LGBTQ America

Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History
(LGBTQ History) in the United States
the Kinsey reports documented the wide gap between what Americans did
and what they said they did. Kinsey popularized conversations about sex
and sexuality at a time when there was a calculated targeting of lesbians
and gay men as sexually subversive (known as the “Lavender Scare”), the
continuing listing of homosexuality as a mental illness in the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American
Psychiatric Association (APA), and an uneasy silence on broader questions
of what was “normal.” Most importantly for the purposes of this chapter,
Kinsey argued that sexuality was best defined as a continuum with his
zero to six scale, with exclusive heterosexuality at one end, exclusive
homosexuality at the other, and shades of bisexuality in between. His
studies showed that same-sex sexual behavior and fantasies were, if not
common, at least significantly present among both men and women in the
American population. This “new” sexual knowledge produced by Kinsey
and his team has left a lasting legacy in relation to same-sex sexualities.
Kinsey’s zero to six scale and the 10 percent figure loosely describing the
instances of homosexual expression, desire, and fantasy (alone or as well
as heterosexual expression, desire, and fantasy) in the general population
have remained with us today. 53 His studies were among the reasons that
the APA removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in the
DSM in 1973. 54
began using her old bedroom for some of his studies. The Alfred and Clara Kinsey House is a
contributing element of the Vinegar Hill Historic District, listed on the NRHP on June 17, 2005.
Originally founded by Kinsey in 1947 as the Institute for Sex Research to house his decades of
research notes, the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction is located in
Morrison Hall, University of Indiana, Bloomington. Alfred Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E.
Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1998); Alfred Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953; repr., Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1998).
53
Donna Drucker, The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014). See also, Janice Irvine, Disorders of Desire:
Sexuality and Gender in Modern American Sexology, revised and expanded ed. (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2005); James H. Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey: A Life (New York: W.W. Norton Company,
2005).
54
This decision was the product of research by other psychologists, including Dr. Evelyn Hooker, who
found that the correlation between homosexuality and mental illness was false. See Evelyn Hooker,
“The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual,” Journal of Projective Techniques 21 (1957): 18-31.
Dr. Hooker’s office at the time she published this paper was in the psychology department of the
University of California, Los Angeles. The change in the DSM was also the result of lesbian and gay
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