Cured review – thoughtful recounting of a forgotten queer past

Bennett Singer and Patrick Sammon’s Cured begins with a written warning. It describes the disturbing images and devastating retellings to come, all relating to the torturous treatment of gay people that followed the American Psychiatric Association's decision to label homosexuality as a mental illness. The abhorrently flawed psychological logic claimed that being gay was a learnt behaviour that could be unlearned through psychiatric treatment in mental institutions.

This documentary plots a timeline, through the 1950s into the early 1970s, of the campaign that worked to remove homosexuality as a category of sexual deviance. Guided by an impressive collection of talking heads, this turbulent point in American queer history – a chapter that had only previously been skim-read – is recounted by those who fought the battle.

Although Cured has an intriguing foundation, the documentary’s inability to maintain a definite focus on the pervasive topic to which it shares insight is unsatisfying. At the film’s mid-point, the cultivated experience from Cured’s interviewees is sidetracked for discussions of broader queer history. This widening contextualisation is seemingly an attempt to accommodate a mainstream viewership but winds up feeling more like a disservice. The documentary is most appealing when it narrows its focus with streamlined editing to spotlight this remarkable hidden history.

Not helped by formulaic navigation and pedestrian pacing, the frequency at which newspaper clippings and highlighted documents fly all over the screen also distracts from the talking head excerpts at the heart of the film. The story of Dr John Fryer, for example, a man whose incomparable bravery in delivering an anonymous speech at the 1972 American Psychiatric Association annual conference is pointed to as a monumental moment in the decision to de-list homosexuality from mental disorder definitions, could provide the subject for an entire documentary of its own. Singer and Sammon’s film excels in such pinpointed moments of attentive reflection; it's just a shame the rest of the film isn’t as consistently concentrated.

Structural issues aside, Cured remains an astute documentary whose focus on the redefined rhetoric of homosexuality offers valuable historicisation. Archive footage of the horrific treatment offers a sobering reminder that so many queer lives were subject to state-funded abuse. As Cured draws to a close, the film, rightfully, makes it clear these anti-LGBTQ+ practices are far from extinct. In the UK, conversion “therapies” remain a legal practice and active campaigns, such as Ban Conversion Therapy, continue their efforts to end this form of abuse. If there’s anything to learn from Cured, it’s that hope is not enough: what's needed is action.

Cured was screened as part of the BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival 2021. A UK release date is yet to be announced.