ABSTRACT
In 1973, in an effort to protect homosexuals from discrimination, the American Psychiatric Association utilized an amalgam of civil rights, sociological, and clinical rationales to justify eliminating homosexuality as a psychiatric diagnosis. That contamination of the clinical by the political created a veritable conundrum, which has thrown all subsequent psychiatric study of homosexuality into disarray. The earlier psychiatric/psychological literature, drawing on patient study and thus emphasizing psychopathology, seems to have been replaced by the appearance of a psychiatric, psychoanalytic, pediatric, and social science literature that is oriented toward persuading the mental health community of the normality of homosexuality and the relative magnitude of its incidence in the population. The anthropological literature has been inconsistent in equating transvestitism with homosexuality, an association that may have often been accurate in that the transvestite chose the sexual partner of the sex adopted. The authors of the adolescent study suggest that their incidence figures for homosexuality approximated those of Kinsey for adults.
