Abstract: In the mid-1920s psychologists Lewis M. Terman and Catherine Cox Miles conducted a study of 134 homosexual men. Seventy-five of these men were incarcerated in US prisons, jails, and reformatories. This 1936 “Study of Male Homosexuals” sought to provide a tool with which disciplinary institutions could identify and classify homosexual men. Terman and Miles designed and tested their “Masculinity-Femininity Test” to determine potential trends in homosexual “personality” across an array of gendered traits. The Terman and Miles study emphasized the idea that homosexuality was identifiable , and that, through measuring degrees of deviation from hegemonic gender norms, “homosexual traits” were measurable . They did this because they were invested in assisting disciplinary institutions in identifying potential “sexual psychopaths,” which was an emerging criminal and psychiatric category then often conflated with homosexuality. Their study reinforced support for a medicocriminal model in the management of homosexual persons that legitimized their confinement in both carceral and psychiatric institutions. This article examines the procedures and conclusions of Terman and Miles’ study of homosexual men in US prisons and jails and demonstrates the impact of this study on the cultivation of discourse about homosexuality, particularly as it related to gender deviance and carceral confinement. While many scholars have pointed to the early 20th century as a time of transition between a criminal model of homosexuality to a medical or psychiatric model, this paper argues that sexologists like Terman and Miles took part in coconstructing a medicocriminal era in the history of homosexuality-a period during which homosexual men were thought to be in need of both psychiatric care and carceral confinement. This paper argues that the Terman and Miles study affirmed this entangled carceral and psychiatric model of prisoner management while also bolstering the institutional role of psychiatrists.
Vic Overdorf (Wed,) studied this question.