A Recent History of Lesbian and Gay Psychology by Peter Hegarty

Author:Peter Hegarty [Hegarty, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Conclusion

Any understanding of the relationship between psychology and the law in the United States in recent times in which lesbian and gay psychology does not play the central role is necessarily impaired. By placing this relationship in its disciplinary context, I emphasized here how psychologists particularly contributed in making manifest the reality of the harms of stigma. The use of biology to undergird argument from immutability was not central to this argument, as Romer and other cases demonstrated. Rather, the recognition that lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals were vulnerable to being singled out as a discrete and insular group was pivotal. And singled out they were from the mid-1990s onward by a counter-science which contested the arguments in the APA briefs. In the next chapter, I examine this relationship among anti-gay animus, arguments about immutability, and the treatment of lesbians and gay men as a discrete and insular group in the context of research on attitudes and public opinion.

The successes of this strategy in its own terms are considerable. The strategy required those engaged in it to stifle valid critiques of the heterosexist reasons for the very existence of the questions that they were required to answer in court. Whilst this strategy could be seen as sacrificing a larger critique of normativity to achieve more circumscribed ends, I think that this legal activism can also be thought of as a far more queer kind of strategy. Minton emphasizes how queer strategies aim not at grand narratives but at strategies of resistance. The engagement in legal activism could be considered a kind of response to Sedgwick’s call to marshall anti-homophobic theory even at the expense of epistemological purity. Moreover, by making the realities of heterosexist prejudice clear and working to reduce them, lesbian and gay psychologists played a part in creating a climate for Lawrence that was markedly different from that of Bowers. Psychologists were wise to notice that the courts are not the ideal context in which to contest normality whole cloth, but to do the piecemeal long-term work of unpicking it thread by thread. When compared with other disciplinary perspectives on sexuality, psychology’s facting strategy has not fared badly in terms of its longevity and achievement in the domain of sexual orientation. ‘There has always been a core of folks in APA and in its structure who work towards social justice, and that’s really important,’ recalled psychologist Beverly Greene:

To be a part of something that becomes part of an amicus brief that APA files on behalf of some discriminated-against group to me is the highest calling, I suppose, in terms of how we use research; that it’s not there just to feed the intellect but it’s there to make the world better in some way.131

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