The gay test pen
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There it was, diagnosis number 302.0, 3 sentences, composed of 81 words, which certified homosexuality as sick. That's what it said in the bible of their profession, what the psychiatrists called the DSM, or the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual, a book which listed in clear, clinical language every possible permutation of psychosis, every variant of paranoia, every deviant mental tick that the children of Freud had ever encountered, all nicely bound together under an industrial yellow cover with an authoritative OED staid font. Or anyway, that's what the psychiatrists thought. For that matter, they were barred from practicing psychiatry, because you don't let someone who's pathological practice medicine on other people who are pathological. Gays were routinely fired from teaching jobs, denied security clearances and US citizenship. Now, because psychiatrists believed that homosexuals were pathological, it gave scientific sanction for the rest of the country to see it the same way. Up until that time, psychiatrists had always thought of homosexuality as a pathology- a problem so profound it affected, as one psychiatrist told me, the total personality. He was asked because, in 1973, he happened to be president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association when the organization decided that homosexuality was not a mental disease. Still, he was asked to testify about the mental health of homosexuals and the mental health effects of discrimination against homosexuals in Ireland, in Texas, in Maine, in front of Congress, and too many places to mention. My grandfather was a psychiatrist, but not in any sense an expert on what was then called sexual deviance. It's a story of doctors, of science, of homosexuals, of lucky coincidence and political action, and of the sheer power of good old-fashioned face-to-face schmoozing. Today, we are devoting our entire show to this one killer story about something very small, something small that helped change something very, very large.
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From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Today's radio program is about something small like that that was at the epicenter of a massive social change in our country for a brief moment. It's uncanny when something so small, for a moment, for the length of time that it takes to sign a name, can carry the entire weight of history of a nation. This pen has done something more important than I will ever do, which is, of course, a distressing thought because, after all, it is just a pen, and you are a human being. I'm guessing that, from time to time, what you do is that you take out the pen and you stare at it, and you think a thought that goes along the lines of- this pen was right there. Let's say that you end up with one of these pens. It took the entire political machinery of a huge country to do that.īut, OK. You know what I'm talking about here? The pen that Lyndon Johnson used to sign the Voting Rights Act- that pen did not give anybody the right to vote. He uses more than one, then he gives the pens away. And when he does it, there are special pens that he uses.
![the gay test pen the gay test pen](https://spectator.imgix.net/content/uploads/2017/04/GettyImages-671972568.jpg)
And finally, the president signs the bill into law. And then there are votes, and there are compromises and more votes. And people talk about it, and then they ignore it.
#The gay test pen tv
And there are stories on the TV and editorials in the newspapers. So for weeks and months and years, people write to their legislators, and lobbyists make massive campaign contributions to try to swing the votes.