Cured: Frank Kameny — Photo: Kay Tobin via Manuscripts & Archives Division, The New York Public Library
For LGBTQ+ people in the U.S., the road towards liberation has been long, circuitous, dark, and dangerous, and those who have organized and fought for equality often were forced to do so from the safety of the shadows. A new documentary, Cured, making its broadcast premiere on PBS’s Independent Lens series, brings to light a little-known chapter of that struggle, when committed activists stepped out of the shadows to loudly and publicly resist an institution that used fear and ignorance to justify treating queer people as second-class citizens.
It was in 1952 that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) listed homosexuality as a mental disorder in the first edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Adding to the public sentiment that gays and lesbians weren’t just different, but were morally deficient, the DSM listing provided a clinical basis for denying queer people basic human rights, from jobs and housing to education and even custody of their children.
Labeling LGBTQ people as “psychologically disturbed” implicitly upheld the discrimination that made it next to impossible for them to live freely and openly. Even worse, the mental illness diagnosis led to thousands of gays and lesbians being committed to mental institutions, or forced into varying forms of therapy, including electroshock treatments, and in some extreme cases, full or partial lobotomies.
Cured — Photo: Kay Tobin via Manuscripts & Archives Division, The New York Public Library
But, as one gay activist argues in Cured, it was this very treatment that posed the greatest danger to his mental health. Gay and lesbian leaders like the late Dr. Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings, and Kay Lahusen rose up, determined to see homosexuality removed from the DSM listings.
Among the surviving activists interviewed for the film who led the fight, the Reverend Magora Kennedy details how their efforts coalesced around the burgeoning civil rights and feminist movements, while Dr. Charles Silverstein recounts his personal path towards rebellion as a then-schoolteacher who sought psychiatric treatment for years in search of a “cure” for his same-sex attraction.
In the words of Sigmund Freud, there was no cure, as homosexuality was not an illness. It was “no advantage, but nothing to be ashamed of,” he wrote, decades before the DSM was even published. In 1973, the APA decided to remove the listing from the DSM.
“Millions were cured with the stroke of a pen,” says psychiatrist Dr. Richard Green. And, as Cured co-director Bennett Singer points out, “Even though this is a story from history, its lessons remain profoundly relevant today. This is a film about the process of bringing about lasting, systemic social change.”
Cured premieres October 11, National Coming Out Day, on PBS Independent Lens. Visit www.pbs.com.
Award season continues unabated, with yet another round of high-profile nominations revealed, with this latest list causing entertainment media to jump for joy for some nods and also decry the lack of attention other talents and projects received.
The nominees for the 2023 BAFTAs have been announced, and while there are many familiar titles and artists included, the British Academy Film Awards organization has favored one title above all others, and it is in stark contrast to what is receiving the same type of praise in the U.S.
The remake of All Quiet on the Western Front leads the charge with 14 nominations, beating out the next most-nominated films, Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Banshees of Inisherin, by four nods.
During my interview earlier this month with Babylon director Damien Chazelle, I asked if he'd seen Zach Cregger's low-budget horror hit Barbarian. Cregger's over-the-top creepfest shares with Chazelle's giddily over-the-top chronicle of Jazz Age Hollywood a sense of proceeding down dark, winding pathways, literally and figuratively, uncertain how far the film will go.
Chazelle hadn't seen Barbarian. "But I've heard a lot about it," he said. "I love movies that do that, where the movie itself feels dangerous. Where you actually don't know just what the filmmakers are capable of. And that almost makes you a little uneasy, or on edge. When you get that sort of feeling from a movie, there's something electric that comes from it."
In the world of comic strips and cartoons, even the artists have great origin stories. That includes the queer creators of underground comix profiled in No Straight Lines, Vivian Kleiman's delightful documentary making its TV debut this month on PBS's Independent Lens.
Inspired by the acclaimed anthology No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics, edited by Justin Hall, the film chronicles how pioneering artists grew a niche art form into a social movement with the pop culture impact to produce mainstream successes like Alison Bechdel's graphic novel-turned-Tony-winning Broadway musical Fun Home.
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