GAY 'CURE' DOCTOR DIES
Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) - 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.
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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.
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