Evelyn Hooker (; née Gentry, September 2, 1907 – November 18, 1996) was an American psychologist known 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, found that homosexuality was not a mental disorder, as there was no detectable difference between homosexual and heterosexual men in terms of mental adjustment.
Hooker argued that a false correlation between homosexuality and mental illness had formed the basis of classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder. The correlation was the result of earlier researchers studying sample groups that contained homosexual men with a history of treatment for mental illness. Hooker's work was of critical importance in refuting cultural heterosexism because it found that homosexuality was not developmentally inferior to heterosexuality. Her work 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, in her grandmother's house and grew up with eight brothers and sisters in the Colorado Plains. When she was 13, her family moved to Sterling, Colorado. The journey to Sterling would be one of Hooker's fondest memories.
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. There, Hooker entered an honors program and was able to take a course in psychology.
In 1924, she matriculated at UCB while working as a maid for a rich Boulder family. Her mentor, Karl Munzinger, guided her to challenge the then-prevalent psychological theory of behaviourism. She wrote her thesis on trial-and-error learning in rats. Munzinger invited her to record her own case history. After receiving her master's degree, she became one of 11 women enrolled in the PhD program in psychology at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, having been refused entry by the chairman of Yale for being a female. She studied with Knight Dunlap, who also generally did not approve of women doctorates. She subsequently applied to the psychology department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). 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. After all, the 1950s was at the height of the McCarthy era, and homosexuality was considered to be a mental disorder by psychologists, a sin by the church, and a crime by the law. She had greater difficulty finding heterosexual men for the study. She gathered a sample of 30 heterosexual men and 30 homosexual men and paired them based on equivalent IQ, age, and education. For the interest of the study, it was required that none of the men from either group have previously been seen for psychological help, in disciplinary barracks in the armed services, in prison, showed evidence of considerable disturbance, or who were in therapy.
Publications
- Evelyn Hooker, "The adjustment of the male overt homosexual", Journal of projective techniques, XXI 1956, pp. 18–31.
- Evelyn Hooker, "The homosexual community". Proceedings of the XIV International congress of applied psychology, Munksgaard, Copenhagen 1961.
- Evelyn Hooker, "Homosexuality: Summary of studies". In Evelyn Duvall and Sylvanus Duvall (curr.), Sex ways in fact and faith, Association Press, New York 1961.
- Evelyn Hooker, "Male homosexual life styles and venereal disease". In: Proceedings of the World forum on syphilis and other treponematoses (Public Health Service Publication No. 997), U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 1962.
- Evelyn Hooker, "Male homosexuality". In: N. L. Farberow (cur.), Taboo topics, Atherton, New York 1963, pp. 44–55.
- Evelyn Hooker, "An empirical study of some relations between sexual patterns and gender identity in male homosexuals". In J. Money (cur.), Sex research: new development, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York 1965, pp. 24–52.
- Evelyn Hooker, "Male homosexuals and their worlds". In: Judd Marmor (cur.), Sexual inversion: the multiple roots of homosexuality, Basic Books, New York 1965, pp. 83–107). Traduzione italiana in: Judd Marmor, Inversione sessuale.
- Evelyn Hooker, "Homosexuality". In: The international encyclopedia of the social sciences, Macmillan and Free Press, New York 1968.
- Evelyn Hooker, "Parental relations and male homosexuality in patient and non-patient samples", Journal of consulting and clinical psychology, XXXIII 1969, pp. 140–142.
- Evelyn Hooker, Foreword to: C. J. Williams and M. S. Weinberg, Homosexuals and the military: a study of less than honorable discharge, Harper & Row, New York 1971, pp. vii–ix.
Legacy
In 2010, actor/playwright Jade Esteban Estrada portrayed Hooker in the solo musical ICONS: The Lesbian and Gay History of the World, Vol. 4.
Season 1, episode 4 of the podcast Making Gay History is about her.
Honors and awards
- In 1967, Hooker became Chair of the NIMH Task Force on Homosexuality.