First appeared Sept. 11, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press.
TWO YEARS AFTER the American Psychiatric Association and American Psychological Association declared that homosexuality was not a mental illness, Chicago-based syndicated advice columnist Eppie Lederer, known to millions as "Ann Landers," would have none of it. She knew better:
"I do not believe homosexuality is just another lifestyle. I believe these people suffer from a serious personality disorder. Some are sicker than others, but sick they are and all the fancy rhetoric by the American Psychiatric Association will not change it."
You can hardly miss the tone of Lily Tomlin's character Ernestine from the telephone company: "WE are the advice columnist. WE are omniscient."
Landers' recent death prompted an outpouring of praise for her sensitivity, her practical intelligence, her concern for her readers. Some of the encomiums mentioned her supportive attitude toward gays and lesbians. But those comments came from people who had not followed her career carefully or else had short memories.
Although Landers did become more gay-friendly during her last decade, throughout most of her long career, from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, she insistently told her readers that gays are sick, that they have a serious personality disorder, that homosexuality is abnormal, that homosexuals are miserable and self-hating, that most homosexuals would change if they could, and that heterosexuality is God's plan for mankind.
Some examples: In 1965, she described homosexuality as a "psychological disturbance." In 1973, she wrote that "homosexuality is unnatural. It is, in spite of what some psychiatrists say, a sickness - a dysfunction." In 1978 she called it "a personality disorder."
In 1976, oblivious of the fact that advice columns are a magnet for unhappy people not happy ones, Landers wrote, "My mail tells me a far greater number (of gays) are wretched and miserable. They hate their homosexuality and would give anything to be straight."
When an "open and happy" lesbian wrote to protest, Landers replied stiffly, "A great many people do not believe homosexuality is 'normal and healthy' and I am among them."
Landers referred approvingly to the notorious homophobic psychoanalyst Charles Socarides as a "New York scholar," and in 1978, five years after the psychiatrists depathologized homosexuality, Landers gave space in her "Ann Landers Encyclopedia" to yet another virulent homophobe, psychiatrist and change therapist Harold M. Voth of the Menninger Foundation.
Voth unleashed a tirade, trotting out all the old psychiatric claims about the possibility of curing homosexuality and the whole creaky machinery of neo-Freudian ideology about close-binding mothers and faulty gender identification, finally summarizing:
"To define homosexuality as 'normal' is to assault the fundamental building block of all societies, namely the heterosexual bond and the family which springs from that bond."
By 1983, a decade after the psychiatrists and psychologists changed their position, Landers was still finding reasons to condemn homosexuality, sounding for all the world like Lou Sheldon, Paul Cameron, and Jerry Falwell:
"I stand firm in my contention that homosexuality is not normal. It is my belief that when God made man and women he instilled in them sexual desires for one another so they would procreate. That was his divine plan to people the earth. ... Since their (homosexuals') behavior does not square with the plan for procreation, I believe in that sense they are abnormal."
Ann Landers, meet Laura Schlessinger.
Finally after more than 30 years of telling Americans gays were disordered, sick, miserable, abnormal, and unnatural, in 1992 Landers suddenly reversed course without ever admitting she had been wrong.
After Landers read about research suggesting a genetic component to homosexuality and nearly 75,000 gays and lesbians wrote saying they were happy being gay, one day she announced: "And now Dear Reader, this is Ann: It is my firm conviction that homosexuality is not learned behavior. It is genetic." And Landers rapidly became much more accepting of gays and lesbians
That research had problems and the findings have not been replicated, but Landers' earlier "firm conviction" was not based on science either so it made little difference. And unlike her previous "firm conviction" which helped two generations of young gays feel defective and two generations of parents feel guilty, her revised view no doubt did some good.
Landers can be praised for changing her mind, but not too much. Most experts and other advice columnists realized there was nothing wrong with gays long before Landers. Landers was the last on board. Her twin sister, Pauline Phillips, known to readers as "Dear Abby," had for decades been much more supportive of gays and lesbians.
"It's as if I've always known that there was nothing wrong with gay and lesbian people," Abby told author Eric Marcus in his recent book "Making Gay History." "This is a natural way of life for them. Nobody molested them, Nobody talked them into anything. They were simply born that way. ... Any therapist who would take a gay person and try to change him or her should be in jail."
Too bad Ann Landers didn't listen to Dear Abby.