Evelyn Hooker - Life

Life

Hooker was born Evelyn Gentry in North Platte, Nebraska, and grew up with eight brothers and sisters in the Colorado Plains. When she was 13, her family moved to Sterling, Colorado.

In 1924 she became a student at the University of Colorado while working as a maid for a rich Boulder family. Her mentor, Dr Karl Munzinger, guided her in her challenge of the then prevalent psychological theory of behaviourism. He invited her to write her own case history. After receiving her Masters degree, she became one of 11 women involved in the PhD program in psychology at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, having been refused referral to Yale. She was awarded her PhD in 1932.

In her early career, she wasn't especially interested in the psychology of homosexual people. After teaching for only one year at the Maryland College for Women, she contracted tuberculosis and spent the next year in a sanatorium in Arizona. In 1937 Hooker received a fellowship to the Berlin Institute of Psychotherapy. She witnessed mass hysteria on the triumphant return of Hitler to Berlin after the Anschluss.

However, during the 1940s, she first became interested in what would turn out to be her life's work. In 1942 while a teacher at UCLA, Evelyn married writer Don Caldwell. She became close to one of her students, Sam From, who introduced her to the gay and lesbian subculture, in 1943. He challenged her to scientifically study "people like him." Despite the social, moral and scientific climate of the post-war period, Hooker became increasingly convinced that most gay men were perfectly socially adjusted and that this could be proven through scientific tests.

Over the next two decades she became established professionally. In 1948 she divorced her husband and moved to a guest cottage at the Salter Avenue home of Edward Hooker, professor of English at UCLA and poetry scholar. They married in London in 1951. In the mid-fifties Christopher Isherwood became their neighbor and they became friends. Sam From died in a car accident in 1956, just before her ground-breaking research was published. Hooker's husband died in January 1957 of a cardiac arrest.

The 1960s saw her work find a wider audience, and her conclusions were taken up by the gay rights movement. In 1961 Hooker was invited to lecture in Europe and in 1967, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) asked her to produce a report on what the institution should do about homosexual men. Richard Nixon's election in 1969 delayed the publication of the report, which was published by a magazine, without authorization, in 1970. The report recommended the decriminalization of homosexuality and the provision of similar rights to both homosexual and heterosexual people. The burgeoning gay rights movement seized on this.

She retired from her research at the age of 63 and started a private practice. Most of her clients were gay men and lesbians.

Hooker died at her home in Santa Monica, California in 1996, at the age of 89.