Part I. The APA, the DSM, and Homosexuality
**The Campaign Begins. **A lifelong hard-left political activist, the psychologist Evelyn Hooker is more than anyone else credited by believers with having demonstrated that homosexuality is normal. Even today, almost fifty years after its publication in 1957 in
Projective Testing, her “The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual” is the only paper referenced in detail on the main website of the American Psychological Association in its discussion of Gay and Lesbian issues, as it attempts to make the case that there is no evidence for an association between homosexuality and psychopathology. 2 Crucially, her study was one of the two upon which in 1973, the APA decided to remove homosexuality from the list of disorders in the DSM and the one study discussed in the APA’s brief in 2003 in the *Lawrence *case. It claims to show that
“homosexuals [are] not inherently abnormal and that there [is] no difference between the pathologies of homosexual and heterosexual men.” 3 Eight years after her landmark study, she found herself chair of a newly –established National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Task Force on Homosexuality, hand -picked by Judd Marmor, an influential psychiatrist at UCLA. The only other “mental health” representatives were Alfred Kinsey’s close colleagues Paul Gebhard, and John Money, the latter a psychologist from Johns Hopkins and an early (but recently discredited and fired) proponent of transsexual surgery. In 1969 the Task Force issued its report. It claimed, parroting the Kinsey reports almost word-for-word, that sexuality was a continuum from exclusive homosexuality to exclusive heterosexuality, and that some degree of *bisexuality *was the human norm. Without evidence, it stated that any homosexual suffering was caused by societal prejudice. (It avoided mentioning, however, that in Kinsey’s view, human sexual taste was almost infinitely malleable.) Thus, there was nothing problematic with homosexuality
per se.
Within a few years, Marmor, who was active in anti -war, pro-abortion, and other “New Left” causes, became Vice-President of the APA. With Hooker and Marmor in such prominent roles, agitators outside the professions could count on their collaboration in organizing protests aimed at radicalizing an organization which until then, held to a tacit ethical creed of professionalism that prohibited them from using the public’s trust in their presumed scholarly expertise in circumscribed domains to exercise influence over general matters of civics. One can see the beginnings of a coordinated effort to corrupt this ethos at the APA’s 1970 annual meeting, when a most eminent and respected psychiatrist and psychoanalyst presenting a paper on “homosexuality and transsexualism” was interrupted by an outside agitator who had been secretly bought into the meeting. 4 Acceding to pressure, the organizers of the 1971 conference agreed to sponsor a special panel —not *on *homosexuality, but *by *homosexuals:
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