The 2007 Burnham Award Committee is pleased to award this year’s prize to Howard Hsueh-Hao Chiang of Princeton University for his engaging submission, “Effecting Science, Affecting Medicine: Homosexuality, the Kinsey Reports, and the Contested Boundaries of Psychopathology in the United States, 1948-1965.” “Effecting Science, Affecting Medicine” adds texture and complexity to the story of the American Psychiatric Association’s famous decision in 1973 to de-pathologize homosexuality. Without rejecting the standard argument that the change in classification must be seen as a triumph of the gay rights movement, Chiang persuasively argues that shifts internal to medicine were also an important part of the story. In particular he notes that a number of mental health professionals—especially within clinical psychology—had begun during the 1950s and 1960s to worry about, and some to become completely skeptical of, claims that homosexuality was a pathological condition. A key factor preparing the way for this shift, Chiang argues, was Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 bombshell, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which revealed levels of homosexual practice theretofore scarcely imagined within the mainstream medical community. Chiang uncovers a number of psychologists and even psychiatrists who, he demonstrates, found in the Kinsey report a direct challenge to their understandings of homosexuality, and who slowly changed their minds, coming to see homosexual sex as just another variant in human behavior. “Effecting Science, Affecting Medicine” does a fine job of revealing and documenting this growing challenge during the 1950s and 1960s within the mental health community to the pathologization of homosexuality, and of explicating the scientific and medical ideas underlying the initial categorization as well as the challenges to it. Well documented and richly footnoted, Chiang’s submission is a worthy recipient of the 2007 Burnham Award.
Howard Chiang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in History of Science at Princeton University.
2007 Burnham Award Committee: John Carson (chair), Paul Lerner, and Deborah Weinstein