Kim Mills: 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 US 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 LGBTQ 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 military's "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 Hegarty, a professor of psychology at the Open University in the United Kingdom, where he studies the history of sexuality and gender in 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.
Peter Hegarty, PhD: Thank you, Kim. It's an honor to be here.
Mills: You're a historian of psychology, as well as a psychologist. 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?
Hegarty: It was. There was a strategic decision on my part to start in that time period. That was because very often when I read histories about the history of sexuality and psychology, the ones to 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. It often ends up in something like the Stonewall uprising, and then the 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association to begin to de-pathologize homosexuality.
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 historians of psychology. 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, the 1970s is a very, very far away period. So things need to be massively updated."
One of the reasons why I chose that time frame was to try to make a contribution to a much larger movement in the history of psychology to think about what has the recent history of psychology been? What's been happening in more recent decades? And sort of changed the narrative focus of how we do things.
And was there a period in which things changed in psychology? Absolutely. That was a really interesting period of incredible change where issues about social justice, issues about inequality, came to the fore much more than that 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 characterizing the American political scene at this point in time, and not least, of course, the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War.
Looking back at that period, you can see that it is a time where it 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 it's accountability is around issues around chronic injustice, and whether it is possible to kind of remain on the fence about those kinds of things.
One thing that happens in that context, which is sort of less well known, 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 had only existed for a few years, and was set up by Kenneth Clark and some other people, because of these questions about what was psychology doing about bi-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 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. But it is funny that psychologists, myself included, so often told that story about psychiatry and never told the story about psychology itself.
Mills: That's a good point. 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?
Hegarty: Yeah, absolutely. It's a good question to ask about that—go a little bit further back in its history maybe. The first codes are from the 1950s. They were written from a blueprint for the codes for including or excluding soldiers in the American armed forces in World War II. It was in that context where the armed forces begun to inquire about men's homosexuality and used that as grounds for excluding them from the military.
Mills: Right, because they were thought to be security risks as a result.
Hegarty: 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. That's why it was sort of within psychiatry. But you're right. That rationale did emerge later on, and to be sure, to justify that policy.
So the DSM was also initially a very psychoanalytic document that was coming under question in the 1970s, 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. Activists such as Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameny began to target the APA and the DSM strategically towards the very end of the 1960s, and to articulate it as a problem. Their writings are very interesting, and are ahead of some of the things that are happening in psychology at the time.
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 suggested that's the case.
And so there was some politics behind the scenes that then led some of those actors to actually speak at an APA conference. That initiated a vote of members as to whether homosexuality should remain a mental illness or not. 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. Even still, it was far from complete. If you just think about sexual orientation for a moment, because what was sort of retained there was this idea of what we kind of know as ego dystonic homosexuality. 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. That didn't go away until the '90s.
Now, you mentioned that the DSM is kind of the arbiter of mental health. 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. It didn't remove homosexuality until the very early '90s. That's the event that is celebrated by IDAHOBIT Day in May.
Mills: I'm just curious. For so many years, psychology and psychiatry viewed homosexuality as a mental illness. Was there really any actual scientific evidence for such thinking?
Hegarty: That's a really good question. I mean, what counted as scientific evidence then, and what counts as scientific evidence now? It's not the same thing.
I think what happened, to be charitable to that, is that they were self-fulfilling prophecies. People who were gay or lesbian, people who were 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.
Two people who do often stand out in the U.S. context are Alfred Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker. One of the things Kinsey was concerned about was the self-fulfilling prophecy. He thought, "Well, there are these people for whom homosexuality is power to their life." And Kinsey was bisexually oriented himself. 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 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 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. That was sort of Kinsey. He really didn't like Freud or any of these kinds of ideas that there was a distinct homosexual personality.
Evelyn Hooker was a 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 book ends, there was a lot of discontent in psychology about the psychiatric basis of mental health care, because it was considered to be quite infirm. Psychologists developed a lot of scientific ways of thinking, many of which had the effect of sort of reigning 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 Rorschach test, where there's targetive thought.
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 Rorschach tests, 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. They both ended up teaching in UCLA around the same time. She gave the test results to Klopfer to analyze. And he read them and he said, "Oh my God. If I hadn't known that this guy was gay and this guy was straight, there's nothing in the Rorschach profile that I could have done to do that."
I think what was so smart about that was, first of all, realizing that by—I think Bruno Klopfer is the real study participant in that study. There was three experts. But I think Klopfer was probably the most important because of his status. 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. What she did is she took that gaze and she turned it around. She turned it upwards on the form of expert reasoning that would interpret these Rorshachs. And when it did, the whole system kind of crashed.
So I always look at that and 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 its the fact that the way she enjoyed Bruno Klopfer in that respect is quite brilliant.
And then lastly, she made a film about her life. I think, actually the AK might've made it before she died. She died in the 1990s. Her reflections in that film about the events later on in the 1970s are really very interesting, because she kind of says, "You know, when I saw all of these protests happening at the American Psychiatric Association, I was initially quite worried. I thought this was bad. I thought this is going to blow the respectability of these lesbian and gay movements." But then she said, "No. Then I realized, 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 in time, other people are ahead of the times. You know? And I think there's something lovely in her kind of mature reflection on this, of when she was ahead of the times and maybe when she gets down 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 of those things together at that point. They created the change I couldn't have done that."
Mills: 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?
Hegarty: Probably quite a large one. I'm not sure it's always a good idea, in general, to think about sexism and hetero-sexism, 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 thought-y question. I don't even know the answer to that question about myself on some days, I have to say. 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 most 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 the American Psychologist Special Issue, which you mentioned so nicely. It's an archival history of something called the Eromin Center which was set up in Philadelphia by gay and lesbian people in the early 1970s. They wanted to do affirmative counseling. They grasped this kind of idea from Carl Rogers that people needed to be listened to, without judgment, with sympathy. And they grounded this in their own lived experiences, and thought this was a better basis for doing this kind of humanistic intervention than the models they had been given by psychology. I think as a community based project, addressing hetero-sexism, 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 center 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 U.S. from overseas. 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? I think 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.
Mills: Let's switch gears for a minute, and move to talking about the AIDS epidemic, beginning in the 1980s. How did that change the questions that researchers were asking?
Hegarty: Yeah, I think it's a really timely question to ask now in the middle of COVID, as well.
Mills: Sure.
Hegarty: I think we might think about that relationship a bit later on as well. Yeah. I looked for what psychologists were writing in regard to HIV/AIDS and when. I think there's a real sea change in the middle of the 1980s on this. When the President's Commission Report comes out, 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 I mean like testing good drugs and ultimately a vaccine. There's sort of an idea of a vaccine.
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 hurt by HIV, grassroots, bottom up. Particularly, an awful lot happens in the New York area. An awful lot happens in California and other places. Right?
Mills: Yeah. Gay Men's Health Crisis, ACT UP people like that who—yeah.
Hegarty: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. 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 than it is in New York, if I've got the history right.
But there's very little. Now, there's a short kind of special section of American Psychology in about 1984. And there you can see that some people who had been leading the kind of gay affirmative initiative in the 1970s, particularly Steven Morand, whose now a counseling psychologist, writing there and saying, "This should be an issue. 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 Psychologist, about 1988, which I went through it in quite a bit of depth. There you can see psychologies of all kinds and 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, they were quite marginal in the 1970s. But I think they became mainstreamed over the horrific period of HIV-AIDS.
There were clearly concerted actors doing incredible work. Division 44, which was initially lesbian and gay, but that, of course, has become much broader since, also took form in that context. But I think, if I think beyond those kind of small groups 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 heterosexist way.
Mills: 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. It just made it really, really challenging to do the science that was needed.
Hegarty: Yeah, it does. I've recently written more based on sort of content analysis of research papers. People that research often will do this. Look back and say, "What have we ever asked about lesbians in 30 years?" That's the thing. People write those papers. If you look at the stuff on health in the mid-90s, on LGBT populations, it's like most, the vast majority of the health research has happened because of HIV/AIDS funding.
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 I'm learning a lot from it. Actually, the research does become very androcentric, again. It becomes very much about men, because it's very much dominated by HIV/AIDS funding.
I think after that time, once that sort of starts to go away, after things like protease inhibitors become accessible in the mid-1990s and HIV/AIDS becomes potentially a less threatening illness if you can access those medications, that's an if. I think you actually see a little bit of a decline in research on LGBT populations. I think there's a peak of it, kind of in the '90s. I think it's been in somewhat of a decline since.
Mills: I want to talk about another underresearched area, which is the B in 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?
Hegarty: I think psychology has. I think—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 once where somebody said, "Bisexuality is like groundhog day. It's like it always kind of gets forgotten and reset and forget and reset and forget and reset."
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 all of those Zoom meetings. You know? We're in three different time zones. I was waxing nostalgic about the experience of being in queer book stores in the States, in the 1990s. A lost experience, right? Here comes a tear coming to your eye as well here. I remember seeing Marjorie Garber, who wrote this book, "Vice Versa," in the early 1990s, which was all about bisexuality, like just kind of talks through that book in a bookstore in San Francisco. It's just so vibrant and exciting.
And, 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 BPS it was at the time. Now it's called the Psychology of Sexualities. We did a lot of work trying to push the British Psychological Society to put words like "bisexuality" and "transgender" in the name. They were very resistant to it, saying like, "There's no British research on bisexuality." We're like, "Well, yeah, because nobody can talk to us, because the name is wrong."
So, those kinds of things, I think, happen. And then, kind of—people haven't really come to terms with Kinsey as a bisexual figure, I think. 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 he does not, that are kind of deep in how his thinking is.
But, I think that whole idea of the Kinsey Scale, which is 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 like, "Lots, and lots, and lots of people have sexual histories that involve people of two genders." 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?
Like, survey gay men. Lots of them have sex with women. Survey lesbians. Lots of them—and we're all going to act surprised. Like people change their sexual orientation label. I think there is something groundhog day about that, really. I think there is. There is something about that.
And, I'm not sure what a good and meaningful scientific finding about bisexuality might be. I mean, what's really—there are researchers who—you can Google it, who got a lot of play early in the 21st century for saying, "Look, look, look. Bisexual men don't exist. They really don't." And then those same researchers got a lot of play by saying, "Guess what? Bisexual men really do exist."
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 people's lived experience? It probably does not a lot more than asking, "Is homosexuality nature or nurture?" Or something like that.
Mills: 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 in seminal court cases on marriage equality. How important has psychological research been to these legal victories?
Hegarty: I think in the U.S. context, it's very important. And the U.S. context is also quite distinct, I have learned, kind of working elsewhere. I think this is something I would want U.S. listeners to know, particularly U.S. 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 particular that is incredibly important. It is a vulnerable history. In psychology, of course, it has a long history going back to Brown versus Board of Education, gender discrimination cases more recently as well.
But certainly the APA starts to lead as 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, the APA has gone to court, to advise the court on the litigation of lesbian and gay rights more often than kind of anything else, by a lot. And, 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. 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." It would be great if the research was used in something like that.
The other thing I would kind of say is, a lot of what people have done in that context is to do an Evelyn Hooker type project. To say, "Look, actually, relationships are not that different between same sex and mixed sex couples." I think that's probably right. On the left wing, lots of people have fantasies that LGBT people will dismantle lots of oppressive structures simply by being. And, on the right wing, lots of people have fantasies that LGBT people will dismantle status quo structures simply by being. We are neither the angels or monsters of these imaginations. We are ordinary people who eat breakfast, and walk dogs, and drive cars, and worry about carbon footprints and things like that.
And so I think a lot of psychological research just does that. It kind of says, "Eh—actually, things are not so different." And so, it was very, very obvious, I think, to a lot of people who are in any way involved in LGBT communities, that people had always been living in very long-term relationships where they were completely mutually interconnected in loving lifelong ways with people of the same gender, forever. Forever. And I think when the state woke up and said, "Well, what are we going to call these things to recognize that?" 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, you could've gone to a talk about equal marriage pretty much any hour of the day all five days. I felt—I think I want to go hang out with the historians now. This is a lot. I feel like I've been married ash a little bit here.
I think 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 yeah, psychological research, very, very important. But I think, also, the question of how central marriage became in the platform of LGBT rights in general, and particularly within APA, is something that I think—It's important to think about what else was sort of going on in that context as well, and what might not have gotten the same attention.
Mills: 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 this same question around marriage equality?
Hegarty: Somewhat. But I think, ultimately, what you would want is 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.
Mills: What's the other argument? That it's the right thing to do? That it's just—
Hegarty: That it's the right thing to do. That it'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 Kitzinger, who did incredibly important work. Set up the Journal of 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 1000 other things. You can read their story for yourself. If you look at the Psychology's Feminist Voices website, their oral history is there. They talk about this.
But they took a case to the Supreme Court here in the UK with two other couples. They had a Canadian marriage at the time. But they wanted it recognized in the U.K. Sue had been living in Canada for a while. And, they lost their case, and had to pay the expenses of that, which run into the thousands. And, that was, I think, maybe about 2006 or so? And the judgment given at that point in time was just simply, "It's tradition that marriage is a man and woman." And now look where things are.
So, I think you'd want to win that argument on other grounds. The other place that's really interesting is Ireland, here. I can 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 the day that marriage referendum went down, it was kind of like, I got all of these sort of emails and messages from people I haven't heard from in years. Like years. I mean decades.
A guy I'd shared a flat with in California like 20 years earlier, I had completely lost contact with, emailed me from Hawaii. A very senior researcher in Europe, who I greatly admire, was like, when Ireland voted, 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—that was lovely. You know? So amazing.
But, what happened psychologically in Ireland was very interesting. I think it was informed by some of the things that happened in the U.S., particularly in California. Ireland had a very sustained campaign of personally touching every person in the country. They knocked on doors. Everybody had a face to face conversation. I think, as a result, everybody thought deeply about this issue.
That's a very different kind of thinking from putting up some research and saying, "Ha ha, your side is wrong, our side 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 U.S. But I think what they did in Ireland was really different. They engaged people in a different kind of thinking. It was longer. It was harder. And it made sense to do it that way.
And, in Ireland that worked. And 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. They didn't do that there, if I understand it rightly. They didn't get into rural community. They didn't have that kind of penetration.
So, I think what is real change? 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." That has a place. And argumentation has a place in conversation. But it's not the whole of us. I think psychologists who do that kind of research need to recognize it's not the whole of us.
Mills: Right, right. And certainly, we have that history here in the U.S. Over the course of occasionally been ahead of where the populous is, for example, Brown versus Board of Education, we didn't—We're still fighting that war. The racism in our country is quite pervasive. You can't just change people's hearts and minds because a court says that this is what you need to do.
Hegarty: Yeah.
Mills: 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 lesbian sounding women and gay sounding men when they're making hiring decisions. Can you talk about that research a little bit?
Hegarty: Yeah. I just—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 has published extensively on auditory gaydar, and the kinds of discrimination it can bring around. He worked as a post-op fellow with me for two years in Surrey and it was in that context that we did that research.
Gaydar is very often studied in psychology. And gaydar is when you kind of make an inference about somebody's sexual orientation. Usually the inference that like, "Oo, 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 study, 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 than against a man who sounded straight. That's an odd finding, because we looked at this still other ways. When Fabio has asked gay and straight women and men, "How much do you think your voice communicates your sexual orientation?" 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. That's the group that really wants to communicate sexual orientation.
We've also done studies where we've asked lesbian and gay men, "How much do you fear this sort of discrimination happening to you?" And in that study, gay men more fear it more than lesbians do, and so on. So, it's sort of interesting that social representation of gaydar 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 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.
Mills: Yeah, I mean that does sound like a surprising finding to me, largely because when we get back to the question of sexism and sex roles in society, because being masculine is valued. And if a woman comes off as being more "masculine" and potentially more gay, then you would think that, that would be valued. And instead, what you're finding is something quite different.
Hegarty: Yeah. No, absolutely. Thank you for coming back to it. People have this question, particularly around something like leadership roles in companies, which was the context here. 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 lesbians favor. And, 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 she is seen as less competent. That seems to be an inference from her perceived sexual orientation. That's the more consistent pattern that explains the discrimination across those studies.
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 gender-y kind of stereotyping around gay and lesbian people that happens all the time. That's not difficult to capture in experiments. But it's also the case that sexual orientation is still a status variable. It's still a marker of your status, and a marker of your higher status to be straight. 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, this podcast is a good example. There's some people that you meet only by hearing their voice. And, since COVID, there's a lot more of this kind of digitally mediated communication as well. So, how people sound can kind of make a big difference.
Mills: 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 the rest of psychology learn from the history of LGBT psychology?
Hegarty: I'm glad you picked up on that point. I'm going to answer it by sort of thinking about two linguistic terms that are now really common. One is coming out. I think it'd be really hard to make an argument that coming out as a way of thinking about having a relationship between yourself and shame originates anywhere else other than in LGBT culture. That would be a little bit tricky to do. That particular understanding of it, you can come out as just about anything, now. So I could come out about the fact that 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. I could come out about the fact that I have a taste in particularly distasteful prog-rock British dad stuff from the early 1970s that's unlistenable for most people. I can listen to things like Henry Cow and King Crimson for a long time. That's a little bit shameful. It's utterly uncool music. Right? But I'm just going to venture out on this podcast and hope I live to tell the tale.
So, you can come out about just about anything. But 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 in its origin. I think that's one of those gifts.
The other one, I think, is the suffix "phobia" to describe an irrational kind of prejudice. Homophobia, I think originates, probably back where you started, around the time of the Stonewall Uprising in New York. It'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 can describe fatphobia. You can describe transphobia. You can describe an autismphobia. Some of my friends in the intersex world want to talk about intersexphobia. You can apply it to anything. I've even heard Vladimir Putin talk about Russiaphobia. And what do I do? I think that's lovely, Vladimir Putin owes an intellectual debt to LGBT movements. Isn't that all quite lovely? Trump probably talked about some kinds of Americanphobia as well, again, lovely. Thank you for acknowledging that intellectual debt, Donald.
So when you hear these things, I think this is another kind of linguistic oral conception gift for thinking about things. The prejudice against us just might be completely irrational, because I say, we're neither monsters or angels, but we're sort of ordinary people who eat breakfast, and walk dogs, and play chess, and listen to bad music.
Mills: Well, thank you for joining us today, Dr. Hegarty. 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.
Hegarty: Thank you so much. It's been a joy.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology at www.speakingofpsychology.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 speakingofpsychology@apa.org. That's speakingofpsychology all one word, @apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.
Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.
Peter Hegarty is a professor of psychology and co-director of the newly launched 
