The study that overturned a dogma

On 30 August 1956, the psychologist Evelyn Hooker stepped up to the lectern at the convention of the American Psychological Association in Chicago. She presented a study that would change how the profession viewed homosexuality, and called it "The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual".

Hooker was doing research at the University of California, Los Angeles. The project had been prompted by a former student, Sam From, who introduced her to his circle of friends and told her it was her scientific duty to study people like him. At the time, homosexuality was regarded as an illness in psychology, a crime in the courts and a sin in the church. Until then, almost the only men studied had come from prisons and psychiatric institutions.

In 1953 Hooker applied to the National Institute of Mental Health for a grant. She got it. For the study she put together sixty men, thirty homosexual and thirty heterosexual, matched for age, social status and intelligence. All took the same three personality tests, including the Rorschach test. The records went to three renowned psychologists who did not know who belonged to which group. They were asked to assess the men's mental state and to tell the two groups apart.

With the Rorschach test they could not do so reliably. Overall, they found no differences in psychological adjustment. Those who had expected illness simply found nothing.

A year later the study appeared in the Journal of Projective Techniques. In 1967 the National Institute of Mental Health appointed the researcher to head a task force on homosexuality, whose final report of 10 October 1969 recommended, among other things, repealing the sodomy laws. When the American Psychiatric Association later removed homosexuality from its diagnostic manual, Hooker's work was among the decisive reasons.