Homosexual Signs and Heterosexual Silences: Rorschach Research on Male Homosexuality from 1921 to 1969

Abstract

IN FEBRUARY 2001 the validity of the Rorschach inkblot test became a matter of public concern—once again. During a phone-in debate on National Public Radio a research psychologist who had recently coauthored a lengthy critical review of Rorschach research stated that "this has been brewing for quite some time; the criticism of the Rorschach really began in the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties, and has really never quite died down." 1 The president of the International Rorschach Society replied that "the Rorschach is a wonderful old test; it's been around for eighty years or so now, used by generations of psychologists, all around the world, who have found it pretty useful." 2 While psychologists are clearly ready to marshal the history of the Rorschach to their own ends, historians of science and medicine have rarely given the test sustained attention. Several recent and otherwise excellent histories of American mental health sciences pay scant if any attention to the test. 3 But historians of sexuality [End Page 400] do need to become familiar with the Rorschach if they are to understand the emergence of "lesbian and gay psychology," a psychological approach that developed in the 1970s after the emergence of lesbian and gay liberation and the depathologizing of homosexuality. 4 The terms lesbian and gay refer not to the identities of practitioners but to the psychological study of lesbian and gay (and, more recently, bisexual and transgender) persons in the context of a broader heterosexist and gender-restrictive society. 5 Before the 1970s the Rorschach was employed repeatedly as a means of detecting gay men (and, to a lesser extent, lesbians). Yet as early as the 1950s one psychologist, Evelyn Hooker, began to critique this use of the test. The experiment that grounded Hooker's critique is often understood as the origin of lesbian and gay psychology, and Hooker's Rorschach work is most often remembered for using the scientific method to gay-affirmative ends. 6

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