Combining interviews with archival footage, filmmakers Patrick Sammon and Bennett Singer provide a deeply emotional, hopeful, and urgent exploration of the campaign for LGBTQ+ human rights in psychology and psychiatry. Cured is showing at BFI Flare from Wednesday, 17th March – Sunday, 28th March; book tickets here.
As the British government continues to kick their promise to ban conversion therapy into the long grass, Cured could not be more timely and urgent. Exploring and uncovering the treatment of LGBTQ+ people by the American Psychiatric Association, this powerful, stark and emotional documentary isn’t afraid to dig into the darkest corners of psychological practice.
Cured opens with a grainy black-and-white reminder of the past, as a group of school kids sit listening to a middle-aged man preach about the dangers of homosexuality. His words are full of hate, bile and anger as he declares, “You will be caught, and the rest of your life will be a living hell” this is then followed by interviews on street corners where passers-by state, “Give them homes like they do the mentally insane,” and “Homosexuality can be unlearned”.
These discriminatory views are not present at birth; they are learnt over the years from the state and its institutions. The psychiatric profession would help form and cement these views for decades by encouraging a view of homosexuality as a mental illness and deviance. In the United States, the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1952) listed homosexuality as a mental disorder, while in the UK, experimental ‘treatments’ were an alternative to jail time for many gay men, with many undergoing forced electroshock therapies.
Meanwhile, on the world stage, homosexuality was classified as a mental health disorder by the World Health Organisation up until 1992, with open, public oppression of LGBTQ+ people encouraged on both psychological, social and religious grounds. LGBTQ+ people who were interned in concentration camps by Hitler’s Third Reich found little freedom in liberation, as they were re-arrested and imprisoned by allies claiming to offer liberty and justice; yet, there was no freedom and justice for them simply due to their sexuality.
However, while homophobia continued to be endemic in many psychological circles, some brave psychologists were willing to challenge the prevailing view. For all his faults, even Freud claimed, “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function”. While Alfred Kinsey openly explored sexuality in Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948), and introduced discussions on sexuality as a spectrum.
The 1960s saw the emergence of a more confident campaign for LGBTQ+ equality in both the USA and the UK, with the fight against psychiatric diagnoses and treatment led by a small but dedicated group of psychologists.
While many view the Stonewall riots as the birth of the gay liberation movement in 1969, many brave US activists already had APA and the psychology profession in their sights by this point, disrupting psychiatric conventions, while slowly gaining the confidence of leading psychologists in their field. Despite the conservative opinions surrounding them from psychiatrists like Charles Socarides and Irving Bieber, this group would win the trust of others and make significant progress by the early 1970s.
Combining interviews with archival footage, filmmakers Patrick Sammon and Bennett Singer provide a deeply emotional, hopeful, and urgent exploration of that campaign for LGBTQ+ human rights in psychology and psychiatry. Here, the key leaders of that fight are given space to explore the complexities and challenges of their brave and bold March for justice in an urgent, timely and long-overdue documentary.
It is a battle that is still raging, as psychology now faces political and social challenges concerning gender identity, but Cured makes one thing clear. The lessons learned from the past will inform the fight for the future. As Ron Gold said, “You don’t have the right to decide that perfectly happy people are sick.” This is a message we all need to take forward, for while the fightback may have begun in 1973, the world wasn’t cured of homophobia or transphobia, and with each new generation, the field of battle shifts and changes.
Psychology and Psychiatry have come a long way, and now they are seen as bastions of equality and diversity; however, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a risk of regression.
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