As reported in the press on the 16th of December 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) announced a decision that quietly but profoundly reshaped history: homosexuality was no longer classified as a mental illness.

The headline read Psychiatrists rule homosexuality no longer ‘deviate’.

At the time, it was reported almost clinically — a vote, a manual revised, a category removed. But its long-term impact has been anything but technical. That decision dismantled the medical justification for stigma, forced “treatments,” and discrimination. It undercut the credibility of  “therapies,” reshaped mental health practice, influenced courts and lawmakers, and helped shift public understanding from pathology to personhood.

It didn’t end the harm overnight — far from it — but it removed a powerful weapon that had been used against LGBTQ+ people for generations. More than a diagnostic change, it was a turning point that affirmed a simple truth: love is not an illness.

History sometimes turns not with a shout, but with a footnote in a manual — and then echoes for decades.

Sadly there are people today, half a century later, who still hold on to the outdated beliefs that were prevalent in the 50s and 60s. Homosexual “expert” of that time, Dr Irving Bieber, believed and wrote that male homosexuality was a mental illness and a form of arrested psychosexual development caused by family dynamics of a “dominant, overbearing mother” combined with a distant, weak, or hostile father and that change was possible. His flawed research claimed around 25–30% had achieved “exclusive heterosexuality” and around 60% were described as having “significant heterosexual functioning” or reduced same-sex attraction. Of the many flaws in his claims was that there was no follow up on his “success” stories he touted.

During my research on the history of conversion “therapy” I came across a fascinating article published in The New York Times the following weekend of the APA announcement. It was an interview with Bieber and also Dr Robert Spitzer. Spitzer had been instrumental in bringing the change in the APA.

In responding to questions, it was clear these two had diametrically opposed beliefs and understanding. Bieber, having invested decades building a reputation that he was a foremost authority on the “treatment” of homosexuality, had a lot to lose with the recent APA decision. It was a big thing to say after all those years “I was wrong”.

In the New York Times article, he explained the “theories” that were the basis of his years of “therapy”.:

“Every male homosexual goes through an initial stage of heterosexual development, and in all homosexuals, there has been a disturbance of normal heterosexual development, as a result of fears which produce anxieties and inhibitions of sexual function. His sexual adaptation is a substitutive adaptation.

I’d like to give you an analogy. In polio, you get a range of reactions of injuries. Some kids are totally paralyzed. Their walking function is gone. Others are able to walk with braces, others have enough muscle left so that they can be rehabilitated and can actually gel to walk by themselves. The analogy falls down only in that the injury of polio is irreversible. But what you have in a homosexual adult is a person whose heterosexual function is crippled like the legs of a polio victim.”

Just to demonstrate that people don’t necessarily change over time, when confronted with the facts, Bieber died in 1991 unchanged in his beliefs.

To religious and non-religious people still holding on to these outdated, ignorant “theories”, I have one thing to say. “Wake up, educate yourself, get with the program.”