The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia (review)

Like many texts on this subject, Jay Hatheway's book maintains the central premise that nineteenth-century medical attention to homosexuality laid the groundwork for modern American homophobia. Hatheway's book is heavily influenced by historians such as Jennifer Terry, Bert Hansen, and Jonathan Katz. Indeed, to place the book within the history of sexology, one might say that it is a mediocre expansion of Hansen's work (basically the same material, just longer) but is still an improvement on Terry's long-winded An American Obsession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Because Hatheway's text relies heavily on published works, much of what one reads here is already well known.

Hatheway acknowledges in the early pages that it is too simplistic to merely identify nineteenth-century psychiatrists as homophobic. But it is worth asking whether the energy devoted to this (largely ahistorical) problem might have been better spent exploring more pressing problems that are neglected in the work of the historians whom Hatheway cites. For example, this book provides little plausible argument concerning the development of sexology—apart from an initial rudimentary discussion of the Enlightenment and the growth of American ideology—that does not link up with the rest of the argument. How these factors inform our understanding of the emergence of sexology is obscure; many salient issues (the relationship with the law, the relationship of sexology to other forms of sexual medicine, etc.) are covered in a cursory fashion. The bulk of the text consists in a retelling of details from medical works.

The German chapter is noticeably weaker than the rest. It highlights Karl Westphal without citing him and relies almost solely on the 1890 edition (translated in 1892 by Charles Gilbert Chaddock) of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis without properly understanding Krafft-Ebing's place in the emerging field of sexology. Using the 1890 edition of Psychopathia Sexualis is a particular problem, as a large part of Krafft-Ebing's argument in that edition was derived from the same American authors whom Hatheway says were influenced by it. (Here I am thinking of the material on the sexual impulse and sadism and masochism.) Most of the early American authors got their Krafft-Ebing from his 1877 article, "Ueber gewisse Anomalies des Geschlectstriebs" (Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, 1877, 7, 291-312). This central text is missing from Hatheway's account of the development of Continental sexology. Also missing is a proper attention to the hypnotic theories of Alfred Binet or Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, although they were central to establishing a model of sexual impulse (and gave an explanation for acquired models of homosexuality). Likewise, major German contributors, such as well-known Berlin physician Albert Moll, find no mention. Such figures are essential for correctly understanding the shape of American psychiatric contributions to theories of sexual pathology.

Clearly, this material cannot all be covered under the rubric of homophobia; rather, we must ask what American physicians were doing when they wrote about homosexuality in the psychiatric press. To do that would require the kind of attention to psychiatric practice that sociologists of scientific knowledge apply. Hatheway's account offers no sense of the main problem for sexologists: understanding the sexual impulse and its variations (including homosexuality).

There are other troubles as well. The treatment of Charles Hughes is confused. He is set up both as someone who is antibiological with regard to James Kiernan's ideas and as a social Darwinist. These arguments cannot both be right. Hughes was the editor of the Alienist and Neurologist, who created a forum for new, largely biological psychiatric theories to be imported to and developed in America. In Hatheway's text there is no sense of his achievements. Likewise, although the treatment of Frank Lydston is quite thorough (and shows that more work could be done on him by historians of medicine), the details of what makes him either a social Darwinist or a Lombrosian need to be sorted out. Lydston cannot...