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Friday 5: Acute homosexual panic - Archive activism at St. Elizabeths - Magic lanterns with the Mattachine - & more
10.7.23
This week:
1. Queer history at St. Elizabeths!
2. Rest in peace, Thomas Tattersall.
3. The Mattachine Society has a dropbox?
4. The dehumanizing metaphor-family!
5. A whistleblower at St. Elizabeths!
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#1. "This is Coercive Federal Psychiatry."
Excerpted from The Washington City Paper: Read the full article here.
Charles Francis and Pate Felts stumbled across a curious omission last year that sparked their interest in St. Elizabeths. While touring the exhibit on the institution, Architecture of an Asylum, the men noticed there were practically no materials on the queer patients whom St. Elizabeths had treated as “perverts.”
"The exhibit was de-gayed,” says Francis. “We did see one wisp of a mention of homosexuality in a diagram entitled ‘Alcoholic Woman No. 2.’” The diagram showed circles of Freudian maladies that a St. Elizabeths patient supposedly suffered from, including homosexual tendencies.
They faced a colossal task in researching St. Elizabeths. In many cases, the experiences of the hospital’s queer patients have been erased. It is unknown exactly how many were committed on account of their sexual orientation or gender identity. No centralized list was kept, and countless patient records have been destroyed or lost.
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St. Elizabeths played an essential role in the 20th-century assault on LGBTQ citizens and deleted queer history in the process.
Winfred Overholser, the superintendent of the hospital from 1937 to 1962 and the president of American Psychiatric Association for one year, was instrumental in arguing that homosexuals should be separated from the military and undergo clinical therapy.
Overholser was a chief architect of policies that lumped LGBTQ people into a cabal of sexual degenerates (killers, rapists, voyeurs, pedophiles, homosexuals) during the period following World War II.
In 1948, D.C.’s congressional overlords approved the Sexual Psychopath Act, which criminalized queer behavior, including oral sex, sodomy, indecent exposure, and “prostitution, or any other immoral or lewd purpose.” Overholser, the St. Elizabeths superintendent, helped draft the law.
If a person was determined to be a “sexual psychopath,” a D.C. court could send him or her to St. Elizabeths, where the person would remain until the hospital’s superintendent found that “he has sufficiently recovered so as not to be dangerous to other persons.” Dozens of people were indicted under the law, which effectively supplied a pipeline of LGBTQ people to St. Elizabeths.
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#2. “Immoral, notorious and scandalous”
Excerpted from Archive Activism: Vergangenheitsbewaltigung!, by Charles Francis and Pate Felts for Mattachine. Read full article here.
Committed to St. Elizabeth’s from 1955 to 1960, (Thomas) Tattersall was administered repeated “insulin shock therapy” sessions, a barbaric series of massive injections of insulin to induce comas over weeks. This was seen as an intravenous lobotomy- like shock for a “self-admitted” homosexual who was considered insane.
Worse, if that is possible, while he was conscious, Tattersall was serially interrogated between 1953 and 1962 by federal investigators who described him as “mentally deranged” and used him as their informant.
Tattersall is one uniquely horrific example of what befell tens of thousands of LGBTQ Americans who were declared sexual perverts by their government in 1953.
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#3. "On the way home we did feel like screaming.”
Excerpts from The Mattachine Society. Read full article-- and see the slides-- here.
We have shared the slides and diagrams with historians familiar with the bad science and psychosexual theories of the time. They point to the disturbing interweaving of homosexuality and criminal or pathological behavior. Of course, by definition, homosexuality in the day was a criminal condition – and you were deemed insane.
Indeed, if one were indicted and institutionalized under the D.C. Sexual Psychopath Act of 1948, you could not leave St. Elizabeths until certified by the Hospital Superintendent as “cured.”
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#4. A family of dehumanizing metaphors
Excerpted from the Dangerous Speech Project. Read full article by Dr. Anna Szilagyi here.
In recent times, with the global rise of populist and far-right political movements, a “family” of dehumanizing metaphors have become common worldwide terms that identify different groups of people as pests, deadly animals, reptiles, parasites, disease, filth, zombies, or demons.
This dehumanizing metaphor-family evokes hostility, disdain, loathing, physical disgust, and/or bodily fear in people.
The targets who are described in these dehumanizing terms most often include foreign nations, ethnic and religious minorities, social classes, LGBT people, political opponents, immigrants/asylum seekers. Importantly, these metaphors simultaneously dehumanize their targets and justify the repressive and inhumane actions that are taken against them.
Indeed, they present the hostility, policy restrictions, maltreatment, human rights violations, and physical aggression to which those people targeted are often subjected to as necessary and that can be carried out according to bureaucratic procedures — naturally excluding any emotional identification with the victims.
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#5. A Whistleblower at St. Elizabeths
Excerpted from The Washington Post (1999). Read full article here.
On May 24, a 22-year-old patient alleged that two staff members put him in restraints during a confrontation, then kicked him and punched him in the mouth. Last week, a 16-year-old accused a staff member of punching him twice in the mouth while he was being put in restraints
The hospital said it is investigating the allegations.
"A lot of people will come to us and say they were harmed while being put in restraints," said Kelly Bagby, managing attorney for University Legal Services Protection and Advocacy Program, the hospital's designated outside patient advocate. "But the majority of allegations of abuse are less serious in nature than in the past."
"In the past": Restraint suit worn in Europe, 1925-1935.
Bagby said she gets about one abuse complaint a month, mostly from patients who say they were roughed up while being put in restraints. Some restraints, she said, have been put on so tightly that they cause bleeding.
She said many patients ask her office not to report abuses to the hospital because they fear retaliation from staff members. Others simply don't bother to report, she said.
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Sidney Brooks, a psychiatrist who was acting medical director at John Howard from November 1997 to March 1998, said staff-on-patient abuse was part of the hospital culture during his tenure.
"It was used as a method of controlling patients and for the staff to exert power over patients," he said.
Brooks said he was "forced out" last year after reporting patient abuse and other improprieties to hospital officials and the FBI.
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