GLR September-October 2024

ESSAY How Evelyn Hooker Rattled the APA W ENDY F ENWICK

A RE HOMOSEXUALS inherently malad justed? It was a question whose answer was so self-evident that psychiatrists in postwar America scarcely raised it at all. As members of a profession, they may have been obsessed with figuring out how to identify homosexual traits or to root out secret desires, but the question of whether homosexuals were mentally ill was not asked, and could not be asked, so long as it was defined as itself a variety of mental ill ness or as a symptom of a broader syndrome. What’s more, it was official: there it was in the Diagnostic and Statistical Man ual ( DSM ), the bible of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which included homosexuality as a “sexual deviation” along with pedophilia and sexual sadism. The prevailing view was expressed by a leading psychiatrist of the day: “When such homosexual behavior persists in an adult, it is then a symptom of a severe emotional disorder.” Someone needed to point out the naked emperor in the room: the fact that the inclusion of homosexuality as a mental illness by the psychiatric establishment was based on an untested assumption, one that placed homosexuals under their psychiatric concern—was unwarranted. It was perfectly possi ble to test this assumption by treating homosexuality and “ad justment” as separate variables that could be empirically measured and statistically compared. Once Hooker had pulled the two concepts apart, what she found was that the standard assumption was far from ironclad. Her research played no small role in the ensuing debate, which simmered at first and came to a boil after the Stonewall Riots of 1969, culminating in the removal of homosexuality from the DSM in 1973, which all at once freed millions of Americans from the stigma of mental illness. § H OOKER ’ S IMPROBABLE LIFE JOURNEY began in 1907 in North Platte, Nebraska, where she excelled in school and was en ______________________ * Hooker’s paper was published in the October 1956 issue of The Journal of Projective Techniques . auspices, to be sure, as if the mere inclusion of homosexuals in the DSM rendered such people “maladjusted” (the term du jour for “mentally ill”). It was Evelyn Hooker, in a landmark paper published in 1956, “The Ad justment of the Male Overt Homosexual,”* who pointed out that the APA’s assumption about homosexuality as a “mental illness”— indeed its assumption of homosexuality as a

couraged by her teachers to attend college out-of-state. Off she went to the University of Colorado, where she majored in psy chology, remaining in Boulder to earn a master’s degree in the same field. From there she made her way to Johns Hopkins Uni versity, where she was one of the first women to earn a doctor ate in psychology, in 1932. Next, her journey brought her to the Berlin Institute of Psychotherapy, where she lived with a Jew ish family and witnessed firsthand the rise of Adolph Hitler, which became an important catalyst in her lifelong commitment to social justice. Returning to the U.S. a few years later, she made her way to UCLA (after a detour or two), where she worked as a research associate and later as an instructor. Up to this point, her work had been guided by behavioral psychology, and she’d shown no particular interest in homo sexuality. It was while teaching a course at UCLA that she was approached by a precocious student named Sam From, who confided to Hooker that he was gay and wondered whether, in her opinion, this meant that he was mentally ill. They became pals; From introduced her to his circle of gay friends, which in cluded Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender; he took her around to L.A.’s gay bars and clubs. Getting to know these Hooker launched her research at a time when psychiatry was riding high, not only as an academic discipline but as a clinical practice and even as a basis for social engineering. This was the age of mass institutionalization of “the insane,” involuntary commitment of persons deemed “certifiable,” and the wide spread use of various procedures designed to “cure” homosexu als. The latter included electroshock, aversion therapy, hormone injections, and lots of time on “the couch.” (U.S. doctors, unlike those in the U.K., largely avoided chemical castration.) Given the power and prestige of the psychiatric establishment, it’s re markable to think that Evelyn Hooker, an obscure psycholo gist—not even a psychiatrist—and a woman at that, was able to singlehandedly challenge a mainstay of the DSM and rock Amer ican psychiatry’s world. How did she do it? The genius of Hooker’s approach is that she didn’t attempt to refute the DSM ’s position on its merits or challenge its methods of diagnosis and treatment. Rather than try to settle the question of whether homosexuals really were mal adjusted, she decided to test the psychiatrists who were rendering this diagnosis on their ability to recognize a homosexual using highly successful gay men, Hooker began to question the pathological model of homo sexuality. From urged her to investigate, saying that it was “her scientific duty to study people like us.” Having been bullied as a kid in Nebraska (apparently for being freakishly tall) and having witnessed the rise of fascism in Europe, she decided that this would become her life’s work.

It was Hooker who pointed out that

defining homosexuality as a “mental illness” was based on an untested assumption.

Wendy Fenwick is an international writer based in Boston.

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