Page 34 - Push Back

[Source: Ibid]

The narrator has admitted that there were only two reports suggesting that homosexuality was
normal. One was a very small study of 30 homosexuals conducted by Evelyn Hooker. These
people were friends and associates of Evelyn Hooker. They were all young men, all of whom
were either students at UCLA, or friends of students who attended this California university.
Evelyn Hooker specifically chose homosexual males from her study that had never been in
prison, never gone to therapy, never been a patient at a mental hospital, and had never been
disciplined by the military for homosexual behavior. Yet, Evelyn Hooker proposed to use this
small sampling of carefully selected homosexual men for her study to demonstrate that
homosexual men were normal, healthy individuals who posed no threat to society.

Evelyn Hooker subjected an equal number of homosexual and heterosexual males to a battery of
psychiatric tests, including the Rorschach Test, also known as the ink blot test. Evelyn showed
the results of her testing to three psychiatrists who did not know the identities of the men, or their
sexual behavior, asking them to try to determine which men were homosexual. The results were
not surprising. The psychiatrists determined that two thirds of each group exhibited
characteristics of well adjusted, normally functioning human beings.

There are so many areas in which to criticize this study by Evelyn Hooker, that it is astonishing
to realize that hers is one of the two primary studies used to justify the reclassification of
homosexuality as normal and healthy behavior. She purposely excluded all homosexual males
that had been in therapy, which would include homosexuals who did not view their sexual
behavior to be normal or healthy. She excluded all who had been in mental hospitals, individuals
whom others viewed to be unhealthy, and suffering from mental disorder. She excluded those
who had been arrested or imprisoned either in society or in the military, which would once again
have been symptomatic of sociopathic behavior. All of the homosexual men came from a specific
societal group of educated men. They were all around the same age. This was not by any measure
a random, or diverse sampling of homosexual males. Even as the Kinsey report was criticized for
being unrepresentative of the general population, Ms. Hooker’s report was unrepresentative of
homosexual males.

One must also question the viability of determining who is normal and who is abnormal by
subjecting them to interpretive tests such as the ink blot test. Such testing is highly subjective and
its accuracy is dubious. This study by Evelyn Hooker was deficient in many ways. To arrive at
the conclusions she set forth would require a far larger number of participants from across a wide
spectrum of backgrounds, ages, and life experiences. It should be a long term study, rather than a
momentary “snapshot” of one moment in a person’s life. Those taking such tests, and
understanding the purpose of it, would also be tempted to be dishonest in their answers, seeking
to provide responses that would cause the tester to view them as healthy and normal, insuring
that homosexuality be viewed favorably. The clinical environment of this small study would not
necessarily lend itself to capturing an honest, unbiased view of the individuals. Who hasn’t given
another person an answer that was intended to cause the questioner to view them more
favorably? Perhaps an individual should sit in on a few job interviews to see how often this
occurs. This is a basic tendency of human nature and it leads to skewed results in examinations,