When Regina Kunzel came out about her sexuality in 1977, her parents took her to see a psychiatrist.
Speaking to a crowd of about 80 students in Tawes Hall Friday, Kunzel said people who are questioning their gender identity or pursuing relationships with people of the same sex can still face a lingering stigma of mental illness.
Kunzel, the keynote speaker for Friday’s Fourth Annual DC Queer Studies Symposium, is a University of Minnesota history professor studying the archives of St. Elizabeths Hospital, a government institution that treated people with mental illnesses.
“This particular history is located in historical time, so this is a moment in the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s where psychiatry is very powerful as an institution that exerts power on people, but the kinds of things that made people despair are not over,” Kunzel said. “All this recent reporting on suicides of LGBT, younger people — that kind of history of societal forces making people crazy is not dead, but the era of the large asylum is dead.”
The St. Elizabeths archive — personal diaries from about 100 patients, mostly men, who were in the hospital to be “cured” of their homosexuality — reflects a time when there was a high level of hostility toward gender nonconformity.
“Patients described their belief in the authenticity of their gender feelings, their difficulty in navigating a binary world of gender and sometimes their longing for bodily transformation,” Kunzel said.
The medical classification of homosexuality as some sort of mental disease lasted about 20 years, according to JV Sapinoso, the assistant director of the university’s LGBT program, who helped organize Friday’s event.
“I don’t know how much students necessarily believe that, but I definitely think that the context and the culture has lingering traces of that idea,” Sapinoso said. “If you think it’s wrong or if you think people are sick, that has roots in the medical model.”
That model included psychoanalysis that required patients to tell the truth of their lives, also known as the “talking cure,” Kunzel said. The records reveal a variety of responses including those who refused the notion that anything was wrong with them to those who desperately wanted to be “cured.”
Kunzel quoted one patient as saying, “Right now I want to be cured so I can have relations with a woman. That right now has no appeal.”
In most cases, however, patients were kept at the hospital for containment purposes rather than actual treatment — some medical experts doubted any treatment was actually possible, and tended to merely tell the patients how to feel about members of the opposite sex.
Kunzel said that for most patients, even the minimal psychoanalysis they faced wasn’t a positive experience — some even resisted the attempted treatment, with one female patient going so far as to draw women having sex with each other on the back of some of her medical paperwork.
“If I don’t mind these archives for counter narratives, I’m forced to reckon with their arguably more overarching one of remorse, self-loathing, shame, humiliation and pain,” Kunzel said. “I could offer quote after quote of devastating evidence here to illustrate this.”
Sapinoso said Kunzel’s research fit very well with the theme of the Queer Studies Symposium — “Archiving the Queer.”
“That’s a lot of what her research was about, giving voices to patients who wouldn’t necessarily have a voice,” Sapinoso said.
Students who attended Friday’s event said Kunzel’s talk was interesting and timely.
“I thought it was one of the most engaging talks that I’ve been to,” said Fernanda Vieira, a senior psychology major.
Vieira said the talk was very relevant to the discrimination that still goes on.
“I hear people driving down Route 1 calling two guys holding hands fags,” she said. “It’s just an important thing to integrate into society and not see it as separate and weird.”
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