Charles Silverstein, eased stigma of being gay

Charles Silverstein, a psychologist who helped achieve one of the most significant victories of the gay rights movement by persuading the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness, died Jan. 30 at his home in New York City. He was 87.

He had lung cancer, said his executor, Aron Berlinger.

Dr. Silverstein spent decades of his life — as an activist, a psychologist, and an author — working to advance the cause of gay rights. He had felt the sting of discrimination and the burden of shame as a gay man who came of age at a time when expressions of homosexuality were stigmatized if not outright illegal and when gay people were treated not only as morally deviant but as mentally ill.

Dr. Silverstein, who thought he had no choice but to conceal his sexuality during his early professional years and into graduate school, came out as the gay rights movement gained momentum after the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969.

He was nearing completion of a doctoral degree in social psychology and had joined the Gay Activists Alliance, an advocacy group that organized high-profile protests known as “zaps,” when he was invited to speak to the American Psychiatric Association’s nomenclature committee on the matter of homosexuality.

At the time, homosexuality was categorized as a mental disorder and “sexual deviation” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a reference volume regarded as the authoritative guide to mental health diagnoses. In February 1973, Dr. Silverstein was one of several speakers who appeared before the nomenclature panel to challenge the scientific and clinical basis of that classification.

“Psychoanalysts believed that gay men were doomed to lives of depression and, eventually, suicide because of their shame,” Dr. Silverstein later told the Windy City Times, a Chicago-based LGBTQ publication. “I argued that these men were not ashamed because they were homosexual but because of what these therapists were telling them.”

Ten months later, in December 1973, the APA voted to remove homosexuality from the list of mental disorders. The association issued a statement declaring that the decision was “not to say that homosexuality is ‘normal,’ or that it is as desirable as heterosexuality.” But among supporters of gay rights, the vote was regarded as a landmark.

“As long as we were officially sick, there was no chance that we would be officially equal,” said Charles Kaiser, who chronicled gay life in the book “The Gay Metropolis.” He called the APA vote “the single most important event in the history of gay liberation after the Stonewall riots” and described Dr. Silverstein as “one of the handful of people most important in bringing the change about.”

In his private psychology practice in New York and in his writings, Dr. Silverstein sought to help gay people live without shame, which he likened to a “toxin in the body.”

Dr. Silverstein was the founder of a New York-based counseling center, the Identity House, and the Institute for Human Identity, which describes itself as “the nation's first and longestrunning provider or LGBTQ+-affirming psychotherapy.”

His longtime partner William Bory died of complications from AIDS in 1993. Dr. Silverstein’s subsequent marriage to Bill Bartelt ended in divorce.

In 2011, Dr. Silverstein received the American Psychological Foundation's gold medal for lifetime achievement. He found fulfillment, he said, as gay rights evolved in recent years to include the freedom of gay couples to marry and build families.

“I’m glad that younger generations are more free,” he said. “That’s what we were fighting for.”