Dr. Evelyn Hooker Advocacy Award
the Award
Every year, oSTEM honors one faculty member, TA, or professor of the CU Boulder community who has inspired an LGBTQ+ student, via mentorship or research, to persist and flourish in the STEM community. We present this individual with The Dr. Evelyn Hooker Advocacy Award to commemorate their work and emphasize the importance of advocacy. Nominees are selected by CU Boulder students and alumni, and the winner will be selected by a diverse board comprised of staff from BOLD, CISC, and the College of Arts and Sciences.
The 2024 Advocacy Award Ceremony will take place on April 15th from 7:00 to 8:00 P.M. in the BOLD Center (ECCE 100). If you would like to nominate someone for this year's award, please do so at the link provided by March 24th, 11:59 P.M.
The Story
It was the height of the McCarthy era in the United States. Political persecution of “possible communists” and homosexuals was rampant. Many in the LGBT community were imprisoned for their sexual orientation. Anyone associated with a known persecuted group was subject of intense scrutiny, investigation, and in some cases, imprisonment. Gay bars were frequently the target of police raids and being openly gay had extensive ramifications. It was during this time that one woman began her research into homosexuality. The objective? To prove that homosexuality was not the “sexual perversion” or “deviant behavior” that most renowned psychologists of the time perceived it to be. Her research would then be cited as one of two papers that led to the American Psychological Associations’ elimination of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
That woman’s name is Dr. Evelyn Hooker. Born into an impoverished family in 1907, Evelyn had humble beginnings and a great deal of determination to pursue a higher education. On the encouragement of several faculty members at her school, she enrolled in the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1924 with a tuition scholarship. She paid for her living by working as a housecleaner for a wealthy family in Boulder. It was here at CU that she became a student of Dr. Karl Muenzinger and found intrigue and inspiration on his lectures on scientific investigation of behavior. She continued her work with Dr. Muenzinger as a master’s student and on his suggestion, began working on her PhD in psychology with Knight Dunlap (who normally did not approve of women doctorates) at Johns Hopkins. Since faculty positions for women were hard to find during the great depression era, she studied psychotherapy in Berlin where she boarded with a Jewish family and witnessed the rise of Nazism firsthand. Witnessing the persecution of these groups of people spawned her desire to “make her life count in helping to correct social injustice.” Working as a research associate in UCLA, Dr. Hooker befriended one of her brightest students, Sam From who introduced her to his circle of gay friends and urged her to conduct research on homosexuals. It was then that she began administering psychological tests on homosexual men. After a divorce and a few years of personal struggle, in 1953 she applied to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for a grant to study nonpathological homosexual men. The application was seen as unusual owing to the fact that during this era homosexuality was considered a mental illness by psychologists, a sin by the church, and a crime by law. Despite the nature of the study, her grant was approved with a fair warning from the chief of the grants division about the possibility of her being subject of an FBI investigation due to her association with the LGBT community. Her study required utmost privacy due to the confidentiality concerns of the subjects of her study. Despite attempts by law enforcement to look at the contents of her study and one incident of her arrest, she protected the privacy of her subjects. The conclusions of her study were corroborated a panel of experts who failed to distinguish the results of homosexual men vs the heterosexual ones proving that there is no abnormality in homosexual behavior.
When I was invited to give a paper at the International Congress of Psychology. I learned that a young Norwegian, Finn Carling, was beginning a study of homosexuals and that it would be worth my while to see him… After we had tea, he turned to me and said, "I want you to know that I am on their side." I think I said, "Me too." And then he said an astonishing thing: "I am not only studying homosexuals, but I am studying refugees, because they teach me the meaning of movement. I am studying the blind, because they will teach me the meaning of sight, of vision. I am studying homosexuals, because they will teach me the meaning of love.
Before Evelyn Hooker’s study, the common corrective procedures on gay people included lobotomies, chemical castration, and electroshock therapy. Sodomy laws criminalized homosexual behavior and the APA wasn’t advocating for the civil rights of LGBT citizens. This would all change over the course of the next fifty years. After her groundbreaking research, Dr. Evelyn Hooker spent the remainder of her life advocating for the LGBTQ community and becoming one of our most treasured allies.
She has done the work that enabled generations of queer youth to be liberated and pursue our civil rights without the burden of who we are being perceived as a pathology by the scientific community. True allies pave way for the liberation of oppressed masses and lay foundations for their empowerment.
Past Winners
2023 - 2024 Winner: Maria Pacheco
She has been actively advocating for more inclusion in the CS Department by hiring diverse PhD students who belong to the LGBTQ+ community. She emphasizes that her lab has various LGBTQ+ members, so that potential students feel welcomed and safe there. Furthermore, she has organized Queer in AI in the past --a volunteer effort that takes place in an NLP conference once a year. The one-day workshop invites queer researchers in AI to publish their research, give talks, and meet each other during the conference in which it is organized. They also fund aspiring queer and marginalized PhD prospective students so they can cover the costs of their applications.
2022-2023 Winner: Dr. Ezra Kottler
In fall 2022, Dr. Kottler began their postdoctoral work as a in the Emery Lab at CU Boulder.
2021-2022 Winner: Dr. Karen Bailey
