For Pride Month, Team Experience is looking at LGBTQ+ related Oscar nominations...
dr evelyn hooker
by Eurocheese
When this series was announced, my first goal was to find a film that was completely new to me on a subject outside of my cinematic wheelhouse. Watching this film served as a reminder of how little I know about LGBTQ+ history. While I’d heard the name Evelyn Hooker before, I’m ashamed to admit I couldn’t have told you what role she played in history, much less the impact she had on the state of gay rights today. If the same is true for you, dear reader, I highly recommend carving 107 minutes out of your day to learn a bit about her impact in the Oscar nominated documentary Changing Our Minds: The Story of Evelyn Hooker (1992). I want to offer a trigger warning though as this film delves into difficult topics and images.
The sliding doors nature of Hooker coming to study homosexuality is mind-boggling if you stop to picture a world where her findings never existed...
Her interest in psychology, a "budding science" if we're being generous, led her to ask questions that just weren't being asked. Her supervisor early on encouraged her to write up her own case histories, something that was very uncommon for women at that time. After getting her Master’s in Colorado, she ended up at Johns Hopkins for her PhD because Yale didn’t allow women to study there in the 1920s (and wouldn’t for several more decades). Time spent in Berlin hearing crowds react to Hitler helps clarify why she was so resistant to accept widely held beliefs during her time.
In Hooker's era anyone who mentioned they were gay publicly was essentially tortured. The documentary, narrated by Sir Patrick Stewart and directed by Richard Schmiechin (who had earlier produced the Oscar winning doc The Times of Harvey Milk) includes startling images that I was not prepared to see. In the middle of Pride month, while Stonewall is a frequent topic of conversation, it’s easy to forget that less than a century ago, the outlook for our community was at best tied to extreme secrecy, and for those with less privilege, extremely grim.
In the 1940s, back in America, Hooker had a student come to her class that would change her life: Sam From. Sam stood out as her smartest student and they became friends. Hooker's husband immediately clocked From as “queer” after meeting him. Hooker had had no idea. At this point, she had no interest in or connection to the gay community. That would change, though – Sam introduced her to what she called a very lively group of friends.
After some time, Sam pushed the idea that Evelyn should study gay men. She was resistant, but her colleagues agreed. At the time, scientific research had only been done on traumatized men -- there was no objective research. Comparing 30 gay men and 30 straight men, all of them unknown to Hooker, allowed her to find that using the MAPS and Rorschach tests that were common at the time, there was no difference in results. In fact, when other researchers looked at her results and tried to determine who was or wasn’t gay, they couldn’t do better than chance (50%). In a world that widely believed gay men had something wrong with them, this was a radical result.
a young gay man being interviewed after a lobotomy
Of course, the reason these findings exist is because someone who had the audacity to ask smart questions had a conversation with someone who wasn’t like her. These findings ultimately changed the way psychologists in America saw the gay community (after Kinsey’s findings weirdly set off additional gay panic in the 1940s, according to the documentary), and directly impacted the United Kingdom’s decision to decriminalize homosexuality. The US eventually followed suit. If Evelyn Hooker didn’t have Sam From as a student, my life might be very different. It’s crazy to think how something that seemed like such a small act had such a lasting impact.
For the rest of her life after presenting her findings, Hooker was flooded with thankful responses from members of the LGBTQ community who needed to hear that there was nothing wrong with them. The fight for equality feels so intense these days, but it’s incredible how far we’ve come. I don’t expect equality to be achieved in my lifetime, but stories like these are encouraging reminders that one act in our corner of the world can have an impact broader than we can imagine. Keep fighting. Happy Pride.
Changing Our Minds: The Story of Dr. Evelyn Hooker (1992) is available to stream on Kanopy and Ovid and rentable on Amazon. It lost the Oscar in its year to The Panama Deception which was about the US's 1989 invasion of Panama.