Research as “Waystation” in the Midcentury Homophile Movement

Homophile organizations at midcentury have long been linked to the “rise and fall” of professions like psychiatry in the American political landscape. In this paper, I engage the various ways that leaders of the homophile movement engaged the professions. In particular, I interpret their close attention to the sources of scientific authority as a “waystation to freedom,” a term I borrow from political theorist Nancy Luxon. I suggest that homophile organizations’ engagement with psychiatric and social scientific research transformed homosexual audiences from subjects-as-patients into subject-participants, carved out a newly authoritative role for the magazines’ audiences, and marked their self-knowledge as methodologically and politically central. These engagements with research perform a kind of “temporal drag” on the present and suggest new ways for contemporary queer theory to engage the homophile movement.