Blackouts

In 1935, a multidisciplinary group formed in New York City to study whom they termed “sex variants.” This committee, which adopted the name Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, consisted of professionals in medicine, the social sciences, and the state—including the Commissioner of the Department of Corrections. They sought “to undertake, support and promote investigations and scientific research touching upon and embracing the clinical, psychological, and sociological aspects of various from normal sex behavior” (McCallum, David. The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences. Springer Nature, 2022). The Committee adopted new technologies like x-ray imaging and then modern ideologies like psychoanalysis to study a group of volunteers who identified as “homosexuals”—a contemporary term.

Many of these volunteers were contacted through underground queer networks known to Jan Gay—born Helen Reitman, estranged daughter of American gynecologist and anarchist Ben Reitman—a lesbian sexologist, author, and researcher. Gay’s work provided the initial basis for the Committee’s work: In the 1920s, she interviewed lesbian women in Europe and New York. No publisher would release her findings without the purview of a male medical professional, so she sought the help of Dr. Robert Dickinson and Dr. George W. Henry—the former of whom lacked judgment of queer people, which was unusual for the time. Despite early optimism about her partners, Gay found herself increasingly pushed out of her own study. By the time the final study, Sex Variants: Studies in Homosexual Patterns, was published in 1941, her name had been all but removed from the work. The study was published with Dr. Henry as the primary author, and concluded that gay and lesbian people were “socially maladjusted individuals who could not adapt to social laws and conventions” (Minton, Henry L. Departing from Deviance. University of Chicago Press, pp. 33–57). Despite this anti-queer conclusion, scholars argue that Gay’s influence remains a powerful force in having destigmatized queerness in the early 20th century, citing volunteers who reported an absence of shame about their queer desires.

Despite Gay’s influence, medicalization of queerness escalated in the 1930s, parallel to the rise of eugenics and global fascism. While previous anti-gay movements frequently took on a religious lens—framing queer attachment as sinful—medical anti-gay movements treated queer attachment as a “disease” that could be cured. The inclusion of “homosexuality” in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual reinforced this attitude, and the term would not be removed until 1973. This attitude led to the development of anti-gay practices such as commitment to psychiatric hospitals and conversion therapy, the latter of which was declared a form of torture in 2020 by the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims.