UC San Diego

This dissertation examines the transformation of the gay rights movement from 1954 to 1973 through the lens of ASH, a mental institution for male sex offenders located two-hundred miles north of Los Angeles. During this period, homosexual patients at the institution claimed that they were being subjected to painful and invasive treatments to change their sexual orientation. Their allegations of abuse made ASH a potent symbol of the state’s oppression of homosexuals, a Dachau for queers, which could be used by activists to discredit the proponents of aversion therapy and the APA. However, ASH was not only a site of contestation that consolidated gay rights activism but also a site that created ruptures within the movement.

Significantly, those ruptures were generated by competing notions of gay community and identity. For early activists of the accomodationist movement, responding to the plight of ASH’s homosexual patients was particularly problematic. As convicted sex offenders, these patients challenged the movement’s central proposition that gays and lesbians were law abiding citizens who only wished to be assimilated into mainstream society. Paradoxically, the proponents of sexual liberation of the late 1960s and early 1970s were confronted with a far more intractable problem, for by that time, most of ASH’s homosexual patients had been convicted of sex offenses against minors and children. This inconvenient truth threatened to undermine public sympathy for ASH’s patients and activists’ depiction of the hospital as a Dachau for queers. In order to resolve these dilemmas, the conservative and militant wings of the gay rights movement had to reconceptualize the boundaries of gay community and identity in ways that neither had anticipated.