Decriminalisation of Homosexuality

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER (15:35): This year, 2025, marks 50 years since the decriminalisation of homosexuality in South Australia. Decriminalisation came from the work of many activists who championed equality and inclusion against systemic injustice. Today, I rise to retell a similar story of change labelled the 'greatest gay victory of the time'.

The first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published in 1952, classified homosexuality as 'sexual deviation' within a larger category of 'sociopathic personality disturbance disorders', including transvestism, paedophilia, fetishism and sexual sadism. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) codified homosexuality as unnatural compared to heterosexuality.

In the wake of the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City, gay rights activists began protesting about the classification. At the 1970 APA convention, activists targeted psychiatrists who argued homosexuality could be cured, and during the presentation of a paper discussing the use of aversion practices to treat sexual deviation, gay rights activists interrupted and were heard to shout 'Vicious!', 'Torture!' and, 'Where did you take your residency?'

Protesters were met with retaliation, being called 'maniacs', 'paranoid fools', 'bitches', and one psychiatrist called the police to come and shoot the protesters. Kent Robinson, a psychiatrist sympathetic to the gay community's concerns, met with Larry Littlejohn, a protester. The two agreed they needed to have gay community involvement at the 1971 APA convention and a panel discussion, entitled Gay is Good, was held platforming activists to speak on stigma and discrimination.

The following year, a psychiatrist, Dr H. Anonymous, led the panel dressed in an oversized suit and mask because he feared his career would be jeopardised as a psychiatrist and he would not get to work in his field if it was known that he was supporting gay activists in addressing their concerns. A booth at the convention encouraged psychiatrist support, declassifying homosexuality with the phrase 'gay, proud and healthy'. They published a flyer emphasising that:

Psychiatry…has been the major single obstacle in our society to the advancement of homosexuals and to the achievement of our full rights, our full happiness and our basic human dignity. Psychiatry can become our major ally.

Support from within the psychiatric profession to declassify homosexuality was growing. APA vice-president Judd Marmor expressed these concerns well. He said:

The cruelty, the thoughtlessness, the lack of common humanity, in the attitudes reflected by many conservative psychiatrists is I think a disgrace to our profession.

Pressure from within the APA and gay rights activists saw progress in the sixth printing of the DSM-II in 1973. There was a change in language from 'homosexuality' to 'sexual orientation disturbance'. This shifted focus towards distress caused by same-sex attraction or the desire to change it—not entirely a satisfactory change to modern thinking, but for its time, revolutionary.

The APA held a referendum amongst members in 1974 that supported this change with a 58 per cent majority. With that, gay rights activists had won what was labelled back in the early seventies a 'decade long battle'. Subsequent editions of the DSM continued to focus on distress about sexual orientation until 2013 when any diagnostic category relating to sexual orientation was removed completely with the release of DSM-5, in 2013! It was 43-year battle for a change that required a bit of copying, pasting and editing in the psychiatric handbook.

In 2024, the Malinauskas Labor government and this chamber banned conversion practices. This recognises the ongoing need to protect the rights of LGBTI people from harm and interference by conversion practice proponents, which we know on the evidence of people who have been through this is still happening now, operating on psychiatric beliefs that are now out of date and have subsequently been discredited by any worthwhile psychiatric practitioner for more than half a century.

The 1970s were a key turning point in the fight for gay liberation. In the space of 10 years we went from being deviants and criminals to disturbed and criminals to, at least in my case, being very cranky and determined to change all of these things.