the individuals who came under
psychiatry’s purview; it also sanctioned a web of stigmatizing cultural attitudes and dis­
enfranchising and criminalizing laws and policies. Sexual psychopath laws, for instance,
vastly expanded the criminalization of non-normative, especially homosexual sex. Passed
in twenty-nine states by the late 1950s, such laws were ostensibly motivated to respond
to dangers posed by violent sex psychopaths to children, but they were used extensively
to criminalize consensual sex between adults of the same sex.30 People convicted under
sexual psychopath laws were typically institutionalized indefinitely. Homosexuals were
barred from employment in the federal government by an executive order signed by Pres­
ident Eisenhower in 1953, with the justification that their mental instability rendered
them security risks. The understanding of homosexuality as a form of mental illness also
underlay the 1967 Supreme Court decision in Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization
Services, which upheld the 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Act’s prohibition against
the immigration of people of “psychopathic personality” and established formally that
that exclusion included homosexuals.31 Tracking this mid-twentieth-century history of
criminalization, exclusion, and marginalization justified by a stigmatized medical diagno­
sis underlines the parallel and, at points, overlapping history of homosexuality and dis­
ability.

Gay Is Healthy
Beginning in the 1950s, and with increasing assertiveness in the 1960s and 1970s, gay
activists and some dissident psychologists and psychiatrists worked to sever the associa­
tive connection between mental illness and homosexuality. In 1953, psychologist Evelyn
Hooker applied for and received funding from the National Institute of Mental Health for
a study of what she termed “non-patient, non-prisoner homosexuals.”32 In choosing her
research subjects from among her gay friends and their friends and from volunteers from
homophile organizations like the Mattachine Society rather than from patients in psychi­
atric care, and in questioning rather than assuming homosexuality’s status as a mental
disorder, Hooker’s work went strikingly against the grain. In 1957, she published findings
from her research that showed that the psychological profile of gay men not in psychi­
atric treatment was indistinguishable from that of a comparable group of heterosexual
men. She framed her initial conclusions tentatively, that “homosexuality may be a devia­
tion in sexual pattern which is within the normal range psychologically.”33 In later years,
Hooker moved to a more definitive assertion that homosexuality was not a form of mental
illness, and that, indeed, it was not a clinical entity at all, but rather, a “way of life” and

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The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States

even a “healthy life style,” one worth studying anthropologically for its cultural interest
rather than psychologically.34

Hooker’s studies were inspired and enabled by gay activists who were beginning
(p. 465)

to organize in the late 1950s. Her research findings became part of the gay activist arse­
nal in the years that followed, deployed to critique the virulently antihomosexual argu­
ments of popular psychoanalysts like Bieber and Bergler. A decade after Hooker first be­
gan to debunk theories of homosexuality as a mental disorder, the effort to distance ho­
mosexuality from the stigma of mental illness would become the defining project of the
emerging gay rights movement. The person most closely associated with that position
was Frank Kameny, a veteran of World War II and an astronomer who was fired from his
position with the United States Army Map Service in 1957 and barred from government
employment when an undercover investigation turned up a record of his past arrest on a
charge of “lewd conduct” (a charge often used for people caught up in police raids on gay
bars or in sweeps of cruising areas). Kameny appealed his dismissal until his case was re­
jected by the U.S. Supreme Court. He went on to devote his life to activism, founding the
Mattachine Society of Washington, DC, in 1961. To Kameny, the claim to health was a
grounding political move, necessary to the political intelligibility of gay people. “ ‘The en­
tire homophile movement is going to stand or fall upon the question of whether homosex­
uality is a sickness,” Kameny wrote, “and upon our taking a firm stand on it.’ ”35 That po­
sition was stated boldly in the Mattachine Society of Washington D.C.’s “anti-sickness”
resolution, approved in 1965, that “in the absence of valid evidence to the contrary, ho­
mosexuality is not a sickness, disturbance, or other pathology in any sense, but is merely
a preference, orientation, or propensity, on par with, and not different in kind from, het­
erosexuality.’ ”36

By 1970, gay activists’ claims to health led them into pitched battle with the American
Psychiatric Association. In that year, gay and lesbian activists boldly disrupted sessions at
the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in confrontational direct actions
known as “zaps,” targeting sessions on aversion and behavior therapy and psychoanalytic
treatment, heckling panelists, and denouncing psychiatry’s role in stigmatizing homosex­
uality. “Psychiatry is the enemy incarnate,” Kameny shouted into a microphone at one of
the sessions at the 1971 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association; “Psychiatry has
waged a relentless war against us. You may take this as a declaration of war against
you.”37 The petition to the American Psychiatric Association appearing in a lesbian news­
paper in 1971, titled “We Are the Experts on Homosexuality,” echoed the disability ac­
tivist principle of “nothing about us without us” in its insistence on wresting authority for
and expertise over their own lives from medical experts.38 “We cannot play the role of a
passive battlefield across which the ‘authorities’ fight out the question of our sickness,”
Mattachine activists proclaimed. “In the last analysis, WE are the authorities, and it is up
to us to take an active role in determining our own status and our own fate.”39
Increasingly, in the appraisal of activists, that fate seemed to hang on throwing off the
“sickness theory” and on making persuasive claims about the health of gay men and les­
bians.

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The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States

It is clear what was gained by such claims. Kameny did not underestimate the extent to
which the understanding of homosexuals as sick undergirded a larger structure of stig­
ma, exclusion, discrimination, and criminalization. The story of the removal of (p. 466) ho­
mosexuality from the DSM was celebrated as an activist victory and has been retold by
historians as a triumphant milestone in the history of social justice. But the insights of
scholars in disability studies and an emerging critical health studies invite us to reconsid­
er this history. Among those critical insights is that health is not just a desired state or
self-evident and universal good, but rather, a normative, normalizing ideology that mobi­
lizes a set of prescriptions and hierarchies of worth. “Appealing to health,” Jonathan Met­
zl writes, “allows for a set of moral assumptions that are allowed to fly stealthily under
the radar.”40

A return to some milestone moments in the familiar story of gay activists’ efforts to align
homosexuality with health illuminates unspoken norms and implicit hierarchies that were
mobilized by those claims. Hooker explicitly distanced her research subjects from crimi­
nalized populations and from people who sought (or were prescribed) psychiatric treat­
ment in defining her interest in “non-patient, non-prisoner homosexuals.” Proposing to
study “homosexuals who do not seek psychiatric help and who lead relatively stable, oc­
cupationally successful lives,” Hooker made gainful employment and lack of an arrest
record criteria for participation in her research on gay men she identified as “responsi­
ble, reliable, productive, well-functioning.”41 Along with their lack of psychopathology,
Hooker emphasized that many such normal gay men were involved in long-term relation­
ships in couples that were not organized around masculine and feminine roles, and so
gender normativity, too, was part of what Hooker claimed, and consequently reinforced,
as “normal” homosexuality.

A survey fielded in 1958 by the lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) a few
years after Hooker began her work aimed to collect data from “Lesbians who probably do
not otherwise come to the attention of the public or of researchers” in order to counter
published work based on “badly maladjusted women who have sought psychiatric help or
from women in prison.”42 The DOB concluded that the respondents to their questionnaire
were a “quite different type of group from that usually studied by doctors and criminolo­
gists.”43 Their survey found that these “normal” lesbians were likely to have higher-than-
average levels of education, income, and professional occupations, and to own their own
homes. In the words of the survey’s author, they lived “a relatively stable, responsible
mode of life by certain conventional, if superficial, standards.”44 They also reported “fair­
ly conventional” family backgrounds, with most of them reared by a mother and father.
The data, they reported, also “presents a picture considerably different from the stereo­
type of homosexuals as heavy drinkers.”45

Hooker and the DOB were not alone in yoking healthy homosexuality to a range of broad­
er cultural norms and values. The title of the panel organized by gay activists in 1971 at
the meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, “Lifestyles of Non-Patient Homosex­
uals,” spoke powerfully to the desire to distinguish healthy gays from sick ones. When gay
activists were granted a session at the 1972 meeting of the American Psychiatric Associa­

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The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States

tion in Washington, DC, they titled it “Gay, Proud, and Healthy” and featured photographs
of “loving couples” to make the visual case for health. What Hooker and gay activists
termed “healthy life styles,” in other words, were dependent on monogamy, gender nor­
mativity, and employment. The norm most readily tied to (p. 467) health, though perhaps
less recognizable as a norm than monogamy, home ownership, and a professional career,
was happiness. “Happy” and “healthy” was probably the most common discursive pairing
in gay activists’ claims to health. Gay activists’ critiques of the antihomosexual claims of
popular psychoanalysts like Bieber, Bergler, and Socarides often countered their repre­
sentations of the homosexual as neurotically depressed, or of homosexuality as a way of
life that was incommensurate with happiness, with sunny assertions of gay happiness.
The claim to happiness, like the claim to health, can be understood as a revolutionary act
against the grain of every cultural narrative of the inevitable unhappiness of homosexu­
als. But while recognition of queer happiness might be cast as a canny strategic response
to dominant assumptions of its impossibility, the mandate to happiness and psychic health
for people with a history of oppression, exclusion, and attributions of mental illness could
have perverse effects. Activists’ insistence on gay psychic fortitude, historian Abram J.
Lewis writes, put them “in the unusual position of having to argue that, as a group, homo­
sexuals were uniquely impervious to their own oppression.”46 And as critical theorist Sara
Ahmed reminds us, happiness, like health, is another quality easily naturalized into a
transparent good but often “used to redescribe social norms as social goods.”47 Ahmed
urges us to think about “how claims to happiness make certain forms of personhood valu­
able.”48 By extension, claims to gay happiness rendered other forms of queer affective
subjectivity less valuable.

Critical lenses developed by disability studies allow us to see the norms and values that
attach to health; they also illuminate the distancing moves and exclusions that so often
accompanied gay activists’ claims to health and prompt us to ask at whose expense such
claims were made. Many activists made the claim for recognition as a minority group not
simply by arguing that homosexuals were not, by default of their sexual choices, sick, but
rather, that most of them were not. Following Hooker’s lead, their most common line of
critique was to criticize psychiatrists’ sampling methods, pointing out that psychiatrists
based their assumptions about homosexuality as a mental illness on their work with ho­
mosexuals who were in psychiatric treatment, a group of people whom they argued were
unrepresentative of homosexuals as a whole. “Obviously, all persons coming to a
psychiatrist’s office are going to have problems . . . , are going to be disturbed or malad­
justed or pathological, in some sense,” Kameny wrote, “or they wouldn’t be there. To
characterize ALL homosexuals as sick, on the basis of such a sampling . . . is clearly in­
valid, and is bad science.”49 A member of New York Mattachine echoed Kameny in assert­
ing that “studies undertaken on convicted sex-offenders or patients in therapy, or inmates
of mental hospitals, are not a scientific study of homosexuality.”50 “If Dr. Bergler actually
believes the statements he makes against homosexuals per se,” Daughters of Bilitis mem­
ber Carol Hales wrote in The Ladder in 1957, “he must have studied only emotionally im­
mature and mentally disturbed homosexuals. Perhaps he should meet some emotionally
mature, cheerful, constructive, and stable members of the sexual minority.”51

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The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States

Sometimes gay activists’ claims to health were posed in temporal terms, as part of a for­
ward-looking gay modernity. In this formulation, “self-hating” or “masochistic” people in
psychiatric treatment were atavistic holdovers of an antiquated gay past, (p. 468) unable
or unwilling to join the bandwagon of gay happiness, health, and pride. One gay activist
in 1966 denounced some members of the Washington, DC, Mattachine Society “who have
an inflated respect for the psychiatric profession and who take masochistic pleasure in
inviting psychiatrists to their meetings to tell them that homosexuals are ‘sick, sick,
sick.’ ”52 Activists’ efforts to align gay and lesbian under the norm of health worked to re­
draw the definitions of the modern gay and lesbian as opposed to the anachronistic homo­
sexual, aligning the modern with a range of linked norms of gender normativity, putative
whiteness, economic stability, monogamy, and other forms of belonging, and the latter
with sickness, trauma, and mental illness.

Among the exclusions affected by gay claims to health was the further separation of
same-sex sexual attraction and gender non-normativity: people who would come to identi­
fy (and be identified as) transgender were excluded from the happy, healthy gay future
championed by activists. The removal of homosexuality from the DSM in 1973 depended
in part on its disaggregation from gender variance, and on the rhetorical appeal on the
part of gay activists and supportive psychiatrists to the distinction between transsexuality
and homosexuality. The third edition of the DSM, published in 1980, the first that did not
include an entry for “homosexuality,” was also the first that named a new diagnosis:
“Gender Identity Disorder.”53 As queer studies scholar Eve Sedgwick observes, “This is
how it happens that the depathologization of an atypical sexual object-choice can be
yoked to the new pathologization of an atypical gender identification.”54

The strategy of attempting to attain rights and respect by distancing one’s own group
from associations with disability was far from unique to the gay rights movement. Both
disability and queer studies scholars have detailed the ways in which stigmatized people
have struggled to be included under the umbrella of the normal by distancing themselves
from the even more stigmatized. Erving Goffman noted this dynamic in his classic work,
Stigma, observing that the “stigmatized individual exhibits a tendency to stratify his ‘own’
according to the degree to which their stigma is apparent and obtrusive.”55 Following
Goffman, queer studies scholar Michael Warner observes that the most common strategy
for displacing sexual shame is to “pin it on someone else.”56 And Robert McRuer docu­
ments efforts to locate disability “elsewhere.”57 Disability, in varied forms, often serves in
battles against discrimination as the limit line separating reasonable and unjust forms of
discrimination. “While disabled people can be considered one of the minority groups his­
torically assigned inferior status and subjected to discrimination,” historian Douglas
Baynton writes, “disability has functioned for all such groups as a sign of and justification
for inferiority.”58 Disabled people, too, have used this strategy to fight discrimination and
avoid cultural shaming. This tactic, Baynton proposes, “tacitly accepts the idea that dis­
ability is a legitimate reason for inequality, is perhaps one of the factors responsible for
making discrimination against people with disabilities so persistent and the struggle for
disability rights so difficult.”59

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The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States

Frank Kameny was clear-eyed in his appraisal of the costs of psychiatric stigma. “Whatev­
er definitions of sickness one may use,” he wrote, “sick people are NOT EQUAL to well
people in any practical, meaningful sense.”60 Kameny seemed to comprehend the exclu­
sionary effects of an antisickness position when he wrote that (p. 469) “[p]roperly or im­
properly, people ARE prejudiced against the mentally ill. Rightly or wrongly, employers
will NOT hire them. Morally or immorally, the mentally ill are NOT judged as individuals,
but are made pariahs. If we allow the label of sickness to stand,” Kameny wrote, “we will
then have two battles to fight—that to combat prejudice against homosexuals per se, and
that to combat prejudice against the mentally ill—and we will be pariahs and outcasts
twice over. One such battle is quite enough.”61 Here, Kameny articulated the pragmatic
decision to organize around a single axis of oppression. His words also suggest an aware­
ness of the stigmatizing dynamics that Erving Goffman described in moments of “mixed
encounter,” when, as Metzl describes, an “affirmation of one’s own health depends on the
constant recognition, and indeed the creation, of the spoiled health of others.”62 As dis­
ability scholars Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umanski write plainly, “To be associated with
disabled people . . . is stigmatizing.”63 The success of the gay liberation movement de­
pended, in part, on cutting those stigmatizing ties.

Conclusion
In his foundational article, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American His­
tory,” Baynton writes that “[d]isability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for
it, but conspicuously absent in the histories we write.”64 Baynton’s observation about
both the ubiquity of disability in historical life and its virtual absence in historical scholar­
ship is certainly true of the history of sexuality and LGBT history. Viewed through the an­
alytic lenses of disability studies Baynton and other disability scholars promise, familiar
historical narratives are defamiliarized and illuminated anew. Disability has the power,
Catherine Kudlick writes, to “force historians to reconsider virtually every concept, every
event, every ‘given’ we have taken for granted.”65

What does a reconsideration of the story of gay activists’ fight against psychiatric stigma
allow us to see? First, such a reconsideration shifts the terms of that story, usually told as
an unambiguously progressive and triumphalist one. Reconsidering this transformative
historical moment in LGBT/queer history through the critical frame of disability studies
exposes the norms and exclusions that attended gay claims to health. It also illuminates
the role of that progressive social movement in solidifying what Robert McRuer terms
“compulsory able-bodied-ness.” Drawing on Adrienne Rich’s concept of compulsory het­
erosexuality, McRuer argues that a system of compulsory ablebodiedness similarly pro­
duces disability and that that system is “thoroughly interwoven with the system of com­
pulsory heterosexuality that produces queerness, that—in fact—compulsory heterosexual­
ity is contingent on compulsory able-bodiedness and vice versa.”66 While McRuer attends
to the linkages between compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory ablebodiedness, this
exploration of gay rights activism allows us to see the attachment to ablebodiedness on
the part of activists who critiqued compulsory heterosexuality. Gay activists’ claims to
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The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States

health can be understood (p. 470) as efforts to disavow the ways in which queerness was
deeply and historically embedded in and intertwined with disability.

For disability studies, this story offers a previously unexplored illustration of the histori­
cal constructedness of disability—a founding claim of the field but something that is often
already firmly in place rather than in motion. Disability is not a self-evident attribute of
the bodies or minds of individuals, scholars have argued. Rather, it is a set of meanings
and a primary way of signifying relations of power and is made socially, culturally, and
historically. Simi Linton defines the construction of disability as “the processes that have
accorded particular meaning to disability and that have determined the treatment and po­
sitioning of people with disabilities in society.”67 This story offers a window onto the
process of how disability and ablebodiedness are made and how hierarchies are formed
and established through the efforts to dissociate from stigma. Ablebodiedness is more
deeply naturalized and less often historicized than disability; this history also illustrates
the historical constructedness of ablebodiedness. The history of the complex relationship
of disability and queer also underlines the importance of building a critical method that
can capture the complex interaction of multiple and intersecting forms of privilege and
oppression and their dynamic relationship.

It is difficult to be “against health,” as Jonathan Metzl and others have observed.68 But
disability studies scholarship helps us understand health not simply as an assertion of
pride over stigma, as it is so often cast in the story of gay liberationist assault on psychi­
atric authority, but as a project in normativity and exclusion, producing hierarchies of
worth and worthiness. Historians cannot dismiss the importance of the assault on
psychiatry’s classification of homosexuality as a mental illness. But that project required
distancing queer people from a long history of injury and illness, disavowing certain
pasts, and disentangling “gay” from the most stigmatized, minoritized, and criminalized
sexual- and gender-variant subjects. Those disavowals were central to the historical
project of depathologizing “gay”; they also persist in the histories scholars write and the
subjects they include, as well as exclude, in the project of “queer history.” Health’s natu­
ralized status as a positive good inclines us, often unwittingly, toward histories of what
Hooker termed “non-patient homosexuals.” This familiar story in LGBT history, defamil­
iarized and reframed through disability studies, inspires us to ponder the histories, histor­
ical subjects, and angles of vision that might have been lost in the effort to distance our­
selves so vociferously from people positioned as “patients,” and in the name of claiming
health.

Bibliography
Baynton, Douglas. “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History.” In
Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds., The New Disability History. New York: New
York University Press, 2001, 33–57.

Cahn, Susan K. “Come Out, Come Out Whatever You’ve Got! Or, Still Crazy After All
These Years,” Feminist Studies 29/1 (Spring 2003): 1–12.

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The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States

Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Pren­
tice-Hall, 1963.

Kafer, Alison. Feminist Queer Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New
York University Press, 2006.

McRuer, Robert. “Shameful Sites: Locating Queerness and Disability.” In David Halperin
and Valerie Traub, eds., Gay Shame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, 181–
187.

McRuer, Robert, and Anna Mollow. Sex and Disability. Durham, NC: Duke Univer­
(p. 475)

sity Press, 2012.

Metzl, Jonathan, and Anna Kirkland, eds. Against Health: How Health Became the New
Morality. New York: New York University Press, 2010.

Mollow, Anna. “‘When Black Women Start Going on Prozac’: Race, Gender, and Mental Ill­
ness in Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s Willow Weep for Me.” MELUS 31/3 (2006): 67–99.

Samuels, Ellen. “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out
Discourse,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9/1–2 (2003): 233-255.

Somerville, Siobhan B. “Queer Loving.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11/3
(2005): 335–370.

Terry, Jennifer. An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern

Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. (p. 476)

Notes:

(1.) Philip Kennicott, “At Smithsonian, Gay Rights Is Out of the Closet, into the Attic,”
Washington Post (September 8, 2007).

(2.) Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York Uni­
versity Press, 1998), 114. For other examples of the use of analogy between disability and
sexual orientation, see Tom Shakespeare, “Disability, Identity, and Difference,” in Colin
Barnes and Geof Mercer, eds., Exploring the Divide: Illness and Disability (Leeds, UK: Dis­
ability, 1996), 94–113. Susan K. Cahn puzzles through the consonances and dissonances
between the identities of lesbian and disabled in “Come Out, Come Out Whatever You’ve
Got! Or, Still Crazy After All These Years,” Feminist Studies 29/1 (Spring 2003): 1–12.
Ellen Samuels discusses analogizing of social identities, queer and disability in particular,
in “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse,”
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9/1–2 (2003): 233–255.

(3.) Emily Martin, Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), xix.

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The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States

(4.) Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2012), 160.
See also Catherine J. Kudlick, “Why We Need Another ‘Other,’” American Historical Re­
view 108/3 (June 2003): 773. Other scholars have pushed further the associative links be­
tween queerness and disability. See Alison Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip (Bloomington: Indi­
ana University Press, 2013); Cahn, “Come Out, Come Out Whatever You’ve Got!”; Robert
McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York
University Press, 2006); Ellen Samuels, “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the
Limits of Coming-Out Discourse,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9/1–2
(2003): 233–255.

(5.) See Siobhan Somerville, “Queer Loving,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
11/3 (2005): 335–370; Serena Mayeri, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil
Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). For a reconsidera­
tion of the usefulness of analogy in nineteenth-century thinking about disability and race,
see Todd Carmody, “Rehabilitating Analogy,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century
Americanists 1:2 (2013): 431–439.

(6.) Robert McRuer, “Shameful Sites: Locating Queerness and Disability,” in David
Halperin and Valerie Traub, eds., Gay Shame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2009), 184. Douglas Baynton makes this point as well, observing that “once gays and les­
bians were declared not to be disabled, discrimination became less
justifiable” (“Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in Paul K.
Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds., The New Disability History (New York: New York Uni­
versity Press, 2001), 46.

(7.) This account stretches the bounds of LGBT/queer history in exploring its connections
to the history of disability. In its consideration of mental illness and psychic distress with­
in the frame of disability, it is inspired by recent critiques within disability studies that
call attention to the ways in which the field privileges physical and visible disabilities over
cognitive, psychic, and often invisible ones. For discussions of the need to incorporate
mental illness and cognitive impairments within disability studies, see Alison Kafer, Femi­
nist Queer Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Margaret Price, Mad at
School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michi­
gan Press, 2011); and Anna Mollow, “‘When Black Women Start Going on Prozac’: Race,
Gender, and Mental Illness in Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s Willow Weep for Me,” MELUS
31/3 (2006): 67–99.

(8.) See Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern
Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. 42–43.

(9.) That diagnosis was announced in Westphal’s title, “Die conträre Sexualempfindung,
Symptom eines neuropathischen (psychopathischen) Zustandes,” (Contrary sexual feel­
ing: Symptom of a nuropathic [psychopathic] condition), in Archiv für Psychiatric und
Nervenkrankheiten (Archives of Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases) 2/1 (n.d.): 73–108.

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(10.) Erin Carlston examines the differences and disagreements among sexologists in “‘A
Finer Differentiation’: Female Homosexuality and the American Medical Community,
1926–1940,” in Vernon Rosario, ed., Science and Homosexualities (New York: Routledge,
1997).

(11.) Havelock Ellis, Studies of the Psychology of Sex, vol. II: Sexual Inversion, 3rd ed.
(Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1928), 310.

(12.) See Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Ho­
mosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Alexandra
Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

(13.) Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Especial Reference to Con­
trary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study, 7th ed., trans. Charles Gilbert Chaddock
(Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1893), vi.

(14.) See Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (London:
Imago, 1949; orig. 1905), esp. 14–25. Some argue that the distinctions between sexolo­
gists and psychoanalysis were less clear, pointing to biological elements in Freud’s theo­
ries, and psychological aspects in the thinking of some sexologists. On the relationship of
Freud to sexology, see Chris Waters, “Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud and the State: Dis­
courses of Homosexual Identity in Interwar Britain,” in Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, eds.,
Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998); Erin G. Carlston, “‘A Finer Differentiation’: Female Homosexuality and the Ameri­
can Medical Community, 1926–1940,” in Vernon Rosario, ed., Science and Homosexuali­
ties (New York: Routledge, 1997); Terry, An American Obsession, 55–57.

(15.) Sigmund Freud, “Letter to an American Mother,” American Journal of Psychiatry 107
(1951): 786.

(16.) Edmund Bergler, One Thousand Homosexuals (Patterson, NJ: Pageant Books, 1959),
244; Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? (New York: Hill and Wang, 1956).

(17.) “The Homophile Community versus Dr. Charles Socarides,” The Ladder 12/11
(1968): 29. See Charles Socarides, The Overt Homosexual (New York: Grune and Stratton,
1968).

(18.) Irving Bieber, Harvey J. Dain, Paul R. Dince, Marvin G. Drellich, Henry G. Grand,
Ralph R. Gundlach, et al., Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals
(New York: Basic, 1962), 220.

(19.) George Weinberg, “The Homosexual and the Psychoanalyst,” Homosexual Citizen 1/3
(March 1966): 5.

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(20.) Barbara Gittings, Preface, in Jack Drescher and Joseph P. Merlino, eds., American
Psychiatry and Homosexuality: An Oral History (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2007),
xv.

(21.) Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New
York: Meridan Books, 1992), 197.

(22.) See Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: Racial Liberalism and the Rise of Prison
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate
(New York: New Press, 1999).

(23.) Cei Bell, “The Radicalqueens Trans-formation,” in Tommi Avocolli Mecca, ed., Smash
the Church, Smash the State!: The Early Years of Gay Liberation(San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 2009), 118.

(24.) Chauncey, “The Trouble with Shame,” in Halperin and Traub, eds., Gay Shame, 280.
In his analysis of the earlier part of the twentieth century, George Chauncy challenges
what he terms “the myth of internalization,” which “holds that gay men uncritically inter­
nalized the dominant culture’s view of them as sick, perverted, and immoral” (Chauncey,
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay World, 1890–1940
[New York: Basic Books, 1994], 5).

(25.) Terry, An American Obsession, 15.

(26.) Benjamin Karpman, “The Case of John S. Brown,” Case Studies in the Psychopathol­
ogy of Crime, vol. 3.

(27.) Martin Duberman, Cures: A Gay Man’s Odyssey (New York: Dutton, 1991), 31.

(28.) Ibid., 20.

(29.) Edmund White, My Lives: An Autobiography (New York: Ecco/Harper Collins, 2005),
29.

(30.) See George Chauncey, “The Postwar Sex Crime Panic,” in William Graebner, ed.,
True Stories from the American Past (New York: McGraw-Hill 1993): 160–178; Estelle B.
Freedman, “‘Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920–1960,”
Journal of American History 74/1 (June, 1987): 83–106.

(31.) See Siobhan B. Somerville, “Queer Loving,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Stud­
ies 11/3 (2005): 335–370; Marc Stein, Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from
Griswold to Roe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

(32.) Evelyn Hooker, “Reflections of a 40-Year Exploration: A Scientific View on Homosex­

uality,” American Psychologist 48/4 (April 1993): 450.

(33.) Hooker, “Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual,” Journal of Projective Tech­
niques 21/1 (March 1957): 30.

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(34.) Hooker, Foreword, in David H. Rosen, ed., Lesbianism: A Study of Female Homosex­
uality (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1974), ix.

(35.) Quoted in John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Ho­
mosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983), 163.

(36.) “Policy of the Mattachine Society of Washington,” adopted March 4, 1965, MSW file,
ISR.

(37.) “Gay Raiders Seize Stage at D.C. Psychiatric Meet,” Advocate no. 60 (May 26–June
8, 1971): 3.

(38.) Barbara Gittings, “Preface,” in Dresher and Merlino, eds., American Psychiatry and
Homosexuality, xvi.

(39.) “Positive Policy,” Eastern Mattachine Magazine 10/4 (May 1965): 23.

(40.) Jonathan Metzl, “Why Against Health?” in Jonathan Metzl and Anna Kirkland, eds.,
Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality (New York: New York University
Press, 2010), 1–2.

(41.) Hooker, “Male Homosexuals and their ‘Worlds,’” in Judd Marmor, ed., Sexual Inver­
sion: The Multiple Roots of Homosexuality (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 92; Hooker,
Foreword, in Rosen, ed., Lesbianism, viii.

(42.) “DOB Questionnaire Reveals Some Facts about Lesbians,” Ladder 3/12 (1959): 2;
“Coming in June: A Lesbian Questionnaire,” Ladder 2/8 (1958): 9. See Marcia M. Gallo,
Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian
Rights Movement (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006), 47.

(43.) “DOB Questionnaire Reveals some Facts about Lesbians,” 5.

(44.) Ibid., 6.

(45.) Ibid., 18.

(46.) Abram J. Lewis, “We Are Certain of Our Own Insanity’: Antipsychiatry and the Gay
Liberation Movement, 1968-1980,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 25:1 (Jan. 2016),
92.

(47.) Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011),
2.

(48.) Ibid., 11.

(49.) Frank Kameny, “Does Research into Homosexuality Matter?” The Ladder, 9/8
(1965): 16.

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(50.) Nick Zervos, “Rose’s Turn,” New York Mattachine Newsletter 9/10 (October 1964):
22–23.

(51.) Carol Hales, “Accept the Challenge!” The Ladder 1/7 (1957): 12.

(52.) L. E. Elson, “The Psychiatrist as Social Tranquilizer,” review of Thomas S. Szasz,

Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry,” Homosexual Citizen 1/6 (June 1966): 14.

(53.) See David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 55; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring
Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys,” Social Text (1991): 18–27.

(54.) Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” 21.

(55.) Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York:
Prentice-Hall, 1963), 131.

(56.) Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 3.

(57.) McRuer, Crip Theory.

(58.) Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in Long­
more and Umansky, eds., The New Disability History, 34.

(59.) Ibid., 51.

(60.) Franklin Kameny, “Emphasis on Research Has Had Its Day,” Ladder 10/1 (1965): 13.

(61.) Kameny, “Does Research into Homosexuality Matter?,” 16–17.

(62.) Metzl, “Why Against Health?,” 5. See also Goffman, Stigma.

(63.) Longmore and Umansky, Introduction, in Longmore and Umansky, eds., The New
Disability History: American Perspectives, 51.

(64.) Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” 52.

(65.) Catherine Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other,’” American
Historical Review 108/3 (June 2003): 765.

(66.) McRuer, “Compulsory Ablebodied-ness and Queer/Disabled Existence,” in Lennard J.

Davis, ed., The Disability Studies Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 301–302.

(67.) Linton, Claiming Disability.

(68.) Metzl, and Kirkland, eds., Against Health.

Regina Kunzel

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The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States

Regina Kunzel is the Doris Stevens Chair and Professor of History and Gender and
Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. Kunzel is the author, most recently, of
Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality
(University of Chicago Press, 2008).

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