AbstractIn 1973, after a prolonged period of social agitation and professional conflict, the American Psychiatric Association deleted homosexuality from its official listing of psychiatric disorders (DSM‐II). In its place a new classification for homosexuals distressed over their orientation was to be included inDSM‐II. Four years later an acrimonious dispute surfaced over the status of homosexuality in the revised APA nomenclature of disorders (DSM‐III). The edited correspondence of the participants in this dispute is presented here as a way of revealing the lingering conflict over homosexuality within American psych