The ‘Cure’: A Transnational History of (Homo-)Sexual Conversion Therapy, ca. 1933-1973
At the center of my research are practices today commonly referred to as “conversion therapy”. Deeply intertwined with Western notions about gender and sexuality as they were developed since the late 19th century, there have existed a variety of approaches that can be subsumed under this name. “Conversion Therapy”, thus serves in my research as an umbrella term for a variety of professionalized attempts to change sexual orientation and is almost as old as the relatively modern concepts of hetero- and homosexuality. Underlying all of these earlier practices was a certain pathological view, the notion that homosexuality is less desirable than heterosexuality, and that sexual orientation is a mutable variable that can be changed, which persists in some milieus until today. This attitude, however, is historically grown. As medical knowledge and technologies developed and changed over time, so did the corresponding practices deemed appropriate to “correct”, suppress, or accept same-sex desire. First, sporadic experiments in the former direction can be traced back to late 19th century medical doctors operating mainly from German-speaking Central Europe (e.g. Steinach, Krafft-Ebing, Hirschfeld, Freud), which is why this project places special emphasis on a transnational discourse emanating from the German-speaking world. By placing transatlantic exchange of experts and expertise on this issue at the center of my inquiry, this project builds on most currently existing research on the topic, which has tended to focus on Anglo-American contexts exclusively, while also diverging and adding to it from a new perspective. At the heart of this approach is really the question after the origin and early genesis of “conversion therapy”. More explicitly, this thesis attempts to shed greater light on theories and practices, which were deemed “scientifically sound” before the early 1970s, i.e. before gay liberation and before these practices became increasing tied to religious fundamentalist groups, drawing from medical publications, conference programs, and doctors’ correspondences.
The other main line of my inquiry revolves around the mutual impact of “conversion therapy” and the pathology discourse on the first and second wave of homosexual activism on both sides of the Atlantic. In both, English- and German-language publications of historical homosexual subcultures, the issue of the nature of sexual orientation comes up constantly. The medical discourse was in this context a unifying element in the sense that it provided early activists with words to describe their situation and feelings, justification of their existence outside of the criminal system, as well as a backdrop against which one could position oneself. Additionally, the progressive belief that acceptance by mainstream society could only be reached through a better “scientific” understanding of human sexuality and according education of the public, was held by many homosexual activist leaders until the mid-1960s. Consequently, a large variety of texts on the origin and treatment of homosexuality circulated over the 20th century between different activist communities on both continents. Here the project takes into consideration emancipatory manifests, periodicals, as well as ego-documents Besides the exchange of expert literature, personal contact, formal and informal networks and activist’s exchange on the issue of “conversion therapy” are of interest to me, since the dissociation from the dependency on medical experts marked a distinct step towards late 1960s “radical, gay” activism and active lobbying of government entities and medical associations for a depathologization of homosexuality.
In summary, this project explores the history of practices aimed at changing sexual orientation in the 20th century from a transnational perspective. The geographical focus of this project lays on the exchange between German States (late Weimar Republic, Third Reich, GDR and FDR) and the US as the two regions associated with world-leading research into sexuality, as well as places of emergent homosexual rights movements in the early and mid-20th century (1910s/1920s and the 1950s/1960s, respectively). Diverging from prior studies that investigated “conversion therapy” within the boundaries of one nation state and within one political regime, this doctoral thesis attempts to get a bigger picture, and shed more light on the manifold transnational connections and continuities immanent in contemporary sources, drawing from both, medical professional and activist archives on two continents.