Seen at...
Cured
- Director: Patrick Sammon; Bennett Singer
- Writer: Patrick Sammon; Bennett Singer
CGiii Comment
Essential viewing.
This is our history. This is the defining moment of our history, not Stonewall...this! This is when we all stopped being a diagnosis, an illness...millions upon millions cured instantaneously...with a mere signature. The American Psychiatric Association was led by religion, not by science...those, alive and dead, ought to be stripped of their bogus credentials...shamed and criminally charged. Any 'doctor' who performed lobotomies, castrations, electro-shock therapies [and other 'treatments'],still alive have to be charged [and, those dead, posthumously so]...without reserve. Historical child abuse...yes, most definitely...imprison the culprits. Historical conversion therapy [and contemporary conversion therapies]...imprison the culprits. The suffering and torture that they administered [and are still administering] was [is] Mengele-ian. Dr [ha] Charl[atan]es W. Socarides...
He wrote that male homosexuality typically develops in the first two years of life, during the pre-Oedipal stage of a boy's personality formation. In his view, it is caused by a controlling mother who prevents her son from separating from her, and a weak or rejecting father who does not serve as a role model for his son or support his efforts to escape from the mother.
Guess what? His son is magnificently gay!
These are the people who paved the way. Here is activism at its most most potent...and, at its most bizarre - the first testimony from a gay psychiatrist...in a mask! It took years, it took patience, tenacity and intellect.
Praise them. They won.
Exceptional film-making. Exceptional people...where would we all be without them?
Trailer...
The(ir) Blurb...
This powerful, new documentary illuminates a pivotal yet largely unknown chapter in the struggle for LGBT equality: the campaign that led the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses in 1973. Incorporating a trove of newly unearthed archival material, much of it unseen for decades, Cured takes audiences behind the scenes of this riveting narrative to chronicle the strategy and tactics that led to a crucial victory in the movement for LGBT rights. The people involved and their belief that they, and not psychiatrists, were the experts on their own lives propels the story and forms the backbone of the film.