But her core focus was always her study of queer women. In 1931,according to When Brooklyn Are Queer, she traveled to Berlin to meet the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. At Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, a prominent research clinic, Gay read Hirschfeld’s “books and notes and records concerning homosexuals, seeing something of the treatment accorded them,” she wrote later. She conducted in-depth interviews with many of her new acquaintances. By 1935, she had visited Oxford, Paris, New York, and Berlin, and interviewed roughly 300 queer women about their lives.
In one number of characters when you look at the 1939, Gay delivered a released questionnaire to help you colleges eg Barnard College. This lady concerns have to have sounded peculiar to a college officer within the the latest 1930s: That was, Homosexual asked, the newest faculty’s ideas towards the crushes or “intimate friendships” certainly one of same-sex children? Was indeed psychiatrists available for those individuals children? Had been “the brand new cases of intimate get in touch with between ladies several?”
Barnard College’s medical practitioner, Gulielma Alsop, had written straight back the day immediately following finding the girl letter. “Homosexuality certainly pupils out of Barnard School isn’t a problem of any magnitude,” Alsop told you. When Gay delivered a comparable questionnaire to many other colleges, only a few indicated better openness toward indisputable fact that they could has queer youngsters in their positions. Vermont’s Bennington University acknowledge so you can Gay it had located “2 or three” matchmaking between women children, and you may a health care professional within Attach Holyoke said that around three people had “raised the question of homosexuality” together.
The analysis team requested a huge selection of questions about each person’s employment history, family unit members background, and you may sexual feel-layer everything from their eating plan during the early childhood on the matchmaking in order to pet
Up until that point, in the United States, research into queer people was luvfree Tipy highly clinical, and often done through a lens of contempt. Beginning at the end of the 19th century, American physicians churned out case studies of patients suffering from a disease they sometimes dubbed “sexual perversion,” usually with an explicit tone of contempt. The dmond warned at the start of one paper that the case studies he was about to present might be “distressing and disgusting” to readers, but “so long as human nature exists such instances will occur and physicians must be prepared to treat them.”
When Gay had finished her interviews, she compiled them into a 70,000-word book, which she tentatively titled Sociological Aspects of Female Homosexuality. She said in one 1935 letter that an unnamed London area drive had accepted it for publication. But there was a hitch-her publisher wanted a more established scholar to “validate” her work, according to the book Departing from Deviance.
Centered on Departing off Deviance, you to affiliate named the woman an “avowed intermediate,” a regard to her sex
Gay called the new gynecologist and you can birth-control advocate Robert Latou Dickinson, whom suggested your two of him or her interact towards a more impressive examination of homosexuality. The guy hired all those teachers, lots of who was basically elite psychologists with little almost every other connection to the new queer area, in order to create the brand new Committee toward Examination of Intercourse Versions-the initial look class in the us to focus on queer individuals.
Gay is actually assigned a chaperone, a psychologist at New york Health titled George W. Henry. But really it actually was the girl research-and you may, a great deal more especially, this lady connectivity throughout the queer community-one made the research possible in the first place. In its very first details, new Committee to your Examination of Gender Versions indexed the sufferers of the investigation “were to be obtained from the properties out of Skip The month of january Gay,” adding-euphemistically-you to definitely Gay had “romantic contact with that it industry for a number of years.” (The latest panel knew you to definitely Homosexual is actually queer. )
Homosexual put for every single queer individual the new panel only using its first name and past 1st. Following, the latest experts categorized differing people once the sometimes bisexual, gay, otherwise narcissistic.