Speaking of Psychology - The history of LGBTQ psychology from Stonewall to now, with Peter Hegarty, PhD

Episode Date: June 23, 2021

Over the past decades, the focus of LGBTQ activism has shifted and evolved, from the AIDS crisis in the 1980s to the fight for marriage equality to the focus on transgender rights today. Peter Hegarty, PhD, author of the book “A Recent History of Lesbian and Gay Psychology: From Homophobia to LGBT,” discusses how psychological research has reflected and responded to these changes, how it has helped move the needle in the fight for LGBTQ rights in the U.S. court system, and his own research on “auditory gaydar” and continuing discrimination against LGBTQ people. Listener Survey - https://www.apa.org/podcastsurvey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

June is LGBTQ Pride Month, marked by marches and commemorations to celebrate LGBTQ culture and advocate for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the U.S. and around the world. This year, President Biden marked the occasion with an official proclamation that touted progress on issues such as marriage and workplace equality. But it also called out areas where LGBT rights are being threatened, including in dozens of states where legislators have introduced bills this year targeting transgender youth. The focus of LGBTQ activism has evolved over the years with the issues and political pressures of the day, from the HIV-AIDS crisis in the 1980s to the militaries Don't Ask Don't Tell Rule in the 1990s, to the fight for marriage equality in the early 2000s, and the focus on transgender rights today.

How has psychological research reflected and responded to these changes? How has it contributed to the public discussion of prejudice and discrimination against sexual minorities? When has it helped and when has it hindered the drive toward equality for LGBTQ people, especially in the United States? What role has it played in moving the needle in the fight for LGBTQ rights, especially in our courts? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. Peter Haggerty, a professor of psychology at the Open. University in the United Kingdom, where he studies the history of sexuality and gender and psychology.

His 2018 book, A Recent History of Lesbian and Gay Psychology, from Homophobia to LGBT, traces the psychological research on these issues since the 1970s. He was also guest editor of a special issue of APA's journal American Psychologist, entitled 50 Years Since Stonewall, The Science and Politics of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity. In addition to his work in the history of psychology, He conducts experimental research in areas including auditory Gaydar and how beliefs about the biological basis of sexual orientation influence prejudice and discrimination.

Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Hegarty. Thank you, Kim. It's an honor to be here. So you're a historian of psychology as well as a psychologist, so let's start with some history. You begin your book in the 1970s just before the Stonewall uprising in New York, which is considered to be the beginning of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. Was it also a turning point in how the field of psychology regarded sexual minorities? It was, and there was a strategic decision on my part to start in that time period.

And that was because very often when I read histories about the history of sexuality and psychology, and the most of which we had access, they very often ended in that period. So very often you see a broad brush stroke starting with Freud, proceeding through Kinsey studies, maybe mentioning Evelyn Hooker and her work in the 1950s, and it often ends up in something like the Stonewall uprising, and then the 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association to begin to depathologize homosexuality. And that framework of thinking, where the past ends and the present begins somewhere around the mid-1970s, is not something that's unique to this area of psychology.

Very often, that's something that we kind of encounter as history audience of psychology. So I think there is a number of us who were sort of thinking, well, we clearly don't live in the 1970s anymore. And when we teach the history of psychology to our students, like the 1970s just is a very, very far away period. So things need to be massively updated. So one of the reasons why I chose that timeframe was to try to make a contribution to a much larger movement in the history of psychology to think about what has the reason. history of psychology being what's been happening in more recent decades and sort of changed the narrative focus of how we do things. Was that a period in which things changed in psychology?

Absolutely. And that was a period, a really interesting period of incredible change where issues about social justice, issues about inequality came to the fore much more than they had done. Exploded in many ways because psychology wasn't able to keep a culture that was separate from the many social movements that were characterising the American political scene at this point in time, not least, of course, the civil rights movements and the protests against the Vietnam War. And looking back at that period, you can see that it is a time where there is, it's also the period where people start to talk about generation gaps.

That's a term that's used for the first time, if I understand it correctly, in the 1960s, where there seems to be a very different consciousness between younger and older people and a difference about what psychology should do, what it should be doing, what its accountability is around issues around chronic injustice, and whether it is possible to kind of remain on the fence about those kinds of things. So one thing that happens in that context, which is sort of less well known, and I certainly didn't know about it for a long time, is that in addition to having activist protests at the meetings of the American Psychiatric Association in the early 1970s, there was one at the American Psychological Association in 1973 on a very similar model.

And shortly after that, what happens is there's a committee for lesbian and gay concerns, I believe it's called, and it becomes part of the Board for Social and Ethical Responsibility in Psychology, which is something that only existed for, a few years and was set up by Kenneth Clark and some other people because of these questions about what is psychology doing about gender injustice and racial injustice. So that's a little bit where the story starts to be sure. And I'm kind of curious in there about, we often tell the story about psychiatry, which of course is so important because psychiatry held this power over the diagnosis, the diagnosis statistical manual. But it is funny that psychologists itself included, you know, so often told that story about psychiatry.

I never told the story about psychology itself. That's a good point, and I did want to talk about that a little bit. Some of our listeners might not really be aware of how psychiatry was compelled to remove homosexuality from the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, which is pretty much the arbiter of what constitutes a mental illness or a mental disorder among all behavioral health practitioners. Can you talk a little bit more about how that happened with psychiatry, which, yes, was very distinctive, but then psychology, which followed a couple of years later? Yeah, absolutely. So it's a good question to ask about that, that DSM go a little bit further back in its history, maybe.

You know, the first codes are from the early 1950s, and they were written from a blueprint for the codes for including or excluding soldiers in the American Armed Forces in World War II. And it was in that context where the armed forces began to inquire. about men's homosexuality and use that as ground for excluding them from the military. Right, because they were thought to be security risks as a result. Well, I think in World War II, they were also thought to be a risk more in terms of mental health. Would they be fit for combat or would they end up being sort of a drain on the Army's resources? I think that was also a sort of concern. So it was kind of, that's why it sort of within psychiatry.

But you're right, that rationale did emerge certainly later on to be sure to justify that policy. So the DSM was also initially a very psychoanalytic document, but that was coming under question in the 1970s. And the psychoanalytic basis for calling a lot of things a mental disorder was quite insecure. And maybe homosexuality was the very best example of that. And activists such as Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameney began to target. the APA and the DSM strategically towards the very end of the 1960s and to articulate it as a problem. They're writing is very interesting and are ahead of some of the things that are happening in psychology at the time. So that started off with a process of direct action and protesting and

disrupting meetings and using those kinds of tactics which were common to various rights movements at the time. And then there were also some politics where there were some sympathetic psychiatrists. There was probably a little bit of a silent minority of psychiatrists who were very unhappy about this diagnosis, actually. And some surveys at the time actually suggest that that's the case. And so there was some politics behind the scene that then led some of those actors to actually speak at an APA conference. And that initiated a vote of members as to whether homosexuality should remain a mental illness or not. And I think that vote was not quite a two-thirds, one-third majority.

It was a bit closer than that. And then the next version of the DSM was published in about 1980. And even still, like, it was far from complete. If we just think about sexual orientation for a moment, because what was sort of retained there was this idea of what became known as ego-distonic homosexuality. So if you were gay and you wanted a psychiatrist to try and cure you, what you might now call conversion therapy or sexual orientation change efforts, that was still legitimate in psychiatry,

and that didn't go away until the 90s. Now, you mentioned that the DSM is kind of the arbiter of mental health, and that's absolutely right. It's extremely powerful, but there's always sort of been two systems in modern psychiatry, I mean, from World War II on. The other one is the ICD, the international classification of diseases,

which covers physical health and mental health. And it didn't remove homosexuality until the very early 90s, and that's the event that is celebrated by, Ida Hobbes Day in May. So I'm just curious, I mean, for so many years, psychology and psychiatry viewed homosexuality as a mental illness. Was there really any actual scientific evidence for such thinking? That's a really good question. I mean, one counted the scientific evidence then, and what counted the scientific evidence now is not the same thing.

So I think what happened to be charitable to that is that they were self-fulfilling prophecies. people who were gay or lesbian, people who are queer, people who were troubled by their sense of self might reach out to a mental health professional for help. They might present as wanting this aspect of themselves to go away because that was how they could imagine living a better life. And so that definitely happened to be sure. But I think evidence that people brought to bear to challenge that consensus is really quite interesting at that period. You know, two people that do often stand out in that in the US context are Alfred Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker. One of the things Kinsey was was this self-fulfilling prophecy. And he thought, well, there are these people for whom

homosexuality is part of their life. And, you know, Kinsey was bisexual-oriented himself. And he thought, if I go outside of these cities and I go outside of these little tiny little secret gay enclaves, then I'm going to find these people who are very different from each other. And it's going to challenge this stereotype about what they're going to. the signs of homosexuality are, which were things like gender inversion or artistic interests for men or things like that. And so that's very much what the Kinsey studies are all about and why Kinsey samples so widely and why he kind of gets in his car and travels to every state. And, you know, studies people who have no understanding of homosexual culture, but might be practicing homosexuality

in their sex lives. And indeed, that's what he finds. So that was sort of Kinsey. And he really didn't like Freud or any of these kinds of ideas that there was a distinctions. to homosexual personality. And Evelyn Hooker was an experimental psychologist who went at this in a very different kind of way. I think in the post-war period between World War II and the Stonewall uprising for the sake of some bookends, there was a lot of discontent in psychology about the psychiatric basis of mental health care because it was considered to be quite unformed. And psychologists developed a lot of scientific ways of thinking, many of which had the effect of sort of reining that in, one of which, of course, was the language of talking about the kind

of validity and reliability of tests that got much more developed in that period, and often things like the Rorschark test, where the target of that. And the Rorschach test was the target of a controlled experiment that Hooker did as well, where she took gay and straight men, gave them all Rorschart test and found that there was no difference. Now, I kind of don't think that's actually the interesting thing about what she did at all. I really think that's the most dull and boring thing. I think what she did that was absolutely amazing was she was friends with a guy called Bruno Klopfer, who at the time was sort of the Rorschach guru or one of the Rorschach gurus in the US. And they both ended up teaching in UCLA around the same time. And she gave the test results to Klopfer to analyze.

And he read them and he said, oh my God, you know, like, if I hadn't known that this guy was gay and this guy was straight, there's nothing in the Roarsartre profile that I could have done to do that. And I think what was so smart about that was, first of all, realizing that by, I think Bruno Clouffer is the real study participant

in that study. There was three experts, but I think Clouffer was probably the most important because of his status. And I think what Hooker did is she took that sort of scientific lens that had always been sort of looking at gay people and assuming there was a difference between gay and straight people

and using that difference, whether it was real or purported, to kind of build a deficit model and build a diagnosis and build a mental health story. And what she did, she kind of looked at gay as and turned it around. She turned it upwards on the form of expert reasoning that would interpret these raw sharks. And when it did, the whole system kind of crushed. So I always look at that and I think,

I always think what was really brilliant about Hooker was not that she went out and found no difference between two groups. I think that's great. But I think it's the fact that the way she enjoyed Bruno Cloughford and that research is quite brilliant. And then lastly, she made a film about her life. I think actually the APA might have made it before she died and she died in the 1990s. And her reflections in that film about the events later on in the 1970s are really very interesting because she kind of When I saw all these protests happening at the American Psychiatric Association, she's like, I was initially quite worried, you know. I thought this was bad, you know, I thought this is going to blow the respectability of these lesbian and gay movements. But then she said, no, then I realized, like, this is what's going to create the change. So I think it's just kind of fascinating to sort of think about this because I think this is what often happens in history. One might be kind of ahead of the times at one point in time, but then at another point of time, other people are ahead of the times, you know?

And I think there's something lovely in her kind of mature reflection on that of when she was ahead of the times and maybe when she could stand back and say, oh, I thought that was wrong. But actually, no, no, no, those people had the right idea about how to put all those things together at that point. They created the change. I couldn't have done that. So what role has sexism played in the way that psychologists and other mental health professionals viewed LGBT people over time? And what role is it playing even today? probably quite a large one. I'm not sure it's always a good idea in general

to think about sexism and heterosexism and racism as necessarily being completely separate kinds of things as they're often very, very bound up with each other. I mean, I think what mental health has to do always is sort of specify in a really vague way what it means to be a mentally healthy person. And that's an incredibly fuzzy question. I don't even know the answer to that question.

about myself on some days, I have to say, and I mean, I'm not saying that facetiously. I honestly, seriously don't know that sometimes. But I think it's very difficult to do mental health in a humanistic way to sort of enable somebody to be their full selves and then to sort of codify that and to write out what those procedures should be or what those categories should be, without at the same time then drawing a norm about what would must be to be a mentally health person. So I'm going to turn this kind of away from gender and towards race a little bit. But just there is a paper in that American psychologist special issue, which you mentioned so nicely. And it's an archival history of something called the Eramint Center, which was set up in Philadelphia by gay and lesbian people in the early 1970s.

And they wanted to do affirmative counseling. And so they grasped this kind of idea from Carl Rogers that, you know, people needed to be listened to without judgment, with sympathy. And they grounded this in their own lived experiences, you know, and thought this was a better basis for doing this kind of humanistic intervention than the models that had been given by psychology. And I think as a community-based project, you know, addressing heterosexualism, addressing real mental health needs,

that was a very good starting point in 1970, rejecting those things and going with that made a lot of sense. But as the story develops, what you can see is there was also limits to that personal experience and they became very apparent in the story as the centre began to engage with people who were not white, as it began to engage with a younger generation of people, as it began to engage with transgender people, it began to engage with people who were coming into the USA for overseas. And it does tell us a little bit of a story about why it's so challenging

to specify what mental health is without setting a norm, you know? And I think that that's always a risk in doing it. I don't have any mental health training, I should say. Nobody should ever entrust anybody's mental health to me. That's a bad idea. It's happened in the past. It hasn't ended well. Well, let's switch gears for a minute.

moves to talking about the AIDS epidemic beginning in the 1980s, how did that change the questions that researchers were asking? Yeah, I think it's a really timely question to ask now in the middle of COVID as well. Sure. I think we'll, we might think about that relationship a bit later on as well. So, yeah, I looked for what psychologists were writing and what, in regard to HIV-AIDS. and when. And I think there's a real sea change in the middle of the 1980s on this. So when the President's Commission report comes out, the National Academy of Science puts out a report. And in the early part of the 1980s, what you can see happening in science is there's very much an approach that HIV-AIDS is going to be addressed first and foremost by a biological model. By a biological model,

mean, you know, like testing good drugs and ultimately a vaccine, right? There's sort of an idea of a vaccine. And what's not getting a lot of attention is any kind of community-based response, any kind of behavioral response, but that's all sort of being developed in the communities, most hard hit by HIV, grassroots, bottom up, particularly, you know, an awful lot happens in the New York area, an awful lot happens in California and other places, right? Yeah, gay men's health crisis,

act up people like that who, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think those groups have different relationships with their local governments that are quite different in different American places. I think it's a little bit happier in parts of California

that it is in New York, if I've got the history right. But there's very little. Now, there's a very, there's a short kind of special section of American psychologists about 1984, and there you can see that some people

who had been leading the kind of gay affirmative initiative in the 1970s, particularly Stephen Moran, who's now a counselling psychologist, writing there and saying, this should be an issue. You know, APA should take note of this. There's mental health implications of this epidemic, which is not something that people, has a lot of attention in the national discourse about HIV AIDS, to the extent that there is a national discourse about HIV AIDS,

because, of course, there isn't very much of one. But I think after these reports come out in the 80s, what you start to see then is psychologists can see, ah, there's research questions here. Ah, there's fundable research questions here. And there's a very large special issue of American psychologists about 1988, which I went through it in quite a bit of death and talked about quite a bit of death.

And there you can see psychologists of all kinds of stripes, social psychologists, community psychologists, biological psychologists kind of saying, this is what our field could do to make a contribution to, HIV AIDS. In the book, I venture this idea. I am interested to see what listeners think about it, but I think once that happened, and once HIV AIDS became a way for psychologists and for psychology in the United States to have a more productive relationship with things like the NIMH funding streams and so on, I think it took some ideas that gay and lesbian people were

just people that were kind of a little bit marginal. You know, they were quite marginal in the 1970s, but I think they became mainstreamed over that horrific period of HIV AIDS. They were clearly concerted actors doing incredible work, Division 44, you know, which was initially lesbian and gay, but of course it's become much broader since, also took form in that context. But I think if I think beyond those kind of small. groups, right, of people who are sort of pushing that, I think HIV AIDS changed a lot of other

psychologists minds who had no particular relationship to a specific LGBT group or project or initiative and got those people thinking in a less heterosexual way. But you do talk about fundable research and what I remember from those days is that there wasn't a lot of funding because the government did not want to fund studies of gay people and you couldn't ask questions about people's sexual orientation, and it just made it really, really challenging to do the science that was needed. Yeah, it does. And I think I've recently written more based on content analyses of research papers.

You know, people every so often will do this, you know, look back and say, you know, what have we ever asked about lesbians in 30 years, right? People write those papers, right? And if you look at the stuff on health in the mid-90s and on LGBT population, it's like most, I mean, the vast majority of the health research has happened because of HIV-AIDS funding. And to get back to your original question about sexism, that's one of the reasons why, even though a lot of that work was very much in conversation with feminism and learning a lot from it, actually the research does become very undercentric again. You know, it becomes very much about men because it's very much dominated by HIV-AIDS funding. And I think after that time, once that sort of starts to go away, you know, after things like protease inhibitors become accessible in the mid-1990s and HIV-AIDS becomes a less threatened, potentially a less threatening illness if you can access those medications.

I think you actually see a little bit of a decline in research on LGBT populations. And I think there's a peak of it kind of in the 90s. and I think it's been in somewhat of a decline sense. Well, I want to talk about another under-researched area, which is the B in the LGBTQ, a part of the movement, that often feels overlooked and dismissed. Has psychology done any significant research into bisexuality? And if so, what are the findings?

I think psychology has, and I think, oh, I wish I could remember who had done this, because I'm now going to be vulnerable to exactly the thing that that person mentioned. I remember reading this article about bisexuality. was when somebody said, bisexuality is like Groundhog Day, you know? It's like, it always kind of gets forgetting and reset and reset and reset and reset and I remember I was feeling very old recently

because I was talking to some PhD researchers here in Europe and when I say in Europe, I do mean kind of everywhere because one of those Zoom meetings, you know, we're in three different timesodes. And I was waxing nostalgic about the experience of being in queer bookstores in the States in the 1990s.

A lost experience, right? Kim, the tear coming to your eye as well here. And I remember seeing Marjorie Garber, who wrote this book, vice versa, in the early 1990s, which was all about bisexuality, like, you know, just kind of tossed through that book

in a bookstore in San Francisco, and it was just so vibrant and exciting. And, you know, it seems to me, Then like a decade later, when I came to the UK, I ended up being the chair of the lesbian and gay section of the VPS. It was at the time now. It's called the Psychology of Sexualities. And we did a lot of work kind of trying to push the British Psychological Society to put words like bisexual gender in the name of that section.

And they were very resistant to her saying like, like, there's no British research on bisexuality. We're like, well, nobody can talk to us because like the name. is wrong. So, you know, those kinds of things, I think, happen. And then kind of do writing the Kinsey book years later, just, I thought, like, people haven't really come to terms of Kinsey as a bisexual figure, I think, you know? And Kinsey doesn't talk about sexual identity very much. He deliberately doesn't talk about sexual identity. He talks about sexual behavior. And there's reasons that that are kind of deep in how his thinking is. But I think that whole idea of the Kinsey scale, which is kind of what people have kind of grabbed from that in a funny sort of way,

was a gloss on something that he was saying, which is, you know, like lots and lots and lots of people have sexual histories that involve, you know, people of two genders. And I think that's something that people find again and again and again and again and again. And it's like, oh, look, here's a big surprise. Do you know what I mean? You know, like, you know, serve gay men, lots of them had sex at women, surveys, service of women, surveys, like people change the sexual orientation label.

So I think there is something, groundhog day about that, really. I think there is something about that. I'm not sure what a good and meaningful scientific finding about bisexuality might be. I mean, there are researchers who, you know, you can Google it, who got a lot of play early in the 21st century who's saying, look, look, look, bisexual men don't exist. They really don't. And then those same researchers got a lot of plays.

say, like, guess what, bisexual men really do exist? You know, so I think the dominant narrative about bisexuality is to say, here's the dominant narrative about bisexuality and we're changing it. And what relationship that has to people's lived experience? Like, it probably does not a lot more than, you know, is asking is homosexuality nature or nurture or something like that, you know? Well, let's talk about more recent history. One of the most striking rights gains in the last decade has been the quest for marriage equality for same-sex couples.

Psychologists at APA were knee-deep in that fight, particularly through our amicus curiae program, in which APAs filed briefs on psychological research and seminal court cases on marriage equality. How important has psychological research been to these legal victories? I think in the U.S. context, it's very important. And the US context is also quite distinct. I have learned kind of working elsewhere. I think this is something I would want US listeners to know, particularly US psychologists, is you simply cannot do this kind of thing

with amicus briefs and influence courts in other countries in the same kind of way. This is something culturally particularly that you do. It's incredibly important. It is a vulnerable history. In psychology, of course, it has a long history going back to Brown versus Board of Education, you know, gender discrimination cases more recently as well.

But certainly the APA starts, to lean into the amicus brief strategy a little bit more explicitly in the 1980s. And all of the amicus briefs that the APA has ever submitted are all online on the APA website. You can download them all and read them. I read lots of them writing the book. And what's striking, if you just look at it, is like the APA has gone to court to litigate, not to litigate, but to advise the court on the litigation of lesbian and gay rights more often than kind of anything else by a lot.

And, you know, a lot of that difference is to do with the marriage stuff in the 21st century. But that trajectory was already set in train by earlier stuff about sodomy laws, equal employment laws, parents' rights to custody of their children, and other things where APA had gone to court about lesbian and gay rights. So I think that is important. And I think it sets, one of my colleagues here said recently, it sort of sets a norm for a certain kind of research. that a prejudice researcher might desire, that, you know, it would be great if their research was used in something like that. The other thing I would kind of say is,

you know, a lot of what people have done in that context is to do an Evelyn Hooker type project to say, look, actually, you know, relationships are not that different between same-sex and mixed-sex couples. And I think that's probably right. On the left wing, lots of people have fantasies that, you know, LGBT people will, you know,

dismantle lots of oppressive structures simply by being. And on the right wing, lots of people have fantasies that LGBT people will like dismantle of status quo structures simply by being. And we are neither the angels or monsters of these imaginations. We are ordinary people who, you know, eat breakfast and walk dogs and drive cars and, you know, worry about carbon footprints and things like that.

And so I think a lot of psychological research just does that. It kind of says, actually, things are not so different. So it was very, very obvious, I think, to a lot of people who were in any way involved in LGBT communities, that people had always been living in very long-term relationships where they were completely, you know, mutually interconnected in loving, lifelong ways with people of the same gender, forever, forever. And I think when the state woke up and said, what are we going to call these things to recognize? It would be hard to think of a better model for that than marriage.

So that was all very important. I think there is also always questions about whether that push around marriage, and it was quite strong. I remember being at the APA in 2010, and I just remember, like, you could have gone to a talk about equal marriage pretty much any hour of the day of the five days of that conference. I was like, okay. I think I want to go hang out with the history.

I feel like I've been married at a little bit here. And I think, you know, people had good claims that there were other things that were happening that were of much, much more pressing concern to important LGBT communities that were being silenced by the marriage thing. So, yes, I thought to research very, very important. But I think also the question of how central marriage became in that platform of LGBT rights in general, and particularly within APA, is something. thing that I think it's important to think about what else was sort of going on in that context

as well and what might have got the same attention. So if, as you were saying, the situation in the U.S. is distinct because of our Supreme Court, the way that we're structured and the court cases have been really important, but not so much in other countries, is the research still useful in other countries that are grappling with the same question around marriage equality? Some of us. But I think ultimately what you would want is you would want these rights to be given not on the basis of convincing people by psychological research.

Do you know? I think that only takes you so far. What's the other argument? That is the right thing to do? That it's just... That is the right thing to do. That's the right thing to do. So, I mean, two people who are really important in this history are a lesbian couple here in Britain

called Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kittinger, who did... incredibly important work, set up the journal Feminism and Psychology, set up the lesbian and gay section of the British Psychological Society, really important, qualitative research on women's health and lesbian identity and a thousand other things. And they, I mean, you can read their story for yourself. If you look at the Psychology's Feminist Voices website, their oral history is there and they talk about this. But they took a case to the the Supreme Court here in the UK with two other couples. They had a Canadian marriage at the time

when they wanted to have recognized in the UK. Sue had been living in Canada for a while. And they lost their case and had to pay their courts. You know, they had to pay the expenses of that, which well entered the thousands. And, you know, that was like, I think, maybe about 2006 or so. And the judgment given at that point

in time was, you know, just simply, it's tradition that marriage is a man and a woman. And now, look, you know, where things are. So, you know, so I think there are, you'd want to win that argument on the ground. I mean, the other place that's really interesting is Ireland here. I could linger on this story for a while. I wasn't in Ireland the day of this vote. And because I live overseas, I don't have a vote in Ireland for good reasons. But, you know, the day that this marriage referendum,

went down. It was kind of like, I got all of these sort of, like, emails and messages from people I hadn't heard from in years, like, years. I mean, decades. People I, like, a guy I shared a flat with in California, like 20 years earlier, he completely lost contact with, which he emailed me from Hawaii. Like, you're a very senior researcher in Europe who I greatly admire, like, email, like, it was like that, when Ireland voted, you know, it's like, everybody wants to touch an Irish gay person, you know? I was the available Irish gay person in some people's network and they wanted to. That was lovely.

You know, that was so amazing. But, you know, I mean, what happened psychologically in Ireland was very interesting. And I think it was informed by some of the things that happened in the US, particularly in California. And the actress in Ireland had a very sustained campaign of personally touching every person in the country. you know, they knocked on doors. Everybody had a face-to-face conversation. And I think as a result, everybody thought deeply about this issue. And that's a very different kind of thinking from putting off some research and saying,

ha ha, your side is wrong, our side is right, this group is similar or this group is different, which is a mode of argument you can do with psychological research, which is very common in the US. But I think what they did in Ireland was really different. and they engage people in a different kind of thinking. It was longer. It was harder. And it made sense to do it that way. And, you know, in Ireland, that worked.

And then I think one of the countries in the former Yugoslavia, I think it was Slovenia, at the same year, had a marriage referendum as well, and it went against them, again, by a two-thirds majority. And they didn't do that there, if I understand it rightly. You know, they didn't get into rural community. They didn't have that kind of penetration. So I think what is real, James? what is lasting change, I think it very often does involve deep conversations rather than, here's my research, now I've proved you wrong. Like that has a place in argumentation,

it's a place in conversation, but it's not the whole of it. And I think psychologists who do that kind of research need to recognize it's not the whole of it. Right, right. And certainly we have that history here in the US. I mean, where the courts have occasionally been ahead of where the populace is, for example, Brown versus Board of Education. You know, we didn't, I mean, we're still fighting that war. You know, the racism in our country is quite pervasive. And you can't just change people's hearts and minds because a court says that this is what you need to do. Yeah. So that's an excellent point. I wanted to talk about your other work, your experimental research. I know one of your recent papers on auditory Gaydar found that people may discriminate

against quote, unquote, lesbian-sounding women and gay-sounding men when they're making hiring decisions. Can you talk about that research a little bit? Yeah, I just a massive shout out to Fabio Fasoli, who is the real genius in this. Fabio is an Italian psychologist who works at the University of Surrey, who is published extensively on auditory Gaydar and the kinds of discrimination it can bring around. He worked as a postdoc fellow with me for two years in Surrey, and it was in that context that we did that research. So Gaydar is very often studied in psychology. I get there is when you kind of, you know, make an inference about somebody's sexual orientation, usually the inference that like, oh, I no longer assume that person is straight

because of something about them. It can be an aspect of their physical appearance or something about the way they move or in our studies something about the way that they speak. So in these studies, people listen to very, very short extracts of talk, which were said to be from interviews where people were being interviewed for leadership positions in various roles. And they listened to voices that with pre-tests, we could tell, people thought either sounded gay or lesbian or sounded like straight women or men. And as in other studies, we found a discrimination effect so that people who sounded gay or lesbian were less likely to be hired for those roles

and judged to be less suitable for them as well. One of the things that was most surprising in those studies, and this was a consistent finding across three experiments was that the stronger pattern of discrimination was in regard to the women targets. So there was much stronger discrimination against a woman who sounded lesbian compared to a woman who sounded straight

than against a man who sounded gay, then against a man who sounded straight. And that's an on-finding because we looked at this the other way. So when Fabio has asked gay and straight, women and men, how much do you think your voice communicate your sexual orientation? Like, men think that much more than women do? By the way, when you ask the question, how much do you want your voice to communicate your sexual orientation? The group that says they really want

that is straight men, right? That's the group that really wants their voice to communicate sexual orientation. We've also, like, done studies where we've asked lesbian and gay men, like, how much do you kind of fear this sort of discrimination? You know, happening to you, and in that study, you know, gay men fear it more than lesbian. do and so on. So it's sort of interesting, like the social representation of Gator is that it's something that happens to men. But in this study, it was actually stronger among women. And in most of the discrimination studies, actually, you don't see it just happening to men. You tend to see it happening to both men and women. So, so yeah, we are working on that. We are working on two more

papers to figure out that conundrum, I have to say. And we have some partial answers to it. But let's see if the field thinks they're worthy of publishing. Yeah, I mean, that does sound like a surprising finding to me largely because, and we get back to the question of sexism and sex roles in society, because being masculine is valued. Yeah. And if a woman comes off as being more, quote, masculine and potentially more gay, then you would think that that would be valued.

And instead, what you're finding is something quite different. Yeah, no, absolutely. Thank you for coming back to it. This is people have this question, particularly around something like leadership roles in companies, which was the context here. So that's a context where people supposedly imagine those people as being men by default and value masculine attributes, overvalue masculine attributes, one could easily say. And so you might think that, yeah, stereotyping might go in a lesbian's favour in less. No, we did measure in those studies how much do you think these people are masculine or, feminine and you do get some stereotyping effect, but the lesbian is not getting any boost

out of that. What's happening is that she is seen as less competent, and that seems to be an inference from her perceived sexual orientation. That's the more consistent pattern that explains the discrimination across those studies. So I think a point here, and I think this is kind of difficult for some people maybe to wrap your head around, is that yes, there is this kind of gendery kind of stereotyping around gay and lesbian people that happens all the time. Yeah, that's, that's, that's not difficult to capture an experiment. But it's also the case that sexual orientation is still a status variable, right? It's still a marker of your status, a marker of your higher status to be straight. And that's why we kind of thought, actually, I think status needs to be thought about

in this equation as well when we think about what is the landscape of discrimination that people might encounter if they are lesbian and gay, or even if they sound lesbian or gay, that's an important distinction to make and go for leadership positions. And of course, these days, I mean, this podcast is a good example. Like, there's some people that you meet only by hearing their voice, you know. And, you know, since COVID, there's a lot more of this kind of digitally mediated communication as well. So how people sound can make a big difference. Well, I want to wrap up with a question that takes us back to your book for a moment, because you ended it by writing that it's important for all psychologists to have some knowledge of the recent

history of LGBT psychology and that the field offers something of what you call generalizable usefulness beyond gay men and lesbians to whom it initially applied. What can psychology, what can the rest of psychology learn from the history of LGBT psychology? I'm glad you picked up on that point. And I'm going to answer it by sort of thinking about two linguistic terms that are now really common. So one is coming out. Okay. I think it would be really hard to to make an argument that coming out as a way of thinking about having a relationship between yourself and shame, it originates anywhere else other than in LGBT culture. That would be a little bit tricky to do. That particular understanding of it. And you know, you can come out as just about

anything now, right? You know, so I could come out about the fact that, like, I have rejoined our local chess club because I've seen Queen's Gambit. It's a little bit shameful, but I know my community is there to affirm me. You know, I could come out about the fact that I have a taste in particularly distasteful, you know, prog rock, British dad stuff from the early 1970s that's unlistnable for most people, you know, I can listen to things like, you know, Henry Cow and King Crimson for a long time. That's a little bit shameful. It's utterly uncool music, right? But I just don't go to venture that on this podcast and I hope I live to tell the tell. So you can come out about just about anything. And that, but that way of thinking, that way of thinking, that way of thinking,

about the relationship between society and the psyche, disclosure and secrecy, it would be hard to argue that that is not coming from LGBT culture and its origin. And I think that's one of those gifts, right? The other one, I think, is the suffix a phobia, right, to describe an irrational kind of prejudice. And homophobia, I think, originates probably back where you started around the time of the Stonewall uprising in New York. And that's certainly where George Weinberg picks it up in his 1973 book and so on. These days, you can use that to describe anything. You know, you can describe fat phobia.

You can describe transphobia. You can describe an autism phobia. Some of my friends in the intersex world want to talk about intersex phobia, you know? And you can apply it to anything. So, you know, I've even heard Vladimir Putin, you know, talk about Russiaphobia, you know? And when I do that, I think that's lovely.

Vladimir Putin owes an intellectual debt to LGBT movements. Isn't that all quite lovely? You know, Trump probably talked about some kinds of American phobia as well. Again, lovely. You know, thank you for acknowledging that intellectual, that Donald. And, you know, so when you hear these things, I think this is another kind of linguistic or conceptual gift for thinking about things. That the prejudice against us just might be completely irrational.

Because I say we're neither monsters or angels, but we're sort of, you know, ordinary people who eat breakfast and walk dogs and play chess and listen to bad music. Well, thank you for joining us today, Dr. Haggerty. It's been a real pleasure talking to you and really interesting. I hope that we've taught our listeners a few things about the history of LGBT psychology that they didn't know. Thank you so much. It's been a joy. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology at www.combeatingof Psychology.org or on Apple,

Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please, if you can, leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at Speaking of Psychology at APA.org. That's Speaking of Psychology, all one word, at APA.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Kondyenne. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.