ABSTRACT
The field of ‘lesbian and gay psychology’ – or ‘lesbian and gay affirmative psychology’ – came into being when lesbian and gay liberation movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s successfully challenged the definition of homosexuality as a mental illness, and the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders in 1973 (Bayer 1981). Prior to these events, psychologists had largely avoided affirmation of lesbian and gay identities. Since 1973, lesbian and gay psychology has both described those identities as legitimate, mature, adjusted, psychologically healthy ways of being in their own right, and theorised the psychological problems that lesbians and gay men face as consequences of social stigma rather than any inherent pathology. Research has shifted away from questions about the causation and mutability of sexual orientation towards a wider set of research questions which concern lesbians’ and gay men's lives within sexual minority communities and larger heterosexist cultures (Morin 1977; Morin and Rothblum 1991).
