NEW YORK (AP) – Charles Socarides, a psychiatrist famous for insisting that homosexuality was a treatable illness, died this week of heart failure at a hospital near his Manhattan home.

He was 83 and died on Dec. 25. A funeral mass was held in his memory Friday.

The Brockton, Mass. native and Ivy League-trained psychoanalyst claimed to have “cured” hundreds of people of homosexuality by the 1990s, and waged an unsuccessful battle to reverse the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. He brushed off frequent condemnations by colleagues who considered his views hurtful.

“Gays ascribe their condition to God, but he should not have to take that rap, any more than he should be blamed for the existence of other manmade maladies – like war,” he wrote in the Catholic weekly magazine America in 1995.

Socarides persisted in his views after having a gay son, Richard, who grew up to be an adviser to President Clinton on gay and lesbian affairs.

In the 1990s, he was among the founders of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, a nonprofit group based in Encino, Calif., “dedicated to affirming a complementary, male-female model of gender and sexuality.”

Socarides decided he wanted to become a psychoanalyst at age 13 after reading a book on the life of Sigmund Freud. He graduated from Harvard College, earned his medical degree at New York Medical College, and got a certificate in psychoanalytic medicine at Columbia University. He went on to teach at The Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Besides his son, he is survived by his wife, Claire; another son, Charles Jr., daughters Alexandra and Jacqueline and one grandchild.

AP-ES-12-31-05 1621EST