Trip Away the Gay?

LSD’s Journey from Anti-Homosexual Psychiatry to Gay Liberationist Toy, 1955-1980

Abstract

Controversy and abuse are sometimes thought to have surrounded LSD or “acid” only once it escaped the lab and fell out of the hands of responsible therapists and research scientists, contributing to a decades-long freeze of inquiry and legal use that only began to thaw during the recent “psychedelic renaissance.” For gay men and lesbians however, this story is more complicated. Psychedelic therapy in the 1950s and 1960s appeared to hold great potential for the treatment of depression, schizophrenia, alcoholism, and other ailments. But its promise, according to some psychiatrists, extended to treating and even vanquishing homosexuality, “converting” gay men and lesbians into healthy heterosexuals. By the late 1960s, LSD permeated across the youth counterculture, and scientific debates and mainstream portrayals of the drug shifted as it morphed from a “normalizer” of behavior to a menace threatening reproduction, manhood, and womanhood. Meanwhile, from the late-1960s through the post-Stonewall years of “liberation” and beyond, gay men and lesbians acting outside of institutions and the law incorporated LSD into their lives in a variety of ways, finding strange pleasures and surreal laughs, encountering nightmares, or experiencing transcendent meaning. This journey of only about two decades represents a little-investigated but incredibly dynamic chapter of the modern sexual revolution, suggesting that scholars of sexuality will find fertile new ground in the battles over use, legitimacy, and meaning that have beleaguered psychoactive drugs.