AHP readers may be interested in a new article in the Journal of the History of Sexuality: “Beyond the Depathologization of Homosexuality: Reframing Evelyn Hooker as a Boundary Shifter in Twentieth-Century US Sex Research,” by Stephen Molldrem. Excerpt:

Hooker’s contributions to the depathologization of homosexuality in psychiatry and psychology are undeniably her most enduring influence on sexual science and clinical practice. However, in this essay I will show that limiting the historical understanding of Hooker primarily to her clinical contributions has had the unfortunate effect of overlooking her direct influence on the development of then-novel approaches to the study of sexuality in social scientific disciplines such as sociology and anthropology from the 1950s until the late 1970s. I will further show that the tendency to characterize Hooker as the great depathologizer of homosexuality glosses over substantive transformations and oscillations in her own conceptualization of the origins and causes of human sexual identifications from the 1950s until her death in 1996. I will also demonstrate that the extant historiography has obscured how Hooker’s most influential clinical work from the 1950s was also deeply influenced by sociological research and social psychology that was published from the 1930s to the 1950s, including the then-emergent Chicago school of sociology and the sociology of deviance.

I thus offer a different view of Hooker—one in which she appears not only as someone who contributed to the depathologization of homosexuality in psychiatry and psychology but also as a more complex figure whose contributions to the study of sexuality in the clinical and social sciences also went beyond the depathologization of homosexuality.