Irving Bieber

Irving Bieber
Born	1909 New York City, U.S.
Died	1991 New York City, U.S.
Alma mater	New York University Medical College
Occupation	Psychoanalyst

Irving Bieber (1909 – 1991) was an American psychoanalyst, best known for his study Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals (1962), in which Bieber took the since discredited position that homosexuality is an illness.

Irving Bieber was born in New York City and graduated from New York University Medical College in 1930. Bieber went on to work at Yale Medical College, New York University, and starting in 1953 at the New York Medical College, where he taught a course in psychoanalysis. Bieber was, along with Lionel Ovesey and Charles Socarides, one of the most influential American psychoanalysts who attempted to convert gay men to heterosexuality. Bieber's 1962 book Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals was a counter reaction to the 1948 Kinsey Report on male sexual behavior. It remained the leading study on homosexuality until homosexuality was removed from DSM-III in 1973.

In 1970, Bieber attended a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco that was protested by gay activists. According to Socarides, Bieber, who felt he had "been working all these years to help these people", "took this very hard." In 1973, the same year the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, Bieber told an interviewer that "a homosexual is a person whose heterosexual function is crippled, like the legs of a polio victim." When Alan P. Bell, Martin S. Weinberg, and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith's study Sexual Preference was published in 1981, Bieber declared that its findings were "totally disparate" with his experience from psychiatric consultation.

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