Rachel Maddow admirably takes down the charlatans of gay 'reparative therapy,' but forgets the one woman most important in discrediting them

Though the always-insightful Maddow did a great job the other night of documenting the importance of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the treatment of gay "pathology," (video below) she never mentioned the person MOST RESPONSIBLE for changing the attitude of the mental health establishment at the beginning of her narrative, in 1973: Dr. Evelyn Hooker, who single-handedly backed institutionalized homophobia into a corner by forcing the medical establishment, via a brilliant study, to either admit that its most cherished mental health tests were deficient or that gay people weren't.
     Below: an excerpt from the documentary about Dr. Hooker, "Changing Our Minds," made by Academy Award-winning director Richard Schmiechen (The Times of Harvey Milk) and narrated by actor Patrick Steward.



From Wikipedia:

Although, since 1954, Hooker had collected data about her homosexual friends, she felt this was of little value because of the lack of scientific rigor attached to the gathering of this data. She applied for a grant from the NIMH, which she received.
     She gathered two groups of men: one group would be exclusively homosexual, the other exclusively heterosexual. She contacted the Mattachine Society to find homosexual men. She had greater difficulty finding heterosexual men. She also had to use her home to conduct the interview to protect people's anonymity.
     Hooker used three different psychological tests for her study: the TAT, the Make-a-Picture-Story test (MAPS test), and the Rorschach inkblot test.
     After a year of work, Hooker presented a team of 3 expert evaluators with 60 unmarked psychological profiles. She decided to leave the interpretation of her results to other people so as to avoid her own prejudice.
     First, she contacted Bruno Klopfer, an expert on Rorschach tests to see if he would be able to identify the sexual orientation of people through their results at those tests. His ability to differentiate was no better than chance.
     Then Edwin Shneidman, creator of the MAPS test, also analyzed the 60 profiles. It took him six months and he too found that both groups were highly similar in their psychological make-up.
     The third expert was Dr Mortimer Mayer who was so certain he would be able to tell the two groups apart that he went through the process twice.
     The three evaluators agreed that in terms of adjustment, there were no differences between the members of each group.
     In 1956, Hooker presented the results of her research in a paper delivered to the American Psychological Association's convention in Chicago.
     Her studies contributed to a change in the attitudes of the psychological community towards homosexuality and to the American Psychiatric Association's decision to remove homosexuality from its handbook of disorders in 1973. This in turn helped change the attitude of society at large.

Maddow's laudable MSNBC piece: