Pride

R E L A T I O N S H I P S | Pride.

I love when one of favorite times of the year also includes a favorite psychological science story.
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This story begins in 1957 with a female psychologist, Evelyn Hooker, self-identified gay and straight male research subjects, psychological tests, and experts of psychological testing. The challenge was to the experts to identify who was gay and to rate their mental health. What happened? The experts could not tell the difference between men gay and men who were straight. However, the gay men did look slightly better adjusted than straight men.
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To say that this changed the world would not be an understatement. Because, it actually did. It changed an entire organization, the American Psychological Association, the leading association for psychological science and the go-to place for expert comment on the human mind and behavior. The organization took out homosexuality as mental disorder from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) for Mental Disorders by 1973.
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Hooker’s research also changed societal attitudes towards homosexuality. We could no longer say homosexuality or being gay or loving a same-sex person was an illness to be corrected or punishable by law. Her work helped usher in and provide empirical support for the gay rights movement of the 1960s.
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Maybe more importantly, however, is how Hooker’s work also helped fundamentally changed our understanding of human sexuality and human love. “Love is love” and “who you love is who you love,” we now say, and we do in part because of her visionary research.💥🏳️‍🌈 

Photo x @mariellevchua