This week in my email, a press release surprised me. The headline was “Pennsylvania State Senate unanimously passed SB 2125, which will remove ‘Homosexuality’ from the list of prohibited sexual acts in Pennsylvania’s criminal code.” What’s more, the legislation was sponsored by Republican State Rep Todd Stevens from Montgomery County.
My surprise was that back in 1975, Governor Milton Shapp created the Governor’s Council for Sexual Minorities, which featured members of the LGBT community and liaisons from each governmental department, including the Attorney General’s office. The commission was to look at all Pennsylvania’s laws and discover if any laws affected the lgbt community. It was a mountain of work and was headed by Barry Kohn. My mind wondered, almost 50 years later, how we missed the bit brought up on SB 2125
Upon further reflection, we didn’t miss it. In the 1970s, it was decided at the time that we could only feel truly safe by legislation action. As I wrote a few weeks ago, sodomy laws in all state in the U.S. were stuck down in 2003 by the Supreme Court. Pennsylvania did that in 1980, making the homosexuality in the crime code irrelevant. But there were other issues at that time that we discovered that needed our immediate attention.
The most important thing at that time that we stumbled on was aversion therapy. Aversion therapy is the grandfather of conversion therapy, which is actually aversion therapy light, at least that’s what is claimed by those who practice it.
Both aversion and conversion therapy are meant to help you rid yourself of your homosexuality and make you what was considered a ‘normal’ human being in the eyes of those practitioners. It was practiced by the psychiatric profession and mostly took place in Pennsylvania supported hospitals and prisons. We focused as an example on Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute outside Philadelphia. There, the methods included electric shock to the genitals among other forms of torture.
An executive order was issued stopping any institution in Pennsylvania that received state funds to stop the practice. Quickly after, during public hearings before the state legislature for the yearly budget, the practice was brought up by State Rep. Herb Fineman of Philadelphia. When the heads of both the prison and State hospital system testified, Fineman explained that if that practice continued he’d cut their funding. This stopped the practice in any institution connected to the state in any way, but it still allowed others to practice it privately. That spotlight created by the Governor’s Commission on Sexual Minorities helped spur the American Psychiatric Association to look into their definition of homosexuality and the idea that it could be treated, an idea that ultimately went away.
Along with aversion therapy, the commission did great work, including looking into how the prison system treated LGBT people, including the trans community.
Sometimes it’s the small nuts and bolts of the work we all do to create equality that have a big difference. They might not get acknowledged as much as other major events, but they still matter. I’d like to give a shout out and a thank you to Governor Shapp and his administration and those brave out LGBT people who served on that commission and started that work back in 1975. It would be many years before other states did so, and that work continues today with social justice, prison reform, and the fight to end conversion therapy.