Three years after the guy who invented the lobotomy was awarded a Nobel Prize, a bunch of ‘experts’ declared homosexuality a personality disorder.
Fortunately, not every scientist was so easily convinced by mid-twentieth century brain science.
Today’s Moment of Science… Evelyn Hooker’s landmark study on homosexuality and mental health.
The first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I) was published in 1952. It wasn’t the first document of its kind, but it was the most sweeping to date. It was meant to classify and give standardization to nomenclature in the still burgeoning field of psychology. Military psychiatrists saw an uptick of soldiers coming back from WWII with mental health issues they didn’t have an appropriate name for. People who might be diagnosed now with depression or anxiety could have been limited to a label of psychopathic or psychoneurotic.
At 130 pages long, it described 106 mental disorders. “Sexual deviation” was one of them, classified at the time as a sociopathic personality disturbance. It grouped homosexuality with other “pathologic behavior.” This put it in a group with “pedophilia, fetishism, and sexual sadism (including rape, sexual assault, mutilation).”
Edmund Bergler, author of the 1956 book “Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life” was one of the most influential psychoanalysts conjuring up theories about homosexuality in the mid nineteen hundreds. He said “I have no bias against homosexuals; for me they are sick people requiring medical help. Still, though I have no bias, I would say: Homosexuals are essentially disagreeable people, regardless of their pleasant or unpleasant outward manner, their shell is a mixture of superciliousness, fake aggression, and whimpering.”
I don’t think he understood what the word “bias” meant. He also wrote a book called “Frigidity in Women.” In my professional opinion as a scientist, were he still alive, that guy could benefit from being fucked in the neck by a cactus.
Then there was Dr. Evelyn Hooker.
She didn’t start off her career in psychology in the 1940s with an interest in studying homosexuality. Rather, she fell into a life so familiar to many of us awkward nerd girls; she was befriended by a group of gay men and it changed everything. One of her students, Sam From, came out to her. After she’d gotten to know his circle of gay friends– hopefully coming to her own realization that they were of sound mind– From suggested she study homosexuality. I’m not entirely sure it’s considered a suggestion given that he called it a “scientific duty,” but it struck a chord with her.
After a tussle for funding during the era of McCarthyism, Hooker set out to use psychology’s readily available tools. Three tests were administered to sixty volunteers, thirty heterosexual men and thirty homosexual men, none of whom had known psychological issues. The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), the Make-a-Picture-Story test, and the Rorschach inkblot test were used. At the time, the Rorschach test was believed to be the best for diagnosing cases of the gay.
Then the wacky hijinks really began.
Hooker then gave those results- blinded- to a panel of clinicians and asked them to sort out the gays and the straights. Which was a thing psychological science was supposed to be able to do because these people had a real mental illness, right? Riiiight?
Hooboy.
Their guesses were no better than if they’d been flipping coins.
Dr. Hooker noted “the most striking finding of the three judges was that many of the homosexuals were very well adjusted.” This stood antithetical to the common belief that all homosexuals had personality disorders.
“The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual” was published in 1956. Though it didn’t make a huge splash right away, it got much wider circulation as the gay rights movement picked up over the following years. Her studies continued to chip away at old attitudes towards the gay community in the psychological establishment.
Homosexuality was removed from new printings of the DSM-II as of 1974.
Sam From, who nudged her to her ‘scientific duty’ all those years before, died in a car accident not long before publication. When Evelyn passed away forty years later, her obituary in the New York Times said that she “recast the view of gay men.”
This has been your Moment of Science, horrified by all the things we’ve been so confidently, deeply wrong about.
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