An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (review)

Jennifer Terry. An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xiv + 537 pp. Ill. $20.00; £14.00 (paperbound).

This overview of modern perspectives on homosexuality underscores the cultural significance of science and medicine even as it chastises physicians and other experts for building the prison of pathology inhabited by gay men and lesbians during most of the twentieth century. Presenting herself as a Foucauldian genealogist and "historian of effects" (p. 21), Jennifer Terry bluntly concludes that the "effects" of sexual science and medicine were more harmful than helpful. Pioneering researchers and clinicians whose curiosity about homosexuality helped to publicize its existence, and eventually to mobilize a freedom movement that would shatter the pathological paradigm, were responsible for "violence committed against sexual dissenters via discourses that officially proclaim them inferior, defective, and maladjusted" (p. 26). The benevolent intentions of professionals whose enlightened creed inspired them to help suffering individuals hardly matter here. What counts is the centrality of sex research in producing the most popular and confining truth about modern homosexuals: that the very desires and behaviors that exemplified their identities also made them sick and abnormal.

The book is organized in a straightforward, chronological fashion. Most chapters detail the methods and findings of research projects aiming to probe the causes of homosexuality and sex inversion in American men and women, while a few chapters that gravitate toward social and political history (the New York gay world in the 1930s, sexual McCarthyism in the 1950s, and the antigay backlash of the New Right during the 1970s and 1980s) seem somewhat out of place. Readers interested in sexology and the human sciences will find plenty of excellent description and analysis here. Some of Terry's major topics include the earliest American medical case histories of homosexuals; Progressive Era studies by sociologist Katharine Bement Davis and gynecologist Robert Latou Dickinson; early sex surveys by cultural anthropologists, endocrinologists, and psychologists, including Margaret Mead and Lewis Terman and Catherine Miles; the Depression-era study by the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, headed by psychiatrist George Henry; Alfred Kinsey's famous studies of the 1940s and 1950s; and psychoanalytical perspectives after Kinsey.

Who can doubt that the science of homosexuality made a tremendous difference? Few enterprises more successfully defined what abnormality meant, diagnosed proliferating deviations, and offered therapeutic means of becoming normal. Like many feminist scholars today, Terry wishes to tell a story of agency and consciousness, however meager, rather than powerlessness and victimization. Homosexuals surely did find confirmation of their selfhood and community in these weighty tomes. They hoped--as many continue to do today--that science might spell salvation. The "variant subjectivity" (p. 15) that Terry discerns by reading between the lines of research reports hardly made homosexual subjects into equal partners, or gave them a full voice in the sexual science that interpreted their experiences and limited their life chances. We can expect to learn more about this eventful exchange between science and its subjects in Henry Minton's Through Science to Justice: Homosexual Rights and Emancipatory Science in America, 1935-1973 (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

Notwithstanding the profound impact on gay people themselves, Terry suggests that the campaign to scrutinize homosexuality was at once a campaign to scrutinize heterosexuality. This science was as anxious as it was ambitious. If homosexuals came unmoored from the natural order of things so easily, could heterosexuals be far behind? Interestingly, Terry finds the idea of inversion a persistent thread in the American science and medicine of homosexuality. European theorists like Karl Ulrichs and Havelock Ellis were the first to hypothesize that homosexuality was a product of reversed gender identity--women manifesting desires to be men, and vice versa. Terry's analysis suggests that sex research throughout the century was held captive by notions of gender duality, even in cases where numerous variations and...