A Recent History of Lesbian and Gay Psychology

From Homophobia to LGBT

Peter Hegarty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138679405
• eBook ISBN: 9781317192022
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This ground-breaking text explores the contemporary history of how psychological research, practice, and theory has engaged with gay and lesbian movements in the United States and beyond, over the last 50 years. Peter Hegarty examines the main strands of research in lesbian and gay psychology that have emerged since the de-pathologizing of homosexuality in the 1970s that followed from the recognition of homophobia and societal prejudice.

The author details the expansion of 'lesbian and gay psychology' to 'LGB' to 'LGBT psychology' via its paradigm shifts, legal activism, shifts in policy makers' and mental health professionals' goals in regard to sexual and gender minorities. For the first time, the origins of the concepts, debates, and major research programs that have made up the field of LGBT psychology have been drawn together in a single historical narrative, making this a unique resource. A case is made that psychology has only very lately come to consider the needs and issues of transgender and intersex people, and that LGB paradigms need to be critically interrogated to understand how they can be best brokered to bring about social change for such groups.

A Recent History of Lesbian and Gay Psychology will serve as an advanced historical introduction to this field's recent history and current concerns, and will inform both those who have been a part of this history and students who are new to the field.

1 Normative creativity

In 1988 the feminist therapist Laura Brown delivered an address as president of the ‘Division for Lesbian and Gay Concerns,’ Division 44 of the American Psychological Association. Brown called for a psychology that would go beyond the discipline’s existing heterosexist knowledge base by making the experiences of lesbians and gay men central. Drawing on feminist thinking, she urged continual questioning of psychology’s positivist epistemology ‘which assumes that phenomena are either A or B,’ and an utter rejection of definitions of reality that either entirely ignore lesbian and gay men’s experiences, or marginalize them as peripheral ‘special topics.’ The costs of such erasure and marginalization were very high, because the experiences of lesbians and gay men – and other marginalized groups – had transformative potential. In Brown’s view, such lives, shaped by their experiences of biculturalism and marginality, required the development of ‘normative creativity’; a ‘terrifying and exhilarating’ process of making up norms of how to be, live, and love, when the dominant culture provided none at all, or provided only norms that worked against one’s very being.¹

Feminist therapy was a pivotal space in the late 1980s in which lesbian-affirmative perspectives in psychology took shape.² Brown located her speech in the recent historical context, emphasizing particularly the de-pathologization of homosexuality by the American Psychiatric Association and American Psychological Association in the early 1970s. But she knew that history had moved on since then. Defining the epistemology of this hoped-for future lesbian/gay paradigm of psychology in liminal spaces between constructed binaries, Brown embraced multiple rather than singular truths. A lesbian/gay psychology might not only be productive in individual lives, but might further transform all of psychology through ‘a dialectical tension’ that would stimulate new forms of inquiry. In the 1990s, calls for such dialectical transformation in knowledge from minority experience, such as Brown’s, became institutionalized as ‘social constructionist’ or ‘critical’ perspectives in some quarters and called out as the worst excesses of ‘political correctness’ in others. Psychology would not need to wait until Brown’s vision was fulfilled before it became a field that included multiple contradictory claims on truth and value.

From the advantaged perspective of the present it is possible to look back cynically at the shortcomings of Brown’s early vision, and the forms of lesbian and gay psychology that followed. The Division of the APA to which Brown spoke is now called the ‘Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Issues.’ Although much of Brown’s argument rests on the affordances of transcendence that live at the margins and liminal in-between spaces of the binary gender system, both bi- and trans- people and their experiences and knowledges went unmentioned in her vision. Moreover, in formulating a lesbian/gay vision, Brown overlooked HIV/AIDS entirely, the most pressing issue for gay and bisexual men in the late 1980s, and one that was already prompting a paradigm shift among a wide range of psychologists. Whilst these particularities matter, a presentist criticism of the gaps in Brown’s vision would not do justice to her own understanding of the dangers of unkind historical hindsight. Brown recognized the value of ambivalence and multiplicity in historical thinking at moments when paradigms shift, and reminded her listeners that a new paradigm ‘in no way denigrates that which has been done before and will continue to be done by way of research and practice in the field.’³

Brown was not alone in noticing that lesbian and gay psychology had developed to the point where its assumptions could be productively challenged. In 1987, British psychologist Celia Kitzinger proposed a radical feminist alternative to ‘lesbian-affirmative’ psychology which assumed that ‘patriarchy (not capitalism or sex roles or socialization or individual sexist men) is the root of all forms of oppression; that all men benefit from it and maintain it and are, therefore, our political enemies.’⁴ Kitzinger’s work was deeply informed by social studies of science and she critiqued the rhetoric by which lesbian and gay psychology justified itself, such as the rhetoric of empirical science and its claim to represent authentic ‘experience.’ Central to her critique was the charge that lesbian and gay psychology was complicit with an ideology of liberal humanism that promised individual adjustment to patriarchal society, such that psychology effectively distracted people from more substantive structural changes. For Kitzinger, lesbian and gay-affirmative psychology was already bringing about a different future – and going in entirely wrong directions.⁵ If Brown imagined that lesbians might transform psychology, Kitzinger hoped they would abandon it.

These two critical perspectives are part of a longer tradition of critical and conceptual engagement with what became ‘LGBT psychology’ by those who care about the empowerment of LGBT people, and this book is written in that spirit. The recent history of this field has rarely been drawn together. More commonly, history has been told in terms of a break between the (bad) past and the (better) present in the early 1970s when homosexuality became de-pathologized. Brown singled out the de-pathologization of homosexuality as the historical event which shaped the context of her speaking most obviously. Kitzinger repeatedly ventured, to rhetorical effect, that lesbians were much better off being labeled as sick than as being adjusted by affirmative psychologists. Histories that focus on the century before the 1970s describe the emergence of sexology in the late nineteenth century, the era to which the French philosopher Michel Foucault famously dated the introduction of the idea that the homosexual was a distinct kind of person.⁶ Histories chart how the psychoanalytic movement, the development of hormonal interventions and the rise of the sex survey all contributed to making sexuality ‘psychological.’⁷

One study looms particularly large in historical accounts of lesbian and gay psychology. In the 1950s, psychologist Evelyn Hooker administered several projective tests – such as the Rorschach inkblot test – to matched pairs of gay and straight men. Whilst the straight men were difficult to recruit, the Mattachine Society, a homophile group, collaborated with Hooker to recruit gay research subjects. Experts in interpreting such tests rated each man for ‘adjustment,’ and attempted to guess his sexuality from his test results alone. Importantly, even such respected experts in Rorschach interpretation as Hooker’s friend Bruno Klopfer could not tell who was who better than guessing at chance.⁸ Hooker’s experiment has become a foundational ‘origin story’ for lesbian and gay psychologists, an explanation of how ‘we’ in the field became who we are. It is also understood as initiating an empirical tradition of defeating social prejudice with the kinds of facts that psychologists and our science can produce.

Whilst Hooker’s work certainly was intended and executed to produce progressive knowledge, accounts can forget Hooker’s normative creativity when it is remembered simply as demonstrating ‘no difference’ between gay and straight men. There were two kinds of research participants in Hooker’s experiment: the gay and straight men, and the experts who attempted to distinguish them. Hooker’s work was part of a larger historical trajectory by which the Rorschach test reversed its gaze away from peering into the personalities of homosexuals and began to reflect on the stereotypes and assumptions of psychiatrists who assumed that a distinct ‘homosexual personality’ existed, which they hoped the test could detect.⁹ The rhetorical power of her study depended upon reversing the empirical gaze up the power hierarchy. Arguably the most important research subject in the study was not any gay man, but the Rorschach expert Bruno Klopfer. Let’s be clear, such an experiment does not add up to either Brown’s paradigm shift or Kitzinger’s radical rejection of liberal humanism. Nonetheless, this kind of reversal recurs often because lesbian and gay psychologists must do more than assert empirical similarities and differences to achieve progressive change. Hooker’s experiment tells a different story about who ‘we’ are if it is remembered that it was a use of the scientific method and a critique of a set of scientific claims that served to justify the oppression of gay men and lesbians by making us into objects of interminable suspicion and fear.

Brown’s call for a new paradigm also expressed her intuition that it is norms that undo lesbians and gay men, and that it is norms that lesbians and gay men need to recreate in their own lives. Her call occurs at the same time that scholars in lesbian, gay, and queer studies, an interdisciplinary study that was gaining recognition in the late 1980s, drew attention to the dynamics of heteronormativity; the ideology that privileges heterosexuality as the ontological ground for everything (including ‘society’ and ‘nature’). How does normativity work, and how to you creatively respond to it? In an earlier book, I distinguished two types of normativity that locate difference in exceptional people.¹⁰ Drawing on the history of the statistics, I called these two Queteletian and Galtonian normativity. Queteletian normativity assumes that unusual people are tragically ill-fated, and worries about how they might threaten society. If parents can visualize no bright future for their child who comes out or expresses a wish to dress, play, or identify in a way that is not ‘normal’ for their assigned gender, or assume that an array of others will harm their child whenever this difference is noticed, then those parents are caught up in Queteletian normativity. Galtonian normativity emerged later and is a kind of creative response to Queteletian normativity that is less about preserving the status quo than configuring optimism. Galtonian normativity is optimistic about what unusual people may become; think of the place that gifted children occupy in eugenic fantasies, for example. Galtonian normativity doesn’t demand that exceptional people become more normal; it obliges them to bring about the future that they are imagined to promise. If employers believe that LGB people’s experience of marginalization or unique combinations of gender traits diversify leadership or bring creativity to a project and might give business a competitive edge then they are engaging in Galtonian normativity.¹¹ In imagining normative creativity, Laura Brown was putting this kind of demand on our shoulders.

In Gentlemen’s Disagreement, I considered how discourses about exceptionally intelligent children and adults (who were largely gendered male) shifted between the logics of Galtonian and Queteletian normativity, particularly when high intelligence signaled queerness. Whilst the events in that book ended in the mid-1950s, I argued there that this understanding of normativity has relevance for the present. Hence, I am not surprised that when Brown refused to rest with the simple defense of lesbians and gay men from Queteletian normativity, she drew on a notion about the intellect – creativity. In Gentlemen’s Disagreement, I examined what went wrong when Lewis Terman entrusted in particular gifted children what he called ‘the promise of youth,’ particularly when they grew up queer. Galtonian normativity can create binding obligations that overlook how structural conditions and marginalization limit the capacity of the exceptional to bring about the change that their difference appears to others to promise. Lesbian and gay psychologists have often had to creatively transform psychology to achieve progress. Obliging queer people to meet unrealistic and romantic ideals to transform psychology, corporations, or anything else through acts of genius is asking a lot. Galtonian normativity requires us to see that hope and optimism have a darker side.

This book is organized into five further chapters. Chapter 2 describes the emergence of affirmative approaches to lesbians and gay men in the 1970s and 1980s. Critical to this chapter is my claim that ‘affirmation of lesbians and gay men’ left the helping professions in a state that Eve Sedgwick has called ‘open season on gay kids.’¹² Whilst psychiatric pathologization was the most obvious ‘other’ that lesbian and gay psychology defined itself against, the continuing pathologization of children who seemed most likely to grow up lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans constitutes a foundational dilemma and limit to the field. Chapter 3 examines how government inaction in response to HIV/AIDS prompted new forms of science that appeared to offer great promise to psychology in the 1980s, and which contributed to the broadening out of gay-affirmative perspectives in psychology. I consider how lesbian and gay psychology formulated its objects around prejudice, including its causes and consequences, and wrestled with the conflicts in values created by a commitment to affirmation on the one hand and a value-neutral empiricist discourse on the other.

Nowhere did lesbian and gay psychologists challenge heteronormative society more persistently and effectively than in the courts, and Chapter 4 considers legal activism by the American Psychological Association from the 1980s into recent support for equal marriage. Lesbian and gay psychological research aligned with legal strategy in ways that are distinct to the USA, were organized around the concept of prejudice, and differentiated psychology from other disciplines that took ‘sexuality’ as an object of knowledge in this decade. In Chapter 5, I review social psychological evidence that refutes the claim that biological models of sexuality constitute a kind of ‘strategic essentialism’ which played a role in ameliorating heterosexist prejudice. As the shortcomings of such biological theories became evident in the late 1990s, theories of flexible sexualities that emphasized gender differences rather than gender similarities introduced new definitions of sexuality, suggesting that not only psychology, but the very experience of sexuality was itself in a state of historical flux.

In Chapter 6, I examine the American Psychological Association’s 2009 Report on Transgender Issues.¹³ This report provides an early and developed exemplar of how marginalized identity groups claim recognition in ways that cite the recent history of lesbian and gay psychology. The shift in recognition in the APA from LG to LGB to LGBT over the last 30 years asks lesbian and gay psychology to be a paradigm for how social movements and psychology can creatively come together, to make good on the promises of Galtonian normativity. I examine what the report says about this history, and what gets lost and what gets promised in making ‘LGB psychology’ the historical basis for transgender psychology, in both realist and analogical terms.

Notes

1 Brown (1989, p. 452).

2 See the work published in Women and Therapy in this period, particularly Rothblum (1988).

3 Brown (1989, p. 455).

4 Kitzinger (1987, p. 64).

5 See Brown (1992); Kitzinger & Perkins (1993).

6 Foucault (1978).

7 See Minton (2002), Terry (1999), Rosario (1997).

8 Hooker (1957, 1958, 1993).

9 Hegarty (2003).

10 Hegarty (2013).

11 See e.g., Snyder (2006).

12 Sedgwick (1991).

13 American Psychological As...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Normative creativity
• 2. Revolutionary science
• 3. Generalizing affirmation in the age of HIV/AIDS
• 4. Taking the case to court
• 5. Naturalizing and denaturalizing sexuality in public
• 6. Cisgenderism and affirmative LGBT psychology
• References
• Names Index
• Subject Index