Psychiatrists of the 20th century: homosexuality went from a ‘crime’ to an ‘illness’

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]One of the most shocking things about that I discovered while researching some men in London is is how absolutely chaotic the psychiatric community was.

[00:00:09]Had absolutely no understanding. People thought there was a was a real move in the right direction because the idea was that we should regard homosexuals no longer as a crime but as an illness.

[00:00:20]Now, in today's thoughts that obviously sounds grotesque and it was because all the old Freudian stuff was trotted out, you know, young boys too close to their mothers didn't have fathers around to beat homosexuality out of them and so on and so forth. The experts were always people who had absolutely clueless ideas or deranged ideas about what what homosexuality was. Whereas, you know, back in in in the 19th century and the early 20th century had people like Magnus Hirschfeld actually saying, "Look, this occurs everywhere. It's not some sort of odd phenomenon and it occurs in the animal world."

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