ARE HOMOSEXUALS inherently maladjusted? 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 illness or as a symptom of a broader syndrome. What’s more, it was official: there it was in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (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 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 Adjustment 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 psychiatric concern—was unwarranted. It was perfectly possible to test this assumption by treating homosexuality and “adjustment” 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.
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Wendy Fenwick is an international writer based in Boston.
