A Recent History of Lbian and Gay Psychology: From Homophobia to LGB

Contents:

• A BRIEF HISTORY OF LBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENR SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
• MENTAL HEALTH LBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENR (LGBT) YOUTH
• A RECENT HISTORY OF LBIAN AND GAY PSYCHOLOGY

A BRIEF HISTORY OF LBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENR SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Kim Mills: June is LGBTQ Pri Month, marked by march and memoratns to celebrate LGBTQ culture and advote for the rights of lbian, gay, bisexual, transgenr and queer people the US and around the world. In addn to his work the history of psychology, he nducts experimental rearch areas cludg dory gaydar and how beliefs about the blogil basis of sexual orientatn fluence prejudice and discrimatn. Some of our listeners might not really be aware of how psychiatry was pelled to remove homosexualy om the Diagnostic and Statistil Manual of Mental Disorrs, which is pretty much the arber of what nstut a mental illns or a mental disorr among all behavral health practners.

If you were gay and you wanted a psychiatrist to try and cure you, what you might now ll nversn therapy or sexual orientatn change efforts, that was still legimate psychiatry.

He thought, "If I go outsi of the ci, and I go outsi of the ltle ty ltle secret gay enclav, then I'm gog to fd the people who are very different om each other, and 's gog to challenge this stereotype about what the signs of homosexualy are, " which were thgs like genr versn, or artistic terts for men, or thgs like that. The Rorschach tt was the target of a ntrolled experiment that Hooker did, as well, where she took gay and straight men, gave them all Rorschach tts, and found that there was no difference. I thk what Hooker did is, she took that sort of scientific lens that had always been sort of lookg at gay people and assumg there was a difference between gay and straight people, and g that difference whether was real or purported, to kd of build a fic mol and build a diagnosis, and build a mental health story.

MENTAL HEALTH LBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENR (LGBT) YOUTH

And there you n see that some people who had been leadg the kd of gay affirmative iative the 1970s, particularly Steven Morand, whose now a unselg psychologist, wrg there and sayg, "This should be an issue. But I thk, once that happened, and once HIV/AIDS beme a way for psychologists and for psychology the Uned Stat, to have a more productive relatnship wh thgs like the NIMH, fundg streams, and so on, I thk took some ias that gay and lbian people were jt people, that were kd of a ltle b margal, they were que margal the 1970s. Mills: But you do talk about fundable rearch and what I remember om those days is that there wasn't a lot of fundg, bee the ernment did not want to fund studi of gay people.

But that trajectory was already set tra by earlier stuff about sodomy laws, equal employment laws, parents rights to ctody of their children, and other thgs where APA had gone to urt about lbian and gay rights. And as other studi, we found a discrimatn effect, so that people who sound gay or lbian were ls likely to be hired for those rol and judged to be ls suable for them as well. So there was much stronger discrimatn agast a woman who sound lbian pared to a woman who sound straight, than agast a man who sound gay than agast a man who sound straight.

I thk a pot here, and I thk this is kd of difficult for some people, maybe, to wrap your head around, is that y, there is this kd of genr-y kd of stereotypg around gay and lbian people that happens all the time. That's why we kd of thought, "Actually, I thk stat needs to be thought about this equatn as well when we thk about what is the landspe of discrimatn that people might enunter if they are lbian and gay, " or even if they sound lbian or gay.

A RECENT HISTORY OF LBIAN AND GAY PSYCHOLOGY

Mills: I want to wrap up wh a qutn that tak back to your book for a moment, bee you end by wrg that 's important for all psychologists to have some knowledge of the recent history of LGBT psychology and that the field offers somethg of what you ll generalizable efulns beyond gay men and lbians to whom ially applied. Where homosexual activy or viance om tablished genr rol/drs was banned by law or tradnal ctom, such nmnatn might be munited through sensatnal public trials, exile, medil warngs, and language om the pulp. However, throughout 150 years of homosexual social movements (roughly om the 1870s to today), lears and anizers stggled to addrs the very different ncerns and inty issu of gay men, women intifyg as lbians, and others intifyg as genr variant or nonbary.