GLR September-October 2024

belief that gay men’s departure from the norm was a pervasive feature of their personality, and that this departure veered toward hysteria, exaggerated af fect, neurosis, and the like (which still beats banality!). Elsewhere Hooker pointed out that gay men in general were thought to ex hibit symptoms of schizophrenia, often of the paranoid variety. Hooker was among the first to point out that paranoia could be a perfectly normal response to anti gay persecution or the fear of exposure. Nevertheless, she found that there was no particular connection between homosex

Pictures 12M and 13MF from the TAT set. Certain features stand out.

uality and psychotic symptoms. Even when the raters were able to correctly ascertain that a subject was gay, they were forced to admit that this condition often did not coexist with any other pathology. § A FTER THE R ORSCHACH came the TAT and MAPS, which were administered together and provided an additional window into each subject’s psyche. Unlike the inkblots, the TAT and MAPS present recognizable images of people alone or in groups, some in intimate situations that may be more likely to elicit revealing comments or even “confessions” of a kind. In short, many of the gay subjects outed themselves either openly or implicitly. Thus the second part of the Rorschach section—identifying the men’s or most of them, who sense embarrassment need no coaxing to razz. But. Here’s the story. Last night, side-sleeping in a dream (as I half knew), a warm bulk settled close behind. Its quick arms pinioned me, a sudden blow that—fast, dynamic—made earthshaking inroads. Yet some part of the psyche told me not to give in, duped subject of a dream whose urging it to be real proved I was awake. I turned my head: a shadow, sinuous, not quite decipherable, paused, withdrew and vaporized to wistful oblivion. Spillage, like heated oil, chagrin, lament…. O baffling, censored faultline, contracted to the world that is the case. But which incites more outcome, covering up? or else sustaining seismic shocks delivered by a pinioned wrestler, his spiced breath carefree in my ear— the firm coaching I heard, and still do hear? A LFRED C ORN The Faultline No, normally, I shut up. Listeners,

sexual orientation—was suspended for the TAT - MAPS section. The judges were still asked to evaluate the subjects’ overall level of adjustment based on the projective narratives. Given the assumption that someone who’s gay is ipso facto mentally ill, one might have expected a weight to drop on these subjects’ adjustment scores, but such was not the case. Even with this knowledge in hand, Hooker reported, when the raters assessed the sixty subjects using standard criteria for adjustment on several dimensions, the two subsamples differed to no sig nificant extent. For the record, the judges were able to identify around a third of the gay subjects with confidence, “while the remaining two-thirds cannot be easily distinguished,” Hooker reported. Noting the tension in their own evaluations, many of the judges’ comments are priceless. One judge marveled that this is “the most heterosexual-looking homosexual I have ever seen.” Another describes a subject whose “impulse control is very smooth” and whose “aggressive impulses are expressed in phal lic gratification. … He must be heterosexual.” And yet, he was not. Another subject was described as “thoroughly immersed in the homosexual way of life, but apart from this I see no particu lar evidence of disturbance.” This comment hints at Hooker’s grand conclusion. After she has shown that homosexuality can not be predicted by a general assessment of mental health or iden tified by a panel of experts, she concludes that sexual orientation can exist in isolation from other atypical characteristics. Her land mark article ends with the words: “If one assumes that homo sexuality is a form of severe maladjustment internally, it may be that the disturbance is limited to the sexual sector.” The importance of Hooker’s study lay not so much in de bunking the assumption of homosexual maladjustment as in striking a blow to professional psychiatry’s confidence in its ability, or even its right, to talk about homosexuality at all. By choosing three judges with impeccable credentials, Hooker had demonstrated that even the most seasoned experts armed with detailed psychiatric profiles couldn’t pick out the homosexual men, many of whom turned out to be high achievers whose sex ual orientation apparently did not diminish their ability to func tion as productive citizens. Hooker’s study raised the hitherto unthinkable possibility that sexual orientation may be an area where psychiatry really didn’t belong. It would be another fifteen years before the APA would officially delete homosexuality as a mental illness—a tacit admission that they’d been trespassing on foreign territory all along.

TheG & LR

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