Estado Sentido

The 1973 American Psychiatric Association (APA) decision to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) could be regarded as the culmination of almost 100 years of psychiatric theorizing about and attitudes toward the subject of homosexuality (Bayer, 1981; Drescher & Merlino, 2007). In the 19th century, as part of a general shift from religious to scientific models of understanding human behavior, psychiatrists began classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder (Krafft-Ebing, 1886/1965). As the Western world's conceptual paradigm shifted from religion to science, many “sins” were reclassified as “illnesses.” Demonic possession became insanity, drunkenness became alcoholism, and sodomy became homosexuality (Bayer, 1981; Szasz, 1965, 1974).



Theories describing homosexuality as a normal variation of human sexual expression have been present since the mid-19th century (Ulrichs, 1864/1994; Ellis, 1905/1978; Hirschfeld, 1914/2000). However, in the mid-20th century, Alfred Kinsey and his associates from Bloomington, Indiana (Kinsey et al., 1948, 1953) contributed to the increasing popularity of this perspective. The first Kinsey Report dealt with male sexuality and the second with female sexuality. The 1948 volume, although published as an academic tome, nevertheless sold millions of copies to the general public. Kinsey found that homosexuality was not rare, that it occurs rather frequently, and, depending on how the data are sorted, 10–35% of the people he interviewed said they had engaged in some kind of homosexual activity in adulthood. This finding was at odds with the then-prevalent psychoanalytic theory that adult homosexuality was a rare condition. Kinsey's conclusion could be summarized as, “If it's that common, how can it be a disease?”