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Charles Silverstein, who toppled gay ‘sexual deviant’ label, has died at 87

Charles Silverstein
Charles Silverstein Photo: Screenshot

Charles Silverstein, a psychologist whose testimony before the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 was a watershed moment in the gay rights movement, died on January 30 at his home in New York City, according to his executor. The cause was lung cancer. He was 87.

Silverstein was close to completing his doctoral degree in social psychology when, as a member of the Gay Activists Alliance, he was invited to speak before the APA’s nomenclature committee about homosexuality, categorized at the time in the organization’s influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, as a mental disorder and “sexual deviation.”

Silverstein approached the topic with humor and disarmed a skeptical audience.

“What I did,” Silverstein later recalled for the Rutgers Oral History Archives, “was write a parody, a satire, of all the absurd things that the American Psychiatric Association had diagnosed.”

“Psychoanalysts believed that gay men were doomed to lives of depression and, eventually, suicide because of their shame,” Silverstein told the Windy City Times in an interview. “I argued that these men were not ashamed because they were homosexual, but because of what these therapists were telling them.”

Silverstein’s strategy worked.

Later that year, the APA voted to remove homosexuality from their official list of mental disorders — with a qualification. The decision was “not to say that homosexuality is ‘normal,’” the APA wrote in an accompanying statement, “or that it is as desirable as heterosexuality.”

Qualification aside, the change was a landmark victory.

Silverstein, who earned his Ph.D. in social psychology at Rutgers in 1974, would go on to become a prolific author and activist, and founder of New York-based Identity House and the Institute for Human Identity, which describes itself as “the nation’s first and longest-running provider or LGBTQ+-affirming psychotherapy.” In both his practice and writing, Silverstein sought to help patients and readers live without shame, which he called a “toxin in the body.”

Silverstein’s books would correlate with both progress and setbacks for LGBTQ+ people over five decades after his groundbreaking testimony.

In 1977, Silverstein co-authored, with Violet Quill writer Edmund White, The Joy of Gay Sex: An Intimate Guide for Gay Men to the Pleasures of a Gay Lifestyle, a paean to the gay community’s newfound sexual liberation and a clap-back to 1972’s The Joy of Sex, which avoided the topic of gay sex altogether. A Family Matter: A Parents’ Guide to Homosexuality (1977), and Man to Man: Gay Couples in America (1981) soon followed.

An updated New Joy of Gay Sex in 1991, co-authored with another Violet Quill member, Felice Picano, addressed the AIDS epidemic, with safe-sex addendums and a heartrending section on writing wills.

In 2011, Silverstein looked back with a memoir, For the Ferryman: A Personal History, which recounts Silverstein’s life with and without his longtime partner William Bory, who died of complications from AIDS in 1993.

For the Ferryman was reissued last year, with a new preface in which Silverstein addresses the latest challenges facing the LGBTQ+ community.

He lamented a new wave of attacks from state legislatures, and religious groups who still “claim they can ‘cure’ us,” but also had words for advocacy groups, whose corporatization and tax-exempt status have “led to a listlessness in the LGBT movement.”

Well-funded organizations that “have to keep their noses clean and eschew politics” are a far cry from ACT UP’s agit-prop in the 1980’s and 90’s, or the Gay Activists Alliance’s notorious “zaps” in the 1970’s.

“One wonders whether to call it a movement any longer,” wrote Silverstein.

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