Harpy Hall of Fame: Evelyn Hooker (1907-1996)

The Harpy Hall of Fame is dedicated to those women who worked on behalf of advancing women’s rights, contributed to reshaping gender roles, or were just generally awesome and badass. Unstinting in their desire to achieve their goals, these remarkable women left legacies that continue to resonate today.

Evelyn Hooker was born in Nebraska in 1906, and grew up in poverty before earning a tuition scholarship to the University of Colorado. Following the advice of her mother, who told her “Get an education and they can never take it away from you”, Hooker threw herself into her studies and decided to earn a degree in psychology — a rare feat for a woman at that time. She was offered a teaching position at her alma mater, but her mentor advised her to earn a PhD. Almost immediately, she was stymied by the prevailing attitudes about women in academia, when she was refused a recommendation by a department chairman who did not believe women should earn graduate degrees. Hooker ended up with a PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1932, then moved to Germany, where she lived with a Jewish family and witnessed the systematic anti-Semitism of the pre-WWII Third Reich.

It was not until the 1950s that Hooker came into contact with the man who would help determine what her career path would ultimately turn out to be. Teaching at UCLA, she became very close to one of her students — Sam From, an openly homosexual young man at a time when his orientation was deemed by society and the medical community as being a mental illness. From urged Hooker to study homosexuality, even taking Hooker and her husband to a clandestine gay club alongside his partner. Hooker took From up on his challenge, and proceeded to do work in the area of sexuality that had widespread and long-lasting ramifications.

Amidst a political climate in which the echoes of McCarthyism had branded homosexuality as a dangerous political force as well as a moral and sexual deviancy, Hooker undertook extensive research for several years with the help of a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grant. At the time, there had not yet been a single academic study devoted to analysis of homosexual individuals who were not psychiatric patients or incarcerated convicts. Hooker published her research in 1957, titled “The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual”, and put forth her opinion, grounded in solid analysis, that homosexual individuals were not mentally disturbed as was widely believed and also that their psychological profiles were indistinguishable from those of heterosexuals.

Hooker’s research findings received nowhere near the widespread publicity as those of Alfred Kinsey did. Sixty years later, she lacks the familiar legacy of Kinsey and has not been subject to a myriad of biographies, let alone a major Hollywood film about her life. But her impact has resonated in the medical community. She was instrumental in fighting to have homosexuality removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s catalog of mental illnesses; although this did not happen until sixteen years after her study was published, her work on a NIMH task force on homosexuality was a great influence in addition to her independent research. Throughout the sixties, she continued to work to combat the stigma associated with gays and lesbians, and whereas Kinsey considered his own sexuality to be fluid, Hooker was notable for being one of the first heterosexuals to ally herself with the gay rights movement. She died in 1996, and was fondly remembered by writer Christopher Isherwood, who said, “She never treated us like some strange tribe, so we told her things we never told anyone before.”

For those who have studied the history of the American gay rights movement, Hooker’s research and life are well worth examining. While she may not have attracted the same attention as Kinsey, she is the subject of an excellent, Oscar-nominated documentary called Changing Our Minds: The Story of Evelyn Hooker released in 1992 and narrated by Patrick Stewart (and not available on Netflix, unfortunately). Further reading about Hooker can be found here and here.