On this day:
1791 – The United States Bill of Rights becomes law when ratified by the Virginia General Assembly.
1906 – The London Underground’s Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway opens.
1973 – The American Psychiatric Association votes 13–0 to remove homosexuality from its official list of psychiatric disorders, the DSM-II.
Presented with data from researchers such as Alfred Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker, the sixth printing of the DSM-II, in 1974, no longer listed homosexuality as a category of disorder. After a vote by the APA trustees in 1973, and confirmed by the wider APA membership in 1974, the diagnosis was replaced with the category of “sexual orientation disturbance”.[28]
Abstract
In 1973 homosexuality per se was removed from the DSM-II classification of mental disorders and replaced by the category Sexual Orientation Disturbance. This represented a compromise between the view that preferential homosexuality is invariably a mental disorder and the view that it is merely a normal sexual variant. While the 1973 DSM-II controversy was highly public, more recently a related but less public controversy involved what became the DSM-III category of Ego-dystonic Homosexuality. The author presents the DSM-III controversy and a reformulation of the issues involved in the diagnostic status of homosexuality. He argues that what is at issue is a value judgment about heterosexuality, rather than a factual dispute about homosexuality.
Births:
1832 – Gustave Eiffel, French architect and engineer, co-designed the Eiffel Tower (d. 1923)
1863 – Arthur Dehon Little, American chemist and engineer (d. 1935)
1869 – Leon Marchlewski, Polish chemist and academic (d. 1946)
1910 – John Hammond, American record producer and critic (d. 1987)
1919 – Max Yasgur, American dairy farmer and host of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair (d. 1973)
1923 – Uziel Gal, German-Israeli engineer, designed the Uzi gun (d. 2002)
1930 – Edna O’Brien, Irish novelist, playwright, poet and short story writer
1946 – Carmine Appice, American drummer and songwriter
Deaths:
1993 – William Dale Phillips, American chemist and engineer (b. 1925)
2010 – Blake Edwards, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1922)
