Originally published at http://www.trickymothernature.com/littlemissdysphoria.html In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association decided to change what kind of homosexuality constituted a mental illness. Those millions of gay men and women who were, in the language of their liberation movement, “happy,” “healthy,” or “proud” – in the language of the psychiatrists, they were “homosexuals per se” – were to cease being mentally ill at once. But those fewer gays, those of us who were “disturbed by, in conflict with, or wish to change” our sexual orientation: we were still sick in the head. We suffered not from homosexuality per se, but instead from “sexual orientation disturbance,” brackets, “[Homosexuality].” With the APA’s release of a new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness in 1980, this disturbance was renamed to “ego-dystonic homosexuality,” or EDH. The less common term for EDH, though one still used, was “homosexual dysphoria.”