Film review: Cured takes unprecedented look at historic fight to take homosexuality off the illness list
Interviews and research shed light on the heroes who took on the American psychiatric establishment
The Cinematheque streams Cured for free until February 18. A live Q&A featuring codirector Bennett Singer and film subject Dr. Richard Pillard takes place February 17 via Zoom at 7pm
IT’S A MOMENT SO bizarre it would be absurdly funny if you didn’t understand the tragic context.
In archival photos of the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in 1972, a man under the pseudonym Dr. H. Anonymous appears in a rubber Halloween mask and wig to address the convention of mainly white old men. Using a voice-altering microphone, he makes a historic firsthand account as a gay psychiatrist, arguing homosexuality is not a mental illness. Because he is so likely to lose his job as a result, he has to wear the disguise.
“This is our greatest loss: our honest humanity,” he says in his riveting speech, which survives on an audio tape of the presentation.
It’s just one of the little-known milestones brought to light in Patrick Sammon and Bennett Singer’s compelling new documentary Cured. While most people know that gay rights came as a result of Stonewall and people taking to the streets in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that battle could never truly succeed until someone took on the medical establishment, whose Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders listed homosexuality at the top of its “sexual deviations” list. In chronicling that struggle, Cured ends up not only ranking as one of the most in-depth film contextualizations of gay liberation out there, but creates an almost courtroom-drama-like tension.
The meticulously researched film opens with deeply disturbing accounts of barbaric conversion therapies inflicted in the name of “curing” homosexuality throughout the 1950s and ‘60s. They include shock treatments, chemical castration, and even lobotomies. This is harrowing stuff. In archival footage from the 1970s, a young gay man describes in excruciating detail what it was like waiting and watching the clock for his next electroshock treatment, hoping against hope that his turn wouldn’t come.
The damage is obvious even in people who only sought psychotherapy, convinced they were mentally ill. As activist Ron Gold says to a roomful of psychiatrists in the film, “The worst thing about your diagnosis is that gay people themselves believe it. Nothing makes you sick like believing you are sick.”
Cured tracks down surviving members of the core group that decided to take on the medical elite—and it’s a colourful and beyond-compelling group of smart, articulate interview subjects. Among them, the Daughters of Bilitis’s Kay Lahusen, her late partner Barbara Gittings a still-inspiring leader onscreen; and Frank Kameny, the astronomer fired from the U.S. Army for his sexuality who went on to organize some of the earliest gay-liberation protests. One of the most fascinating stories surrounds conservative psychiatrist Charles Socarides, who fought vocally to keep homosexuality as a mental disorder till his death in the 1980s—and whose own gay son, interviewed here, became a prominent rights advocate in the Clinton government.
The film’s biggest impact derives from the bravery of gay-liberation pioneers, and appreciating how far we’ve come in five decades. Still, Cured’s closing credits push us to do more—conversion therapy is still legal in many places, for instance. The documentary also reminds us at a pertinent moment of social activism that change often doesn’t happen overnight—that it takes decades of unrelenting work and, most of all, discussion.
And by the way, that man in the rubber mask went on to become an American gay hero, eventually coming out to his colleagues as Dr. John Fryer. The late psychiatrist's journals now sit in a special archive in Philly. At a recent APA conference that appears in the film, his colleagues even pay tribute to him by wearing “Who is John?” buttons.
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