From The Advocate magazine in partnership with Glad, this is LGBTQ and A.

I'm Jeffrey Masters, and today I'm talking to Dr. Charles Silverstein, whose

1973 presentation before the American Psychiatric Association led them to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness.

And you know, with how much has changed for our community since then, I think we can forget what a crucial game changer it was for the movement

to have it officially declared that the way we live and love is not a mental illness.

It is not something that needs or even can be cured.

And this fight, everything that led up to it, including Charles' role in it,

is a subject of a really fantastic new documentary called Cured.

That premieres on PBS on October 11th, if you want to check that out.

And of course, like any movement in history, Charles wasn't acting alone.

For many years, he was part of the Gay Activist Alliance or the GAA.

This was an early activist group that was founded about six months after the uprising at Stonewall.

Charles was a part of their protests

and zaps before eventually going on to co-write the 1977 landmark book, The Joy of Gay Sex.

This book, along with being banned and burned, seized by custom agents around the world,

this book really did educate generations of gay men about all aspects of gay life, sexual

and not.

So today we're talking about all of this with the now 86-year-old Dr. Charles Silverstein.

Here he is. I want to start off by talking about your role in helping to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder.

But before we get to that, can you talk about why originally it was classified as that, and any evidence or assumed

facts that backed that up?

Well, everything about sexuality is based upon the moral beliefs of a society, and since

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