ABSTRACT
The interplay of social change and psychoanalytic understanding is demonstrated by how we have dealt with homosexuality, more than by any other issue—more, even, than female psychology. Even analysts who were otherwise friendly and supportive of gay colleagues advised them not to seek treatment with psychoanalysts. In the audience of a gay-themed play on Broadway in the early 1990s, just the mention in the dialogue of someone going to a psychoanalyst evoked loud hoots and jeers from the audience. Change in our psychoanalytic understanding of gender and sexual orientation began in the women's movement and in gay liberation movements out there in the culture, not from within our field. Psychoanalytic principles were abandoned in the zeal to cure homosexuality. Some have claimed that the "gay activist movement" in the American Psychoanalytic Association forced its agenda upon us.
