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Journal of the History of Sexuality 12.3 (2003) 400-423



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Homosexual Signs and Heterosexual Silences:
Rorschach Research on Male Homosexuality from 1921 to 1969

Peter Hegarty
Yale University


IN FEBRUARY 2001 the validity of the Rorschach inkblot test became a matter of public concern—once again. During a phone-in debate on National Public Radio a research psychologist who had recently coauthored a lengthy critical review of Rorschach research stated that "this has been brewing for quite some time; the criticism of the Rorschach really began in the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties, and has really never quite died down." 1 The president of the International Rorschach Society replied that "the Rorschach is a wonderful old test; it's been around for eighty years or so now, used by generations of psychologists, all around the world, who have found it pretty useful." 2 While psychologists are clearly ready to marshal the history of the Rorschach to their own ends, historians of science and medicine have rarely given the test sustained attention. Several recent and otherwise excellent histories of American mental health sciences pay scant if any attention to the test. 3 But historians of sexuality [End Page 400] do need to become familiar with the Rorschach if they are to understand the emergence of "lesbian and gay psychology," a psychological approach that developed in the 1970s after the emergence of lesbian and gay liberation and the depathologizing of homosexuality. 4 The terms lesbian and gay refer not to the identities of practitioners but to the psychological study of lesbian and gay (and, more recently, bisexual and transgender) persons in the context of a broader heterosexist and gender-restrictive society. 5 Before the 1970s the Rorschach was employed repeatedly as a means of detecting gay men (and, to a lesser extent, lesbians). Yet as early as the 1950s one psychologist, Evelyn Hooker, began to critique this use of the test. The experiment that grounded Hooker's critique is often understood as the origin of lesbian and gay psychology, and Hooker's Rorschach work is most often remembered for using the scientific method to gay-affirmative ends. 6

Any history of the emergence of lesbian and gay psychology makes assumptions about the relationship between psychological science and sexual politics. Contemporary lesbian and gay psychologists often use empiricist ideas to describe their work as above and beyond political matters. For example, John Gonsierek claims that "we [lesbian and gay psychologists] successfully challenged the illness model of homosexuality and defeated it, primarily by critical thinking and arguments based on empirical information." However, he finds lesbian and gay studies to be a "significant challenge from the politically correct left," where "dogma is substituted for critical thinking." According to Gonsierek, lesbian and [End Page 401] gay studies are "inward looking," are "self-absorbed," and have become "intellectually rigid and irrelevant both to the lives of gay and lesbian citizens and to honest intellectual inquiry." 7

In direct opposition to Gonsierek's empiricist claims, psychologist Celia Kitzinger describes the emergence of lesbian and gay psychology as an extension of patriarchal power. Through rhetorical analysis of research and therapeutic literature, Kitzinger exposes how lesbian and gay psychologists construct lesbians as "well-adjusted" persons only when lesbians understand their sexuality in privatized psychological terms. Women who politicize their lesbianism are described by psychologists as "immature" individuals who have "internalized homophobia." 8 Kitzinger argues that, for some, lesbian (and gay) psychology is little better than the illness models that it superceded. Thus for Gonsierek, empiricism allows lesbian and gay psychology to transcend politics, but for Kitzinger, psychological science is little more than politics by other means.

I want to argue for a more contextual approach to the relationship between knowledge and power than either of these positions affords. Philosopher-historian Michel Foucault and anthropologist Bruno Latour each presume that relationships between power and scientific knowledge vary across (and partially shape) social contexts. 9 Foucault and Latour have each constructed new objects of inquiry that collapse micro- and macrolevel analyses...

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