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Departing from Deviance: A History of Homosexual Rights and Emancipatory Science in America. By HENRY L. MINTON. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 344. $65.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper).
Henry L. Minton's Departing from Deviance is an important contribution to queer studies generally and to the historiography of the lesbian and gay civil rights movement specifically. The book climaxes with the American Psychiatric Association's 1973 removal of homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. To get to that point, Minton traces a fascinating history, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, of the pioneering role that lesbian and gay activists and advocates played as they influenced the production and publication of a number of significant psychological and sexological studies. Prior to the 1960s it was, largely speaking, only through studies such as these that gay and lesbian activists could find a voice. In a scornful and dismissive society, the medical profession provided the legitimating sponsorship for them to do so. These scientific studies, Minton persuasively argues, became emancipatory for the gays and lesbians who influenced, conducted, and participated in them. Additionally, the author explores the significant influence that more mainstream sexologists and psychologists, for example, Evelyn Hooker and Alfred C. Kinsey, had within the scientific fields on homosexual rights. Finally, Minton considers the immediate impact that lesbian and gay activists had on the American Psychiatric Association in the early 1970s, when after years of groundwork by those noted above they helped to push that organization into reevaluating its position on homosexuality.
Minton sets the background for homosexual emancipatory science in America...