EVELYN HOOKER (née Gentry), who died on this date (b: 1907) was an American psychologist most notable for her 1956 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 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 (DSM).
Hooker’s mother, Jessie Bethel, who had a third grade education, told her to pursue an education because that was the only thing that could not be taken away from her. The Gentry family was not wealthy in the least, and Hooker was further stigmatized by her nearly 6-foot stature. Still an advocate of education, Jessie Bethel enrolled her daughter at Sterling High School, which was large and unusually progressive for the time. There, Hooker was in an honors program and was able to take a course in psychology. Hooker wanted to go to a teachers college, but her instructors saw her potential and encouraged her to go to the University of Colorado. By the time she was ready to graduate, she had obtained a scholarship to the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB).
In her early career, she was not 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. After her recovery she began teaching at Whittier College in Southern California. Then in 1937 Gentry received a fellowship to the Berlin Institute of Psychotherapy, at which point she left Whittier. Hooker lived with a Jewish family while she studied in Europe. While there, she got a first-hand look at the rise of Adolf Hitler and witnessed such events as the Kristallnacht. She learned later that the Jewish family she lived with was killed in concentration camps. Before returning home, Hooker went on a group tour to Russia, arriving just after a major purge. The events that Hooker would see in Europe ultimately sparked her desire to help overcome social injustice.
During the 1940s, she first became interested in what would turn out to be her life’s work. Hooker was teaching an introductory psychology class in 1944 when a student approached her after class. He identified himself as Sam From; he confided in her that he was gay and so were most of his friends. She realized Sam was one of the brightest students in the class and quickly became friends with him. They would spend time between and after classes to talk and get to know each other. Sam introduced Hooker to his circle of homosexual friends. They would go to clubs, bars, and parties where Hooker was able to fraternize with more homosexuals. Sam’s closest friends included Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender, a writer and a poet. He challenged her to scientifically study “people like him”.
Sam proposed a question to Hooker: Why not conduct research on homosexuals to determine whether homosexuality was some sort of disease or disorder and not relevant to a person’s psychological makeup? Sam urged her to conduct research on homosexuals, saying it was “her scientific duty to study people like us”.
Hooker was intrigued by the question and further persuaded by her experience with social rejection as a child, witnessing the effects of racial and political persecution in her travels, and discrimination in her professional life.
Over the next two decades she became established professionally. In 1948 she moved to a guest cottage at the Salter [more likely Saltair] 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. She was against the relationship of Isherwood with the much younger Don Bachardy; they were not welcome at her house. Sam From died in a car accident in 1956, just before Hooker’s 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.
She retired from her research at UCLA in 1970 at the age of 63 and started a private practice in Santa Monica. Most of her clients were gay men and lesbians. In her later life she would be awarded with the Distinguished Contribution in the Public Interest Award. The University of Chicago opened the Evelyn Hooker Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies in her honor. She was also the subject of the 1992 Academy Award–nominated film Changing Our Minds: The Story of Dr. Evelyn Hooker. Season 1, episode 4 of the podcast Making Gay History is about Hooker.
Hooker died at her home in Santa Monica, California, in 1996, at the age of 89.