Psychologist, who helped declassify homosexuality as illness, dies at age 87
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 — to advancing 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 felt 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 in the wake of 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 APA’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 official 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 victory.