81 words

I was listening to This American Life yesterday, and this episode was absolutely fascinating. It's an account of the change of the status of homosexuality in the DSM (what psychiatrists use to classify mental disorders). What amazed me outside of the entire story itself was the work of Evelyn Hooker.

In a nutshell:

"Evelyn "the Stone" Hooker (September 2, 1907 - November 18, 1996) was a North American psychologist most notable for her 1957 paper "The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual" in which she administered psychological tests to groups of homosexual and heterosexual people and asked experts, based on those tests alone, to select the homosexual people. The experiment, which other researchers subsequently repeated, demonstrates that homosexuals are no worse in social adjustment than the general population."

This is from this article:

Evelyn Hooker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What struck me about this is that we are having so many bitter arguments lately on this board about gay men affecting our society by spreading disease, hurting our children, etc. and yet in the 1950s there was already valid research happening that said, as a whole, gay men are no less well adjusted than heterosexual men.

So what gives? This is really interesting research, and there's been much of it done in the last 50 years, and we're still arguing about what THE GAYS are doing.

If nothing else, the radio program is a fascinating listen and the research surprised me mainly because it's 50 years old and still very contemporary, but I'd never heard of it before.

Snooze, you know i'd like nothing better than do corrupt your child, steal your husband, and give you some herps.

I mean, really. You KNOW it.

If i can do all of the above from within the confines of a 6 by 6 padded room in a bathhouse, all the better!

The problem is ingrained, snooz (and hi to you and JBT, BTW)...

So much of red-blooded 'merican male culture is centered around how not to be gay. It's what suppresses this kind of info. Might it not be unmanly to read up on this sort of thing, in itself? To allow that the study might actually ring true?

A bigger problem: instead of waving a rainbow flag everywhere I go, I'd rather have a folder full of flyers condensing this study that I could hand out to everybody I meet. So I could feel less fearful of being out (read: not suppressing MY feelings/thoughts around whom I assume to be straight and/or homophobic).

Something I'd be interested in reading about is the repeatability of the study, mentioned in the wiki.

And overall? Granted, Ms. Hooker's research did a lot to change a general population's perception of homosexuals from "WTF is wrong with them". But it only changed it to "well I guess there's nothing wrong with them; but it's still wrong and keep it out of my face".

Hi to you too!

Danny-boy, the problem isn't so much that homophobia is ingrained into little boys from the moment they're born, the problem is that the gays have to flaunt their choice to everyone!

I mean, the real crux of the problem is that the vagina is the only legitimate thing to stick a cock in. And even then, it should only be for procreative purposes. Otherwise you'll wind up wanting to shag little boys and dress in womens clothing. It's a known fact.

I think that white heterosexual men (like myself) have found it hard to adjust to all the developments in human rights etc in the last fourty years, that have questioned their sitting at the top of western society's pyramid.