Timeline
4th c. BC Hippocratic medical texts
2nd c. AD Galenic medical texts
1533 Henry VIII criminalizes “buggery,” making it
punishable by death and the loss of property
1610 The Virginia Colony establishes sodomy as a
capital crime; other American colonies follow suit
1710? Anonymous publication in England of Onania, or the Heinous Sin of
Self-Pollution
1760 Onanism, or a
Medical Dissertation on the Diseases Produced by Masturbation by
Samuel-Auguste-André-David Tissot
1789-1799 French Revolution
1791 French Constituent Assembly (1789-1791) deletes
antisodomy laws from the new French penal code. This subsequently
becomes the model for the decriminalization of sodomy in other
countries.
1809 Philosophie
zoologique by Jean-Baptiste de Lamark
1857 Treatise on
the Physical, Intellectual, and Moral Degeneration of the Human Species
and the Causes of these Morbid Varieties by
Bénédict A. Morel
1857 Medico-legal
Study of Crimes Against Decency by Ambroise Tardieu
1859 On the Origin
of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin
1861-1865 U. S. Civil War
1864-79 Pamphlets by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs defending
same-sex love as a biological phenomenon
1866 General
Morphology of Organisms Ernst Haeckel
1868 First German usage of homosexual and heterosexual, in a letter from Karl
Maria Kertbeny to Karl Ulrichs
1869 A Practical
Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) by George
Beard
1869 Karl Ernest Westphal describes “contrary sexual
sensation” (conträre
Sexualempfindung) as a neuropathic and psychopathic condition
1871 Passage of German Paragraph 175, a law that criminalized "unnatural fornication"
between males
1878 Arrigo Tamassia renders Westphal’s term into
Italian as inversione dell'istinto
sessuale (inversion of the sexual instinct)
1886 Psychopathia
Sexualis by Richard von Krafft-Ebing
1892 Alice Michel lesbian “lust murder” case
1895 Oscar Wilde trials
1897 Sexual
Inversion by Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds
1897 Magnus Hirschfeld founds the Scientific
Humanitarian Committee to defend the civil rights of homosexuals
1898 George Bedborough put on trial for selling
Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion.
1901 The Social
Problem of Sexual Inversion by Magnus Hirschfeld
1905 Three Essays
on the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund Freud
1910 Transvestites:
The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress by Magnus Hirschfeld
1914-1918 World War I
1920 “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in
a Woman” by Sigmund Freud
1921 Edward Kempf’s Psychopathology describes “homosexual panic”
1924 Henry Gerber and six friends establish the
Society for Human Rights, the first American homosexual rights
organization
1929 Factors in the
Sex Life of Twenty-two Hundred Women by Katharine Bement Davis
1932 “On Female Homosexuality” by Helene Deutsch
1933 Adolph Hitler and the National Socialist (Nazi)
party come to power in Germany
1934 Embryology and
Genetics by Thomas Hunt Morgan
1935 Sigmund Freud states in his "Letter to an American Mother" that, "Homosexuality
is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no
degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness."
1935 The Committee for the Study of Sex Variants is
formed
1935 Egas Moniz develops “frontal lobotomy” or
leucotomy in Portugal
1935 First use of electrical shock in aversive
treatment of homosexuality
1937 J. Edgar Hoover declares “War on the Sex
Criminal!”
1939-1945 World War II
1939 Sigmund Freud dies in London
1940 Sandor Rado’s “A Critical Examination of the
Concept of Bisexuality”
1940 Newdigate Owensby promotes pharmacological shock
therapy for the treatment of homosexuality
1940 Selective Service Medical Circular No. 1
recommends that doctors screen out homosexuals from military draftees
1941 Bombing of Pearl Harbor; United States
enters World War II
1944 “Eight Prerequisites for the Psychoanalytic
Treatment of Homosexuality” by Edmund Bergler
1948 Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred Kinsey, Wardell
Pomeroy, and Clyde Martin
1949 D. O. Cauldwell first describes “psychopathic
transsexualism”
1950 Beginning of Senator Joseph Macarthy’s hearings
on communists in the government; purges of homosexuals from
government
1951 The Homosexual
in America by Edward Sagarin under the pseudonym Donald
Webster Cory
1951 Mattachine Society founded in Los Angeles
1951 Patterns of
Sexual Behavior by Clellan S. Ford and Frank A. Beach
1952 The first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM) groups the "sexual deviations" (including
homosexuality) under the category of “sociopathic personality disorders”
1952 Franz J. Kallmann’s “Twin Sibship Study of Overt
Male Homosexuality”
1952 George Jorgensen undergoes sex reassignment
surgery in Denmark to become Christine Jorgensen
1953 First volume of ONE Magazine: The Homosexual Viewpoint
1953 Sexual
Behavior in the Human Female by Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell
B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin and Paul H. Gebhard
1954 Female
Homosexuality by Frank Caprio
1955 Daughters of Bilitis founded in San Francisco
1956 Evelyn Hooker begins publishing research on the
psychology of non-clinical homosexuals, based on work begun in the 1940s
1957 British Wolfenden Commission recommends
decriminalization of homosexuality
1960 Kurt Freund uses pharmacological aversion
therapy to cure homosexuality
1961 The Myth of
Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz
1961 Madness and
Civilization by Michel Foucault
1962 Homosexuality:
A Psychoanalytic Study by Irving Bieber
1964 M. P. Feldman and M. K. MacCulloch report on the
use of electric shock aversion therapy in the treatment of homosexuality
1965 Sexual Inversion: The Multiple Roots of Homosexuality by
Judd Marmor
1965 Washington Mattachine Society adopts a
resolution declaring that “homosexuality is not a sickness”
1968 The Overt
Homosexual by Charles W. Socarides
1968 Homophile activists protest against Dr. Charles
Socarides at the American Medical Association meeting in San Francisco
1968 DSM-II reclassifies the sexual deviations
as a separate category of personality disorders
1969 The Stonewall Inn riots in New York’s Greenwich
Village ignites a radical gay rights movement
1969 National Institute of Mental Health Task Force
on Homosexuality, headed by Evelyn Hooker, completes its Final
Report; publication delayed until 1972
1970 Gay rights activists storm panels on
homosexuality at the American Psychiatric Association (APA) annual
convention in San Francisco
1970 First Christopher Street Liberation Day March in
New York City commemorating the Stonewall riots
1971 Annual APA meeting in Washington DC features first-ever panel of gay
people speaking about " Lifestyles of Non-Patient Homosexuals"
1972 APA annual meeting sponsors panel--"Psychiatry: Friend or Foe to
Homosexuals: A Dialogue"--that includes gay activists, gay sympathetic
psychiatrists, and a disguised gay psychiatrist, Dr. H Anonymous (John Fryer,
MD)
1972 John Money and Anke A. Ehrhardt’s Man & Woman, Boy & Girl:
Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to
Maturity reports on research started in the 1950s
1972 Lesbian/Woman by Del Martin
and Phyllis Lyon
1973 Board of Trustees (BOT) of the APA approves the
deletion of homosexuality from the DSM-II and substitutes a diagnosis
of “Sexual Orientation Disturbance”
1974 Referendum organized by antigay psychoanalysts to overturn APA BOT decision
is defeated. APA members support BOT decision to remove homosexuality
by significant majority
1977 The Joy of
Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein and Edmund White
1978 Homosexualities:
A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women by Alan P. Bell and
Martin S. Weinberg
1980 Outbreak of genital herpes in the U. S.
1980 DSM-III creates a new class, the “psychosexual
disorders,” including psychosexual dysfunction, paraphilia (fetishism),
gender identity disorder (transsexualism), and “ego-dystonic
homosexuality”
1981 Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women by Alan P. Bell, Martin S. Weinberg and Sue K. Hammersmith
1981 Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis by Ronald Bayer
1981 First reports of a new immunodeficiency syndrome
in homosexual men
1982 APA establishes the a Caucus of Homosexual-Identified Psychiatrists which later becomes the Caucus of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Psychiatrists
1985 Establishment of the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists
1982 U.S. Centers for Disease Control adopt the name
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)
1982 French virologist Luc Montagnier isolates LAV
(lymphadenopathy-associated virus) as the causative agent of AIDS
1982 American virologist Robert Gallo isolates
HTLV-III (human T-cell lymphotropic virus type III) as the causative
agent of AIDS
1986 The name Human Immune Deficiency Virus (HIV)
adopted by consensus
1987 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) forms
in New York City
1987 President Ronald Reagan speaks publicly about
AIDS for the first time
1987 DSM-III-Revised deletes the diagnosis of
homosexuality entirely, leaving the paraphilias and sexual dysfunctions
as the two main classes of "sexual disorders"
1989 First issue of Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy, the official journal of the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists
1990 APA issues position statement opposing discrimination against gay people
in the military
1990 Dutch neuroscientists, Dick Swaab and Michel
Hofman, first report on neuroanatomical differences between homosexual
men and a reference group
1991 J. Michael Bailey and Richard C. Pillard publish
findings on high concordance rate of homosexuality in twins
1991 Simon LeVay reports on a difference in
hypothalamic structure between heterosexual and homosexual men
1991 Sandy Stone’s “Posttranssexual Manifesto”
1991 American Psychoanalytic Association issues position statement opposing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in the selection of psychoanalytic candidates
1992 American Psychoanalytic Association modifies position statement opposing
discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to include faculty, supervising
and training analysts
1993 Dean Hamer and colleagues report on a linkage
between DNA markers on the X chromosome and homosexuality
1993 President Bill Clinton's unsuccessful effort to end discrimination against
gays in the military leads to the compromise: Don't Ask, Don't Tell
1993 Cheryl Chase founds the Intersex Society of
North America (ISNA)
1994 DSM-IV groups sexual dysfunction, the
paraphilias, and gender identity disorder under the heading “sexual and
gender identity disorders”
1995 Release of Saquinavir, the first protease
inhibitor, for the treatment of HIV disease
1996 US Supreme Court strikes down as unconstitutional Colorado's antigay Amendment Two which nullified then-existing civil rights protections for gays and also barred the passage of new anti-discrimination laws
1996 US congress passes Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a law signed by President Clinton, and prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages
1997 American Psychoanalytic Association becomes first mainstream mental health organization to support marriage equality (same-sex marriage)1998 APA officially criticizes efforts to change sexual orientation
2000 Vermont becomes first US state to offer gay people civil unions
2000 APA issues two position statements, one in support of same sex civil unions and the other asking ethical psychiatrists to refrain from practicing conversion or "reparative therapies"
2001 The Netherlands becomes the first country to legalize marriage equality
2002 American Academy of Pediatrics issues position statement in support of second parent adoptions for same-sex couples; APA follows suit with a similar position statement that same year
2003 US Supreme Court strikes down as unconstitutional state sodomy laws in the 13 states that still criminalized consensual, adult homosexual behavior
2003 Belgium legalizes marriage equality
2004 Gay marriage legalized in the US state of Massachusetts
2004 American Psychological Association issues positions statement in support of marriage equality
2005 APA issues a position statement in support of same sex civil marriage
2005 Canada and Spain legalize marriage equality
2006 South Africa legalizes marriage equality; Israel, which does not permit civil marriages, recognizes gay marriages performed in other countries