The 1940s was a scary time to be gay.
Being out of the closet was risky — you could be thrown into jail or lose custody
of your kids.
You could also be targeted for forced hormone injections to try to lower sexual desire.
Or shock therapy to deter homosexual thoughts.
That's because the medical community at the time considered homosexuality a mental disorder
(even though there wasn't any data to back this up).
But in 1945, one woman decided to scientifically study this commonly held belief.
And her research helped spark modern the gay rights movement.
What they were saying was homosexuality is a pervasive emotional disorder.
I suppose I didn't have any problem about that because the world of factual discovery
is constantly being remade and changed. What's called this year “evil” and whatever,
next year may constitute the blessing of the human race.
This is Dr. Evelyn Hooker. She taught psychology at UCLA in the 1940s.
While teaching there, Evelyn met a student named Sam From who would stay after class
and chat with her about the course. Over time, they became friends — and their friendship
continued after the semester ended.
Eventually, Sam felt safe enough to tell Evelyn he was gay.
Being gay at that time was not something you just disclosed to everyone without concern.
This is Dr. Gregory Herek, a professor emeritus of psychology at UC Davis.
So Evelyn was in this unusual situation. She was a heterosexual woman a psychologist and
she was being introduced to this rather large circle of mostly gay men.
Evelyn even went on trips with Sam and his friends up to San Francisco where they took
her and her husband to visit gay bars and drag clubs.
Unbelievable. I've never seen anything like that my life, it was the craziest place. Magic!
There was this lively, lively circle of friends and in that group there were philosophers,
poets, engineers, you name it, they had it!
One day Sam asked Evelyn if she could study him and his friends to show scientifically
that being gay wasn’t a mental illness.
He argued that it was "her scientific duty to study people like us."
At the time, the only published studies of homosexuality had been done with prison populations
or those being given psychiatric treatment.
She could see from her own experience that Sam and his friends didn’t fit with what
she had learned from her psychology textbooks.
But Evelyn knew that she couldn’t study her own friends and remain objective. She
needed to recruit a random set of subjects — which proved to be a tricky task.
For her study, she set out to compare the mental stability of 30 gay men and 30 straight
men.
Remember, this was during the McCarthy Era when homosexuals were often labeled as Communists
or traitors to America.
Every man who came to me put his occupation, his job, his reputation at stake.
Luckily, Sam was able to put her in touch with a wide group of gay men. The hard part
was actually finding straight men who met the criteria for the study. So she had to
get more creative.
She basically took anyone's anyone she could find. And she joked that her husband said
that no man was safe on their street because if they were showing up to repair the plumbing
or to mow the lawn or something she was gonna grab him and get him in her study.
She eventually found her subjects.
Each group took several psychological tests.
One you may know is the Rorschach inkblot test — where a subject is shown an inkblot
image and asked to describe what they see.
Once everyone had taken the tests, their overall psychological adjustment was evaluated using
a 5 point scale — 1 being superior and 5 being maladjusted.
And the results were clear.
Almost the same number of gay men and straight men are found in number 1, number 3 and number
5.
Which means there's no difference in the pathology between gay men and the straight men.
She had top psychologists look at the Rorschach data and they couldn’t tell whether a subject
was gay or straight any better than if they had flipped a coin.
Mort was absolutely convinced that he could tell. And in fact when he couldn't, he asked
as a special favor if he couldn't come back and go through the process again because he
was so sure that he would be able to do it.
This was a huge deal. Her study clearly and objectively disproved a basic myth about homosexuality.
So Evelyn was, in many ways, extraordinary. Here was this psychologist, a woman, studying
sexuality in the 1940.
She published several papers from this study, the first in 1957 — but nothing immediately
changed for the gay community.
So it wasn’t really the case, in a storybook way, where the data came out, oh we were wrong
and then they changed the policy. Instead it took some agitation. It took some activism.
Evelyn’s study gave gay and lesbian activists the ammunition they needed to show that homosexuality
was not an illness that needed a cure.
They started showing up at American Psychiatric Association meetings and would picket outside.
Some psychiatrists at those meetings were sympathetic and they would bring in activists
to take part in the conversations about homosexuality.
In 1973 — roughly 15 years after Evelyn’s study— the American Psychiatric Association
finally took homosexuality off of the list of mental disorders.
So it's really important to have the data but make the data visible, make people know
what's out there and communicate the results in a way that sometimes scientists are not
so good at.
Because homosexuality was on the list of mental disorders, it was often used to justify laws
that discriminated against the gay community — from employment and housing discrimination
to bans against same-sex marriage.
In the last years of her life, Evelyn worked with the next generation of researchers, including
Greg, to support and fund even more research on sexuality — to use science to shine a
light on the lives of LGBT people.
And over several decades, this research — along with a growing cultural visibility — was
presented to the courts, including the Supreme Court, in key cases that overturned many of
these laws.
We like to think about science as being rational and objective — but scientists don’t conduct
their research in a cultural vacuum.
The psychiatrists in the 1940s who labeled homosexuality as a mental disorder weren’t
basing this on data or research. They had blindspots and prejudices that compromised
the science.
Evelyn’s groundbreaking research helped to challenge this bias. But she never would
have begun studying the topic if it hadn’t been her friendship with Sam.
Because he opened her eyes to the gay community, she was able to challenge scientific convention
— and prejudice— about homosexuality.
Thanks for watching, if you liked the video give us a thumbs up and don’t forget to
subscribe to watch more videos, including this one about how the census overlooks the
LGBTQ community.
You can also learn more about Evelyn’s amazing story in “Changing Our Minds”, a great
documentary released by Frameline. We have a link to it in the video description.