Departing from Deviance: A History of Homosexual Rights and Emancipatory Science in America

by Henry L. Minton

Overview

The struggle to remove the stigma of sickness surrounding same-sex love has a long history. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic classification of mental illness, but the groundwork for this pivotal decision was laid decades earlier. In this new study, Henry L. Minton looks back at the struggle of the American gay and lesbian activists who chose scientific research as a path for advancing homosexual rights. He traces the history of gay and lesbian emancipatory research from its early beginnings in the late nineteenth century to its role in challenging the illness model in the 1970s. By examining archival sources and unpublished manuscripts, Minton reveals the substantial accomplishments made by key researchers and relates their life stories. He also considers the contributions of mainstream sexologists such as Alfred C. Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker, who supported the cause of homosexual rights through the advancement of scientific knowledge. By uncovering this hidden chapter in the story of gay liberation, Departing from Deviance makes an important contribution to both the history of science and the history of sexuality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226304458
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/15/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	355
File size:	909 KB

About the Author

Henry L. Minton is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Windsor, Canada. He is the author of Lewis M. Terman: Pioneer in Psychological Testing and Currents of Thought in American Social Psychology.

Read an Excerpt

Departing from Deviance
A History of Homosexual Rights and Emancipatory Science in America

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By Henry L. Minton
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2002 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-53044-4

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Chapter One
Introduction: Emancipatory Science and Homosexual Rights

Oppressed people resist by identifying themselves as subjects, by defining their reality, shaping their new identity, naming their history, telling their story. -bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminism, Thinking Black

The social and political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s reflected an intensification of the long struggle by oppressed people to resist domination by claiming the right to speak in their own voice. Rather than being treated as objects-defined and controlled by the dominant stratum of white heterosexual men-women, people of color, lesbians, and gay men strove to achieve subjective agency. As subjects, they could define their reality, mold their identity, rescue their history, and tell their stories-in essence, become cohesive politicized groups demanding social justice and political representation.

These liberatory social movements had far-ranging effects. Not only did they force political and social transformation; they generated change in intellectual spheres. In many universities by the early 1970s, programs in women's studies and black studies were created. In various fields of study, scholars became more sensitized to their own biases and the need to incorporate minority perspectives in their work as well as to deconstruct the categories through which certain groups are constituted as minorities. In the social sciences, which had a history of either ignoring or distorting minority experience, alternative forms of inquiry challenged established theory and research practice. These various strands coalesced into a perspective that became known as emancipatory or critical social science.

Central to emancipatory social science is the idea that human knowledge is always situated within a framework of social relations. Thus, knowledge is based on the position that knowers or observers hold in society. This implies that there are multiple realities. Observers who occupy privileged positions in the social hierarchy have a perspective different from those who are marginalized. Being marginalized has the inherent advantage of being able to know the realities of both the oppressor and the oppressed. Blacks, for example, cannot escape the impact of white dominance and are thus aware of the norms and values of white society. But they are also aware of their own black world and its place in the larger society. On the other hand, whites have historically had little understanding of what it means to be black and oppressed.

In the 1960s and 1970s, as more women, people of color, lesbians, and gay men entered the social sciences, the traditional white male heterosexist worldview within academia was challenged. Incorporating situated knowledge, women's experience was now interpreted from a feminist perspective rather than from the historically entrenched, androcentric viewpoint. In fact, a feminist perspective has not been limited to the social sciences. As Donna Haraway, commenting on primatology, has noted, feminist science in general acts to destabilize dominant accounts and explanations, and thus engenders a better science by providing a more complete, coherent version.

By incorporating minority perspectives and hence challenging dominant views of reality, critical social science has emancipatory potential. Knowledge production that reflects the experiences and struggles of oppressed people undermines the biases and distortions that perpetuate the status quo of domination. Liberation and social transformation become possibilities when scientific knowledge contests the hegemonic assumptions, myths, and stereotypes that serve to rationalize and justify the inequitable treatment of the oppressed.

As part of the emancipatory social science of the 1970s, gay and lesbian scholars challenged the heterosexist ideology underlying the scientific treatment of homosexuality. The major target was the assumption that homosexuality was pathological, an assumption that was institutionalized by the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) official system of diagnostic classification. In 1973, as a result of a concerted effort by gay and lesbian activists and a group of psychiatrists and psychologists who dissented from the canonical medical model, homosexuality as a generic category was removed from the psychiatric nomenclature. The struggle to excise homosexuality from the psychiatric lexicon did not result in a complete victory since the APA introduced the new antigay category of "sexual orientation disturbance" to refer to homosexuals who were psychologically troubled by their sexual orientation. Nevertheless, 1973 marked a turning point in the movement for gay and lesbian rights. Removing the official blanket association of homosexuality with sickness enabled the social science of same-sex relations to gain legitimacy in academia. Parallel developments took place in the humanities and the arts. Gay and lesbian studies became a bona fide field of academic specialization.

But there is a much longer history of gay and lesbian studies. My purpose here is to tell that story, focusing on its scientific facet. From the origins of the first homosexual rights movement, which took place in Germany in the late nineteenth century, there has been an ongoing effort to use scientific knowledge as one means to emancipate homosexual men and women from the tyranny of moral ostracism, legal punishment, and medical treatment. Magnus Hirschfeld, the German sexologist and pioneer homophile activist, chose as the motto for his life's work "Per scientiam ad justitiam" (Through science to justice).

Spurred by the liberatory climate of the gay and lesbian movement of the early 1970s, the last two and a half decades have witnessed an explosion of scholarly work in lesbian and gay history. As George Chauncey, Martin Duberman, and Martha Vicinus note in their introduction to Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, this scholarly work has documented the history of homosexual repression and resistance. Not only has this work uncovered the extensiveness of homosexual victimization, but also in its revelations of homosexual resistance it has reclaimed the historical agency of gay men and lesbians.

From the origins of the homosexual rights movement in Germany in the late nineteenth century, homosexual activists promoted their cause by writing about the nature of same-sex love. They created labels, such as the male "Urning," the female "Urningin," the "sexual intermediate," and, more concisely, the "homosexual," to reflect the group identity of people who experienced same-sex love. Ironically, with the emerging visibility of homosexuals, medical specialists expropriated the labels and medicalized the theories developed by the homosexual activists. Thus, homosexual activists who chose science as a means of promoting homosexual emancipation have had to engage in an ongoing struggle with medical and scientific authorities over who best understands the experiences of gay man and lesbians.

In this book I concentrate on the contested treatment of homosexuality in America by homosexual activist-researchers and medical/scientific authorities. By the 1930s there was an extensive sexological literature on homosexuality in America, Britain, and Europe. With some notable exceptions by homosexual activists and sympathizers, such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis, this literature was driven by the assumption that homosexuality was a form of sexual pathology. In America two watershed events took place that undermined the hegemony of the pathology model. The first occurred in 1935 with the founding of the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants. This interdisciplinary committee comprised experts on sexuality and social deviance. In contrast with previous research on homosexuality conducted by physicians and scientists, homosexual activists played a major role in organizing and carrying out the committee-esponsored research. This grassroots involvement set the stage for a series of research studies of homosexuality that involved the active participation of homosexuals. It was this body of research that proved to be influential in the second watershed event to challenge the pathology model-the 1973 psychiatric declassification of homosexuality.

Central to the participatory research approach was the active strategy by homosexual activists to have gay and lesbian participants tell their stories. The goal was to establish a dialogue with sex researchers so that the investigators would understand the lived experiences and realities of homosexual people. It was thus hoped that the myths of homosexuality as a sin, crime, and sickness would be replaced by a social tolerance for sexual difference. For homosexual activists, life story narratives served as a vehicle for effecting social change.

My major objectives in this book are twofold. First, I want to reveal a hidden history of research production and collaboration on the part of American gay and lesbian activists who sought the right to speak for themselves and gain homosexual rights through the scientific enterprise. This history of gay and lesbian emancipatory research is a part of the history of homosexual resistance. Second, I want to present the substantive contributions produced by these gay and lesbian researchers. Much of this work is obscure because of the publication obstacles faced by these researchers. This body of work includes significant primary texts documenting the American homosexual world of the early and mid-twentieth century. Moreover, by revealing the lives of the researchers and their accomplishments, I hope to redress the suppression of their work and provide them with the recognition they deserve.

In the following chapter, I provide the historical background for the participatory research launched by gay and lesbian activist-researchers in the 1930s. Within the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I consider the relationship between homosexual research participants and sex researchers. There were also instances during this era in which gay men and lesbians carried out their own research and I examine the work of these early activist-researchers.

Several chapters are devoted to the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants and its role in spawning various research projects in the 1930s that involved the active participation of lesbians and gay men. Chapter 3 details the efforts of Jan Gay to publish her work on lesbian life histories. In order to achieve this objective, she required the sponsorship of recognized medical and scientific experts and she thus played a major role in the creation of the sex variants committee. Her research was expanded to include gay men. Unfortunately, her work was taken over by psychiatrist George W. Henry. The emancipatory potential of her project as well as her original contribution was thus subverted into a psychiatric treatise on homosexuality.

In chapter 4 I reclaim the substance of Gay's research by analyzing the lesbian and gay life histories from the perspective of the storytellers. Luckily, their narratives were preserved in Henry's published two-volume monograph, Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. I also contrast the first-person accounts with Henry's psychiatric discourse. Chapter 5 deals with the collaboration between Henry and Alfred A. Gross, a closeted gay ex-Episcopalian priest. Henry and Gross focused their work on gay male sex offenders, and it was Gross who actually carried out the research. After World War II Gross directed the George W. Henry Foundation, a social agency devoted to helping gay men in trouble with the law.

The life and contributions of Thomas Painter are dealt with in chapters 6 and 7. Painter, like Gay and Gross, was associated with the sex variants committee in the 1930s. In 1941 he completed a two-volume manuscript on male homosexuality and male prostitution. The manuscript was never published, but it came to the attention of Alfred C. Kinsey. In 1943 Painter began a thirty-year unofficial association with the Kinsey Institute. Until Kinsey's death in 1956, Painter served as one of Kinsey's homosexual consultants, and more significantly, at the suggestion of Kinsey, he maintained a written and richly detailed "Life Record" of his sex life. I also deal with Kinsey's work on homosexuality and his relationship with other homosexual collaborators. Painter hoped that a biographer, a "Mr. X," would eventually extract his life story from his voluminous papers preserved at the Kinsey Institute. I have assumed that role and, as a gay man, have felt especially impelled to present his extraordinary contributions to gay scholarship and tell his remarkable story.

Chapter 8 focuses on the protracted struggle in the 1960s and early 1970s to challenge the official psychiatric classification of homosexuality as sexual pathology. The two key players in this challenge were psychologist Evelyn Hooker and homophile activist Frank Kameny. Hooker carried out a pathbreaking study in the 1950s that demonstrated there was no scientific basis for considering gay men to be psychologically maladjusted. Her research was initiated through her friendship with a circle of gay men in Los Angeles. Kameny led the successful confrontation with the American Psychiatric Association.

In the epilogue I briefly consider the post-1973 emergence of gay and lesbian studies in academia, focusing particularly on the utilization of scientific inquiry in the interests of social justice for gay people. The liberatory climate of the last three decades has nourished the development of gay and lesbian studies and emancipatory social science. There is, however, a long history of achieving homosexual rights through scientific channels. This book seeks to place the modern era of a social science of same-sex relations within the framework of its historical antecedents.

Chapter Two
The Relationship between Homosexuals and Sex Researchers, 1870-1940

It occurred to me today with something of a shock how horrible it would be for this diary of mine to be pawed over and read unsympathetically after I am dead, by those incapable of understanding, who would be filled with disgust and astonishment and think of me as a poor demented wretch, a neurotic or a madman who was better off dead. And then the thought of the one thing even more dreadful and terrible than that-for my diary never to be read by the one person who would or could understand.

For I do want it to be read-there is no use concealing the fact-by somebody who is like me, who would understand. Yet Havelock Ellis is about the only person known to me, that is, known by name, to whom I could confidently entrust my life, my inmost soul at times. -Jeb Alexander, Jeb and Dash: A Diary of Gay Life, 1918-1945, 14 April 1923

The pseudonymous Jeb Alexander was a gay man who was a government clerk in Washington, D.C. He started his diary in 1912, when he was twelve, and continued it until a year before his death in 1965. As his words suggest, he found sympathetic understanding in the work of sexual scientist Havelock Ellis. He most likely read Ellis's Sexual Inversion and discovered that others shared his own experiences. While Alexander had no intention of publishing his diary in his lifetime, like the respondents whose lives were recorded in Ellis's case histories, he wanted to leave a legacy of his life as a gay man. He thus willed his fifty handwritten volumes to his niece, Ina Russell, who in 1993 published selections from the years 1918 to 1945.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Departing from Deviance by Henry L. Minton Copyright © 2002 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Preface

1.Introduction: Emancipatory Science and
Homosexual Rights

2.The Relationship between Homosexuals
and Sex Researchers, 1870-1940

3.Jan Gay and the Sex Vairants Committee,
1935-41

4.Homosexual Life Stories, 1935-41

5.Henry and Gross and the Study of Sex
Offenders, 1937-72

6.Thomas Painter and the Study of Male
Prostitution, 1935-43

7.Toward Participatory Research on
Homosexuality: Painter, Kinsey, and
the Kinsey Institute, 1943-73

8.Evelyn Hooker, Frank Kameny, and
Depathologizinf Homosexuality,
1957-73
Epilogue: Beyond 1973

Notes

Index

Photographs

Recipe

The struggle to remove the stigma of sickness surrounding same-sex love has a long history. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic classification of mental illness. But the groundwork for this pivotal decision was laid decades earlier. In this new study, Henry L. Minton looks back at the struggle of the American gay and lesbian activists who chose scientific research as a path for advancing homosexual rights. He traces the history of gay and lesbian emancipatory research from its early beginnings in the late nineteenth century to its role in challenging the illness model in the 1970s. By examining archival sources and unpublished manuscripts, Minton reveals the substantial accomplishments made by key researchers and relates their life stories. He also considers the contributions of mainstream sexologists such as Alfred C. Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker, who supported the cause of homosexual rights through the advancement of scientific knowledge. By uncovering this hidden chapter in the story of gay liberation, Departing from Deviance makes an important contribution to both the history of science and the history of sexuality.