This classification was challenged by gay rights activists during the gay liberation movement especially following the 1969 stonewall riots, and rendered problematic by research. The classification and understanding of homosexuality within the field of psychology have undergone profound changes over the past century In 1973, the american psychiatric association (apa) removed the diagnosis of “homosexuality” from the second edition of its diagnostic and statistical manual (dsm)
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This resulted after comparing competing theories, those that pathologized.
In the first edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm), published in 1952, homosexuality was classified under “sociopathic personality disturbance” (1)
The last 70 years have brought psychiatry a long way, but it is only in the most recent version of the dsm that the last pieces of evidence of pathologizing homosexuality were removed (2) The first dsm, created in 1952, established a hierarchy of sexual deviancies, vaulting heterosexual behavior to an idealized place in american culture.
