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LGBTQ People Suffered Traumatic Treatments at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Mentally Ill
LGBTQ People Suffered Traumatic Treatments at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Mentally Ill
“This is coercive federal psychiatry. ...This whole idea of LGBT Americans being broken and in need of a cure—religious or psychiatric—is still a pernicious, damaging lie.”
ANDREW GIAMBRONE MAY 31, 2018 6 AM
St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane was supposed to help straighten Thomas H. Tattersall out, but by all appearances, it put him through a world of pain. ... Tattersall was admitted to the federal hospital in Southeast D.C. in the mid-1950s, after he had been forced out of his job at the U.S. Department of Commerce. Bureaucrats in the Eisenhower administration learned that Tattersall, a married man with a history of mental illness, was what was then pejoratively labelled a “self-admitted homosexual.” He was gay, in other words—and needed to be cured of it.
So off he went to the country’s first federally operated psychiatric facility, established a century earlier by an act of Congress at the urging of reformers Dorothea Dix and Thomas Miller. They championed humane treatment for the mentally ill who lived in the area, and who previously had been sent to prisons and almshouses that offered little if any therapeutic care, much less dignity.
....
Some of the darkest realities of St. Elizabeths’ fame are still largely hidden. But two local residents who describe themselves as “archive activists” want to change that for the institution’s LGBTQ history. ... Charles Francis and Pate Felts stumbled across a curious omission last year that sparked their interest in St. Elizabeths. While touring the National Building Museum’s 2017 exhibit on the institution, Architecture of an Asylum, the men noticed there were practically no materials on the queer patients whom St. Elizabeths had treated as supposed “perverts.”
....
Francis and Felts had their first major breakthrough last August when they visited the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies at the University of Minnesota. The archives hold the papers of Benjamin Karpman, who served as senior psychiatrist at St. Elizabeths from the 1920s to the 1960s. Francis and Felts went through 21 boxes of materials, writing notes as they went. (Visitors cannot take photos.) ... Born in Russia, Karpman studied psychoanalysis in Minnesota. At St. Elizabeths, he practiced on homosexuals committed by judges, and served as a federal expert on complications of sex and gender. In 1948, according to documents the Mattachine Society has reviewed, he told the Post Office Department—in testimony about obscenity in the mail system—that “90 percent of the cases at St. Elizabeths have many problems centered on some sexual difficulty.”
....
“This is coercive federal psychiatry. ...This whole idea of LGBT Americans being broken and in need of a cure—religious or psychiatric—is still a pernicious, damaging lie.”
ANDREW GIAMBRONE MAY 31, 2018 6 AM
St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane was supposed to help straighten Thomas H. Tattersall out, but by all appearances, it put him through a world of pain. ... Tattersall was admitted to the federal hospital in Southeast D.C. in the mid-1950s, after he had been forced out of his job at the U.S. Department of Commerce. Bureaucrats in the Eisenhower administration learned that Tattersall, a married man with a history of mental illness, was what was then pejoratively labelled a “self-admitted homosexual.” He was gay, in other words—and needed to be cured of it.
So off he went to the country’s first federally operated psychiatric facility, established a century earlier by an act of Congress at the urging of reformers Dorothea Dix and Thomas Miller. They championed humane treatment for the mentally ill who lived in the area, and who previously had been sent to prisons and almshouses that offered little if any therapeutic care, much less dignity.
....
Some of the darkest realities of St. Elizabeths’ fame are still largely hidden. But two local residents who describe themselves as “archive activists” want to change that for the institution’s LGBTQ history. ... Charles Francis and Pate Felts stumbled across a curious omission last year that sparked their interest in St. Elizabeths. While touring the National Building Museum’s 2017 exhibit on the institution, Architecture of an Asylum, the men noticed there were practically no materials on the queer patients whom St. Elizabeths had treated as supposed “perverts.”
....
Francis and Felts had their first major breakthrough last August when they visited the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies at the University of Minnesota. The archives hold the papers of Benjamin Karpman, who served as senior psychiatrist at St. Elizabeths from the 1920s to the 1960s. Francis and Felts went through 21 boxes of materials, writing notes as they went. (Visitors cannot take photos.) ... Born in Russia, Karpman studied psychoanalysis in Minnesota. At St. Elizabeths, he practiced on homosexuals committed by judges, and served as a federal expert on complications of sex and gender. In 1948, according to documents the Mattachine Society has reviewed, he told the Post Office Department—in testimony about obscenity in the mail system—that “90 percent of the cases at St. Elizabeths have many problems centered on some sexual difficulty.”
....