Evelyn Hooker

81
Evelyn Hooker bigraphy, stories - Psychologist famous for demonstrating homosexuality is not a mental disorder

Evelyn Hooker : biography

September 2, 1907 – November 18, 1996

Evelyn Hooker (née Gentry, September 2, 1907–November 18, 1996) was an American psychologist most notable for her 1957 paper "The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual" in which she administered several psychological tests to groups of self-identified male homosexuals and heterosexuals and asked experts to identify the homosexuals and rate their mental health. The experiment, which other researchers subsequently repeated, argues that homosexuality is not a mental disorder as there was no detectable difference between homosexual and heterosexual men in terms of mental adjustment.

Her work argued that a false correlation between homosexuality and mental illness had formed the basis of classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder by studying only a sample group that contained homosexual men with a history of treatment for mental illness. This is of critical importance in refuting the existence of the category of cultural heterosexism because it argues that homosexuality is not developmentally inferior to heterosexuality. Her demonstration that it is not an illness led the way to the eventual removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Life

Hooker was born Evelyn Gentry in North Platte, Nebraska, and grew up with eight brothers and sisters in the Colorado Plains. When she was 13, her family moved to Sterling, Colorado.

In 1924 she became a student at the University of Colorado while working as a maid for a rich Boulder family. Her mentor, Dr. Karl Munzinger, guided her in her challenge of the then prevalent psychological theory of behaviourism. She wrote her thesis paper on trial-and-error learning in rats.Shneidman, E. S. (1998). Evelyn Hooker (1907-1996). American Psychologist, 53(4), 480-481 He invited her to write her own case history. After receiving her Masters degree, she became one of 11 women involved in the PhD program in psychology at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, having been refused referral from the chairman of Yale for being a female. She studied with Knight Dunlap, who also generally did not approve of women doctorates. She was awarded her PhD in 1932.

In her early career, she wasn’t especially interested in the psychology of homosexual people. After teaching for only one year at the Maryland College for Women, she contracted tuberculosis and spent the next year in a sanatorium in Arizona. In 1937 Gentry received a fellowship to the Berlin Institute of Psychotherapy. She witnessed mass hysteria on the triumphant return of Hitler to Berlin after the Anschluss.

However, during the 1940s, she first became interested in what would turn out to be her life’s work. In 1942, while a teacher at UCLA, Gentry married writer Don Caldwell and took his surname. She became close to one of her students, Sam From, who introduced her to the gay and lesbian subculture, in 1943. He challenged her to scientifically study "people like him." Despite the social, moral and scientific climate of the post-war period, Caldwell became increasingly convinced that most gay men were perfectly socially adjusted and that this could be proven through scientific tests.

Over the next two decades she became established professionally. In 1948 she divorced her husband and moved to a guest cottage at the Salter Avenue home of Edward Hooker, professor of English at UCLA and poetry scholar. They married in London in 1951, and she took his surname. In the mid-fifties Christopher Isherwood became their neighbor and they became friends. She was against the gay relationship of Christopher Isherwood with the much younger Don Bachardy, they were not welcome at her house"Chris & Don, A love story", a film by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara, 2009. Sam From died in a car accident in 1956, just before her ground-breaking research was published. Hooker’s husband died in January 1957 of cardiac arrest.

The 1960s saw her work find a wider audience, and her conclusions were taken up by the gay rights movement. In 1961 Hooker was invited to lecture in Europe and in 1967, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) asked her to produce a report on what the institution should do about homosexual men. Richard Nixon’s election in 1969 delayed the publication of the report, which was published by a magazine, without authorization, in 1970. The report recommended the decriminalization of homosexuality and the provision of similar rights to both homosexual and heterosexual people. The burgeoning gay rights movement seized on this.