Hilton Hawaiian Village
On May 9, 1973, the American Psychiatric Association, which was holding its annual convention in Hawaiʻi that year, held a session at the Hilton Hawaiian Village entitled “Should Homosexuality Be in the APA Nomenclature?”At issue was the question of whether homosexuality should continue to be classified as a “mental disorder,” as it had been since the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was first published in 1952, despite the accumulation of research contradicting that label and its harmful effects on the LGBTQ+community.
The first speaker was Ronald Gold, representing the Gay Activists Alliance, who implored the psychiatrists to “Stop it, you're making me sick!” He received long and loud applause. While two of the other speakers continued to insist that same-sex attraction is inherently pathological, the vice president of the association argued that categorizing homosexuality as an illness was a misuse of psychiatry that “rests chiefly on the fact that society disapproves of that behavior, and psychiatrists who labeled it ill are merely acting as agents of such cultural value systems.”
The removal of homosexuality from the DSM was also supported by Robert Spitzer, a prominent heterosexual therapist who for the first time during the meeting had an opportunity to meet gay psychiatrists when he was invited to a clandestine meeting they arranged at a local Honolulu bar. Following the meeting, members of the association voted strongly in support of depathologizing homosexuality. In December the removal of this category from the DSM was approved by the board of trustees, and the decision was confirmed by the wider APA membership in 1974.
Ironically, the Hilton Hawaiian Village where the meeting took place is famous for its large rainbow mural and was using rainbow motifs abundantly in its advertising and promotion, even though the rainbow flag did not become a symbol of LGBTQ pride until several years later.
Brochure photos courtesy of DeSoto Brown collection