Beyond the Depathologization of Homosexuality: Reframing Evelyn Hooker as a Boundary Shifter in Twentieth-Century US Sex Research

Abstract

E v E l y n H o o k E r (1907–96 ) wa s a psychologist best known for a 1957 paper that showed no statistically significant differences between what she characterized as the “adjustment” of thirty homosexual men and thirty heterosexual men drawn from nonclinical samples who “on the surface at least, seemed to have average adjustment.”1 That landmark study, titled “The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual” and published in the Journal of Projective Techniques, played a key role in laying the foundation for the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973.2