Fifty years ago, in 1973, the American Psychiatry Association (APA) made a diagnostic change at their annual conference, declaring that homosexuality is not a psychiatric disorder. Instantly, ten million Americans were cured of the disease our society had inflicted upon them. I was eighteen at the time, unaware of the change, or the impact the decision would have on my own life.

I am not a loud proponent of Gay Pride: never liked parades before I came out; don’t like them any more now. But when I hear how Gay Pride festivities have dampened this year, in response to restrictive laws about drag performance and other curbs to queer enthusiasm, I worry. If we could instantly cure ten million people in a more welcoming time past, might we instantly label them diseased again in our dark and fearful present?

When I consider “what might have been” versus “what is” in my own life, I like to acknowledge that people and institutions can change for the better, and (to paraphrase Martin Luther King Junior) that the arc of societal prejudice is long, but it bends toward acceptance.

The history of homosexuals in general, and me in particular, over recent decades is a series of self-fulfilled prophecies.

Prophecy #1: My forebears were criminals.

When I was born, in the hyper-normative 1950’s, homosexuality was both a criminal and psychiatric offense. We were drummed out of government because we were, ostensibly more easily blackmailed than ‘normal’ people. It is true that people who harbor secrets are more easily blackmailed than open books. However, the institutions forcing secrecy were the same ones that then pointed to us as security risks.

Prophecy #2: What has no name does not exist.

Homosexuality did not exist in my blue-collar Catholic youth. It was a sin beyond the pale of my Irish ancestry, never given so much as a name, unless you count the repeated times I was advised to become a priest.

Prophecy #3: We can fix this.

I was fourteen years old and a mere fifty miles away when the Stonewall Riot became the Boston Tea Party of the Gay Liberation Movement. Yet I had never heard of it, even when I hit my own literal stone wall, in 1974, freaked out at college, and went to my first shrink. The APA had “unlisted” homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder, but as any civil rights worker can tell you, just because the law has changed, doesn’t mean the culture has shifted accordingly. I was under the care of one kindly shrink after another, all of whom parroted the same line. “When you suffer depression, it manifests itself as inappropriate feelings about men.” I heard that logic so often I never considered its proper inverse: “When you can’t express your feelings about men, you get depressed.”

Prophecy #4: You must deal with it.

I don’t complain about the twenty years that followed my inverted therapy. I loved my career, my wife, my terrific children. But something was definitely wrong. Until some fresh therapist (I’ve lost count of how many over the years) used words I’d never heard. “You are a homosexual, that is integral in you. You are never going to get centered until you accept it and act on it.” Psychiatric whiplash.

I am not bold or independent by nature. I was lucky to come out in a time and a place that was receptive, even welcoming. Still, the truths that family, church and community drilled into us as youth do not unravel overnight. Thirty years after coming out, I still sometimes have to brace myself against a lingering residue of shame.

Today, I worry how that residue clings to others. How the hate of the Florida State Legislature and the Tennessee fear of drag queens might make other queer people stick to the shadows. How these repressive laws and attitudes will make those they target become invisible, which will only make more repressive laws easier to pass, and which could, one day, make the APA and other groups reassessed their views yet again.

I want to belief that the arc of societal prejudice bends toward acceptance. But I would be naïve to deny that it can arc back as well.

If ten million can be cured by an edict at a convention, damning those same ten million is possible again. Please, sane people, don’t let that happen. Let each individual live our own truth.