In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental diseases.
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Many later studies with other measures led to the conclusion that homosexuality had no related pathology, and that gays and lesbians function equally well in work and in loving relationships. Three Rorschach experts tried to distinguish the responses of the two groups but could not (Hooker, 1957). Hooker gave the Rorschach test to thirty homosexual and thirty heterosexual males. Neither government nor businesses would hire homosexual persons. If she did, their “occupations and very lives were at risk” (Hooker, 1993, p. Gay males she wanted to test feared she would betray their confidentiality. When she told the psychiatry department chair she wanted to study normal homosexuals, he replied, "There is no such person!" (Hooker, 1993, p. A gay former student told her, "Evelyn, it is your scientific duty to study men like me." Hooker agreed, "He's right - we know nothing about them." (cited in Burr, 1993). Until the 1950's, most homosexual persons studied by psychologists and others were prisoners or mental patients, so it was easy to conclude that these were linked.Įvelyn Hooker, a brave psychologist at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), began undoing this belief in the early 1950s. Through the 1970sįirst, psychological studies disproved the belief that homosexuality is related to mental illness and criminality. Why have these attitudes changed? For many reasons, but psychological science has contributed in three important ways. In 1996, just 27 percent favored same-sex marriage.
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READ MORE: How the Great Depression Helped End Prohibitionīy the post-World War II era, a larger cultural shift toward earlier marriage and suburban living, the advent of TV and the anti-homosexuality crusades championed by Joseph McCarthy would help push the flowering of gay culture represented by the Pansy Craze firmly into the nation’s rear-view mirror.ĭrag balls, and the spirit of freedom and exuberance they represented, never went away entirely-but it would be decades before LGBTQ life would flourish so publicly again.In 1977, 41 percent of Americans thought that gay or lesbian relations should be legal. This not only discouraged gay men from participating in public life, but also “made homosexuality seem more dangerous to the average American.”
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In the mid- to late ‘30s, Heap points out, a wave of sensationalized sex crimes “provoked hysteria about sex criminals, who were often-in the mind of the public and in the mind of authorities-equated with gay men.”
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The sale of liquor was legal again, but newly enforced laws and regulations prohibited restaurants and bars from hiring gay employees or even serving gay patrons. Each gay enclave, wrote George Chauncey in his book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, had a different class and ethnic character, cultural style and public reputation. In addition to these groups, whom social reformers in the early 1900s would call “male sex perverts,” a number of nightclubs and theaters were featuring stage performances by female impersonators these spots were mainly located in the Levee District on Chicago’s South Side, the Bowery in New York City and other largely working-class neighborhoods in American cities.īy the 1920s, gay men had established a presence in Harlem and the bohemian mecca of Greenwich Village (as well as the seedier environs of Times Square), and the city’s first lesbian enclaves had appeared in Harlem and the Village. “In the late 19th century, there was an increasingly visible presence of gender-non-conforming men who were engaged in sexual relationships with other men in major American cities,” says Chad Heap, a professor of American Studies at George Washington University and the author of Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940.