“THE SCIENCE of homosexuality” has headlined two issues of this magazine to date. This issue is more about the scientists themselves and their times, though most of our subjects did in fact make important contributions to LGBT science.
Sexuality as a subject of scientific inquiry can be traced to mid-19th-century Germany. Part of the impetus was the discovery that there were sexual anomalies to be explored, including the newly minted “homosexuals.” As William Benemann documents here, this approach was finding its way to the U.S. by the 1880s, when physicians began to publish papers about patients who suffered from what was seen as a nervous disorder: a sexual attraction to one’s own sex. And while the doctors prefaced their research with the obligatory moral outrage, they tended to regard these patients as a curiosity to be explained—the better to find a cure for what ailed them.
The neurological model soon gave way to the psychiatric paradigm of Freud and his followers, as “sexual disorders” were annexed by the psychiatric establishment and catalogued in the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)—which is where “homosexuality” remained for many decades. In the 1950s, along came Evelyn Hooker to carry out a study that marked the beginning of the end for the pathological model. As Wendy Fenwick argues, Hooker challenged not only the notion that homosexuals were “mentally ill” but the very legitimacy of the APA’s claim to jurisdiction over people’s sexual orientation.
While “homosexuality” was dropped from the DSM in 1973, the “T” in LGBT has remained. “Gender dysphoria” refers to a mismatch between one’s current gender identity and one’s assigned gender at birth. Vernon Rosario reveals that the crucial research on this topic was undertaken by German-American physician Harry Benjamin. Trained in endocrinology in the early 20th century, he started out promoting slightly crackpot treatments for sexual disorders but became intrigued by the connection between gender and hormones, and found himself working with Christine Jorgensen in the 1950s, which launched his pioneering research into transgender healthcare.
Claude Schwob was a radiochemist who’s the only known LGBT scientist to have worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. While working with Robert Oppenheimer on the testing of materials to be used in the first atom bombs, Schwob had a steady boyfriend and made no attempt to hide his gayness, which apparently was an open secret. David L. Chapman argues that Schwob was remarkably free of shame throughout his life, even when the FBI went after him, and he spent much of his later life photographing young men in various states of déshabillé and sexual entanglement. His vast collection of photos is preserved in the GLBT Historical Society archives.
