1952-1970s: Homosexuals literally declared de facto psychopaths

[breathedout]

[Under the McCarran-Walter Act,] a prohibition barring aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality was enacted in 1952 to explicitly prevent homosexual aliens from entering or remaining in the [United States]. […] Yet just like the military’s policy on tendencies, this finely honed tool relied on ambiguity to do its work. This was not an accidental ambiguity, it was an instrumental one. “Loosely written laws” were called for because they widened the net as to what kinds of evidence could be “read” by state officials as homosexuality. […]

Ultimately, though, it was not medical professionals who stirred the pot. Despite the fact that homosexual exclusion relied on the psychiatric category of psychopathy, the medical consensus about what defined homosexuality was breaking down just as a bureaucratic consensus was solidifying. Many psychiatrists were reluctant to equate homosexual acts with homosexual people, or to tag the latter with the label of psychopathy. Because the law required the Public Health Service (PHS) psychiatrists to certify aliens as psychopathic prior to deportation, the increasing defection of medical experts left federal officials in a difficult position. When aliens facing deportation pointed strategically to scientific uncertainty surrounding the definition of both homosexuality and psychopathic personality, moreover, courts countered that these were, in fact, legal rather than medical terms. According to the law, they insisted, one who had homosexual sex was a homosexual person and a psychopath. With homosexuality defined as a nonmedical category, however, the PHS relinquished all responsibility for certification, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was left as the primary arbiter of homosexuality among aliens. By the late 1970s—with different political investments in the issue—the PHS, the INS, and the federal courts had thus all converged on the idea of homosexuality as a legal construct.

—Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (bolding added)

Man, I didn’t know any of this. The immigration stuff in this book is among the most revelatory, at least for me—and that’s saying something, because the welfare and military chapters are extremely eye-opening as well.

Among the things my brain is really chewing on: the ease with which loosely-written laws become tools of specific, targeted abuse; the blatant weaponization of psychiatric concepts which, when rejected by the medical community itself, were simply coopted by the legal system instead; and the equation of “homosexual” with “person who has same-gender sex"—which, as the next paragraph goes on to say, eliminated a whole palette of sexual shades of grey that existed (legally) in the first half of the 20th century, and simultaneously made heterosexual status more difficult to prove/attain.

Extremely thought-provoking stuff.

Comments

[felinejumper]

Quick question what the fuck is right.

This is incrediblyyy interesting & nightmarish & just... so many things to chew on, as you said. I'm amazed you got through the book, given the excerpts you've posted.

I actually am really struck by this:
When aliens facing deportation pointed strategically to scientific uncertainty surrounding the definition of both homosexuality and psychopathic personality, moreover, courts countered that these were, in fact, legal rather than medical terms.

It's my particular niche of scientific authority being used in service of a marginalized group, and then demonstration of how extremely tenuous that authority actually is. (My fascination might also just be with how wildly irrational policy is, always, because...why??)

[breathedout]

I kind of couldn't put the book down! But there's definitely an element of not being able to look away from a train crash, for sure.

And YES, so irrational!! Horrifyingly so.

[ordinarybirds]

I am concerned that my response is a wildly emotional digression but pls forgive, here we go:

I have a highly stigmatized diagnosis, and therefore I am both wary of and interested in legal criteria vs medical psychology, and diagnosis as punishment tool, as a queer polyamorous person with BPD. I know this country has a tradition of specifically targeting immigrants, even when we need them (as useful tools and easy scapegoats), and I am also thinking of a book I read half of (Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari; I hit a MAJOR trigger and had to tap out before finishing*; also up to where I read it does not deal with queer issues except for an previously-incarcerated trans man whose mother was an addict and may have been an addict himself? I don't remember, triggery things get blurry;) that touched on the legalizing (?) of medical terms--in this case, addiction as crime rather than medical condition. I realize I'm coming at this from the opposite end of this text, but I think the point is related: "pathology" cannot be used as a blunt instrument, and yet people are routinely struck with it. What is a "self"? I don't have one, I am bits and pieces, but I'm told others do. who defines that, how does sexuality and/or chemical dependence map onto that? How could a judge tell? What, in this later era of privatized prisons and xenophobia, does this all lead to? Were there any avenues to fair action? are there now?

Again, this is outside the area of your post, and I realize you don't have an answer handy, because no one does. But it's something I think of often and may be relevant to your interests.



*if you are interested in this book and want to know the issue that distressed me, I'll explain in detail, but I don't know if anything past this has other triggers; I read a little past this but I didn't process it, I had psychologically tapped out even though I tried to rally on.

[breathedout]

I think your response is wholly appropriate and on-topic, and also really insightful! So thank you for it.

And yes: exactly those questions: how could a judge tell? (I mean, obviously, they can't.) And ARE there any avenues of recourse? (A lot of times, no.) Believe it or not I'm marking most of my ported-over posts "Don't display on reading pages" so as not to spam people's pages, but I pulled a couple of other excerpts from the Canaday that deal with the specific intersection of xenophobia and racism with these legalized/pathologized blunt-instrument tools, and you'll be shocked to hear that mysteriously, when the immigrant in question was white Northern European with a middle-class job, a history of back-alley blowjobs not only ceased to be a reason to designate him a legal psychopath, but also ceased being a reason to label him a legal homosexual! The courts literally ruled that his status as an upstanding citizen meant he COULDN'T be a homosexual, they were so blind to the idea that a homosexual could be an upstanding citizen. Whereas in the same time period a Latina lesbian with a similarly well-paying job and similar glowing testimonials from community members, was deported forthwith. The irony is incredible, even if you put aside how politically suspect the concept of an "upstanding citizen" is to begin with.

Anyway, thanks for the heads-up about the Hari book; I will check it out.

[ordinarybirds]

I feel you can predict my next point: white "kids" of various ages being given community service and rehab stays, vs POC dealing with mandatory minimums and getting shoved in prison. I have also seen news reports of pretty white European women having children in the US, which would, born of brown women, be the much hated Anchor Babies*. I personally don't have the sources together to help you dissect the notion of the Upstanding Citizen, but I feel we're both on the same page on how fucked up it is. The legal gymnastics of "not queer for suckin some dick as a pale European" and "no intent to sell as a white kid with a lot of weed" are pretty similar. I think I'm mostly apologetic that I don't have a tidy point; we're both in agreement that this system is fucked. It's easy to assume from certain insular points of view that homophobic/transphobic pathologization has a different significance than racial and/or ableist pathologization, and I feel like, as queer adults with varying experiences, we understand the perils of quibbling over faux moral details to decide who "deserves" to be caught in the chaos of the system? This has been something that's on my mind, especially as tumblr crumbles under the weight of the first amendment.





*i cannot produce a source for this right now so i can't say if it's credible, but frankly a fleet of pretty pale cis women having pretty pale children who can sponsor them for citizenship in a couple decades sounds........beyond reasonable.

[xmarksthespotwhereistand]

Wow, that's super interesting because psychology is kinda conscious of that the diagnosis they can provide is not exact and a pathology is always more complicated than the labels they have the language for so the legal matters need to distance themselves somewhat from medical diagnosis to be able to say something about these matters but then this definition is not even interested in the medical side of the pathology anymore. And it's terrifying because we know full well that it's nothing else but a weapon but also fascinating that psychopathy can have a nob-medical definition (of course it can have but I've never read a text that so explicitly addresses it and now I really would like to)