In Treatment: Queer Encounters with Psychiatry

In his landmark 1995 study Gay New York, George Chauncey countered what he termed the “myth of internalization,” which held that gay men uncritically internalized the dominant culture’s view of them as sick, perverted, and immoral.  In this talk, I examine the encounter of sexual and gender variant people with psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the mid-century U.S. to track a complex relationship to structures of psychiatric stigma, scrutiny, and medicalization.  While some who were committed to mental hospitals or sought private psychiatric treatment presumably learned to understand themselves in the terms of the psychiatric establishment and to identify with the emerging taxonomy of sexual and gender deviance and others resisted those stigmatizing terms, most encounters between patient and psychiatrist were more ambivalent.  Looking to the archive of queer encounters with psychiatry, this talk considers a wider range of subjects than those usually incorporated into LGBT history: reluctant subjects, afraid that they’re homosexual; unpalatable subjects, attracted to young children; unheroic subjects, debilitated by shame and self-loathing.  It does so to explore a history of strategic forsaking and normalization, organized around the mandate to health.