Seven Questions

All sex facts / History

Homosexuality was a mental illness until 1973

The vote that changed it was decided by evidence nobody had asked for.

Homosexuality was a mental illness until 1973

It sat in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual as a sociopathic personality disturbance. The research that undid it was done in the 1950s by psychologist Evelyn Hooker, who gave personality tests to matched groups of homosexual and heterosexual men and asked expert judges to identify which was which. The judges could not do better than chance.

The APA removed it in 1973. The World Health Organization did not follow until 1990 — on 17 May, a date now marked annually. Denmark had decriminalised in 1933, but removed it as a diagnosis only in 1981.

Sources

Hooker, Journal of Projective Techniques (1957); APA (1973); WHO (1990)

Related facts

Hysteria was a diagnosis for two thousand years

Named after the womb, and applied to almost any woman who complained.

Cornflakes were invented to suppress masturbation

The breakfast cereal was a medical intervention, and it is not a joke.

Pompeii’s erotic art was locked away for 180 years

Not censored by the Romans. Censored by the people who dug it up.
The sex-toy guide

A shop has two hundred of them. One of them is right for you.

Seven questions: who it is for, what sounds appealing, how quiet it has to be, what it may cost. Out comes one type — with what to look for, what it costs, and what nobody prints on the box.

  • Sixteen types, from a bullet vibrator to a blindfold
  • No brands, no shop, nothing for sale here
  • Two minutes, and nothing is saved
Start the seven questions For the two of you

Find out what you both want — without either of you saying it first.

You each answer twenty questions on your own, and neither of you ever sees the other’s answers. Only what you both said yes or maybe to comes back. A no and a maybe look identical from outside, so saying no costs nothing — which is what makes the answers honest.

  • Six sets of twenty questions — three by depth, three by subject
  • An evening you can actually plan, built from what you agreed on
  • No account, no names, and it deletes itself after a few days
Open Let’s talk about sex

General information, not medical advice. Anything persistent or painful belongs with a doctor, who has heard it before.