Psychology had risen in American culture to be an influential lens through which people understood themselves and society. In 1956 Dr. Evelyn Hooker, a psychologist at UCLA, used funding from the National Institute of Mental Health to administer three standard personality tests to thirty homosexuals and thirty heterosexuals. The anonymous responses were read by three experts, who discovered absolutely no differences between the two groups. Hooker’s paper was published in 1957, but made little impact on the thinking of the professional community. Why was this?
