Departing from Deviance: A History of Homosexual Rights and Emancipatory Science in America (review)

In Departing from Deviance, Henry Minton provides a new look at the story of homosexuality's elevation from social and medical pathology to a normal sexual variant. The overall history is well known: through much of the twentieth century, gay men and lesbians were thought to be psychologically damaged and sexually perverted. Gradually, dissenting views emerged in the medical and social science communities, moral standards changed after World War II, and the gay rights movement appeared in the 1960s. The climax of the story is the American Psychiatric Association's declassification of homosexuality as an illness in 1973.

Elsewhere this story has been told from various perspectives. In social histories such as Jennifer Terry's An American Obsession, one sees society misunderstanding and mistreating homosexuals, with medical authorities in featured roles. In gay autobiographies such as Martin Duberman's Cures, one sees psychiatrists echoing the prejudices of the larger society. In histories of medicine one sees the institutional and intellectual struggles that preceded the American Psychiatric Association's 1973 decision.

What Henry Minton adds is the story of homosexual activists playing a crucial role in the social science research that depathologized homosexuality. These activists introduced sex researchers to the homosexual subculture of major U.S. cities and collected life histories of friends and acquaintances. They also recruited well-adjusted gays to clinical studies—previously based on prisoners and patients in psychoanalysis.

Minton begins with a history of the symbiotic relation between sex researchers and their subjects. Starting in the nineteenth century, we learn, a few researchers hoped to "use science to liberate gays from medical treatment, moral ostracism, and legal punishment" (p. 3). Individual gays, in turn, cooperated with these scientists in the hope that they would find self-understanding or a cure for their affliction.

In Minton's history, there are two key sponsors of research sympathetic to homosexuality: the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants (CSSV) and the Kinsey Institute. While others have written on these institutions, Minton is the first to provide biographies of the gay fieldworkers who recruited the subjects, performed much of the research, and sometimes struggled with others over its interpretation.

Three such activist-fieldworkers are central to Minton's history. The first is Jan Gay, who recruited the female subjects for Sexual Variants, a two-volume study of homosexuality published by the CSSV in 1941. The daughter of Emma Goldman and Ben Reitman, Gay was a freelance writer and naturalist. In the early 1930s, she learned interviewing at Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute in Berlin, interviewed 300 lesbians in Europe and New York City, and wrote a 70,000-word manuscript on female homosexuality.

To satisfy her publisher, Gay needed to add medical data on lesbians. To that end, she went to work for the CSSV in New York, whose director was the psychiatrist George Henry. In Minton's account, Gay is victimized by Henry, who borrows from her manuscript, uses her to recruit lesbians for Sexual Variants, but denies her co-authorship.

The second activist-researcher profiled by Minton is Alfred A. Gross, a closeted homosexual who sought treatment from George Henry and became the recruiter of males for Sexual Variants. In the 1940s and 1950s, he was Henry's assistant for studies of sex offenders in New York City and a ghostwriter of reports to various supporting organizations. Unlike Jan Gay, Gross was not completely silenced by the psychiatric establishment. In his collaboration with George Henry, Minton suggests, Gross was denied his own voice but could make Henry's writing more sympathetic toward gays.

The third researcher rescued from obscurity is Thomas Painter, a freelance researcher for Alfred Kinsey, who spent his life conducting participant– observer research on male prostitutes. Painter's...