Evelyn Hooker

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Lore & Background

Evelyn Hooker was born Evelyn Gentry on September 2, 1907, in North Platte, Nebraska, and grew up with eight brothers and sisters in the Colorado Plains. Her 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. Hooker earned her PhD in psychology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932, having been refused entry by the chairman of Yale for being a female. After teaching at the Maryland College for Women, she contracted tuberculosis and spent a year in a sanatorium in Arizona. In 1937, she received a fellowship to the Berlin Institute of Psychotherapy, where she witnessed the rise of Adolf Hitler and Kristallnacht; she later learned that the Jewish family she lived with was killed in concentration camps. These events sparked her desire to help overcome social injustice. In 1944, a student named Sam From confided that he was gay and introduced Hooker to his circle of homosexual friends, including Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. From challenged her to scientifically study "people like him." Hooker secured a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health and gathered 30 homosexual men (via the Mattachine Society) and 30 heterosexual men, matched by IQ, age, and education. None of the men had previously been seen for psychological help. She administered the Thematic Apperception Test, the Make-a-Picture-Story test, and the Rorschach inkblot test. She presented 60 unmarked profiles to three expert evaluators, who could not identify the homosexuals and found no difference in mental adjustment. Her groundbreaking research was published in 1956, just before Sam From died in a car accident.

Reader's Guide

Evelyn Hooker's 1956 study was a landmark in psychology. By using matched samples of 30 homosexual and 30 heterosexual men who had never been in therapy, and by having experts blindly rate their mental health, she found no detectable difference between the groups. Hooker argued that a false correlation between homosexuality and mental illness had formed the basis of classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder, a correlation resulting from earlier researchers studying sample groups that contained homosexual men with a history of treatment for mental illness. Her work directly challenged the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In 1967, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health asked her to produce a report on how the institute should treat 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. Hooker retired from UCLA in 1970 and started a private practice in Santa Monica. She later received 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 the subject of the 1992 Academy Award–nominated film Changing Our Minds: The Story of Dr. Evelyn Hooker. Hooker died at her home in Santa Monica, California, on November 18, 1996, at the age of 89.

Did You Know?

• Hooker was nearly 6 feet (1.8 m) tall and was stigmatized by her stature as a child.
• She witnessed Kristallnacht while living with a Jewish family in Europe; the family was later killed in concentration camps.
• Sam From, the student who challenged Hooker to study homosexuality, died in a car accident in 1956, just before her groundbreaking research was published.
• Hooker had to use her home to conduct interviews to protect participants' anonymity during her study.
• Her 1970 report recommending decriminalization of homosexuality was published by a magazine without authorization.