Critical Introduction - Old Silent Assumptions

1. The Myth of a "Natural" Human Sexuality

Homosexuality: Healthy or sick?
The word "homosexual" was invented by the Austrian-Hungarian writer and "gay rights" advocate K.M. Kertbeny in 1869. He wanted this term to characterize a healthy condition of loving one's own sex. Immediately thereafter, however, the Berlin psychiatrist Carl Westphal named this condition "contrary sexual feeling" and declared it to be a disease. For the next hundred years the entire psychiatric profession - adopting Kertbeny's term, but Westphal's characterization - considered homosexuals to be suffering from mental illness and devised various "cures". Finally, in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed the diagnosis from its manual. From that moment on, millions of formerly sick homosexual women and men were healthy again - the greatest and fastest mass cure in medical history. (However, this did not win anyone a Nobel prize for medicine).

Two pioneers:

K. M. Kertbeny (1824 -1882) invented the word "homosexual" in 1869 Carl Westphal (1833 - 1890) invented the disease homosexuality in 1870