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Charles Socarides, Gay 'Cure' Doctor, Dies

Posted on: Saturday, 31 December 2005, 21:00 CST

NEW YORK - Charles Socarides, the psychiatrist famous for insisting that homosexuality was a treatable illness and who claimed to have "cured" hundreds, has died. He was 83.

Socarides, died Dec. 25 of heart failure at a hospital near his Manhattan home, his family announced. A funeral Mass was held Friday.

He waged an unsuccessful battle to reverse the American Psychiatric Association's 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, and brushed off frequent condemnations by colleagues who considered his views hurtful.

"Gays ascribe their condition to God, but he should not have to take that rap, any more than he should be blamed for the existence of other manmade maladies - like war," he wrote in the Catholic weekly magazine America in 1995.

Socarides persisted in his views despite having a gay son, Richard, who became an adviser to President Clinton on gay and lesbian affairs.

In the 1990s, he was among the founders of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, a nonprofit group based in Encino, Calif., "dedicated to affirming a complementary, male-female model of gender and sexuality."

A native of Brockton, Mass., Socarides decided he wanted to become a psychoanalyst at age 13 after reading a book on the life of Sigmund Freud. He graduated from Harvard College, earned his medical degree at New York Medical College, and got a certificate in psychoanalytic medicine at Columbia University. He taught at The Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Besides his son, he is survived by his wife, Claire; another son, two daughters and one grandchild.

Source: Associated Press/AP Online

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