Okay. Well, let's begin way back at the beginning and could you tell a little bit about your background before you became involved with ALGP and of course Division 44.
[Stephen Morin] Okay, we're going way back. Well. I was born in Amherst, Massachusetts in an academic environment. I started at 16 working in the Amherst College psychology rat lab mostly cleaning up in the labs, but I also learned some simple statistics and things like that. I graduated from U Mass Amherst right down the road and then went to Ohio State for graduate school in developmental psychology with an emphasis on social. Went from there to my first teaching job at Cal State University in San Bernardino, where I taught mostly – I taught a great deal on tests and measurements and statistics. And research design – those kind of courses. But I also, I'm going a little out of order, but I also got permission to start the second fully-accredited gay studies course in the country.
The story about ALGP really starts in Hawaii at the [1972] APA meeting. There I started meeting people at one of the talks – it was for psychologists debating: Are homosexuals sick? And of course, they had no gay people on the panel and they said that that was their oversight, but they didn't want to ruin anybody's career.
There I met Marty Rogers at that meeting and the two of us plotted a lot on what we would do about it.
We decided we would found an Association of Lesbian and Gay Psychologists.
We then put together a symposium with only gay psychologists at the Montreal Convention [1973], which was the next year after Honolulu. Everyone who spoke said “I'm doctor so-and-so and I'm openly gay or lesbian” as the case may be. And then proceeded to give the same talks that everyone else was giving but it was kind of revolutionary to start that way.
And, it was. Probably. The time. What was it? 1973, I think. At any rate, ALGP wanted to also have a press event.
So, we had a press event and at the time I was chairing the group. So, I got to convene the press conference. And I thought, well, this will be a breeze because we were demanding certain things at the APA.
I think we had 10 demands. Back in the seventies, people didn't have requests. They had demands.
It was a kind of an activist crowd and we had this press conference. Which went pretty well.
Our major demand was that our APA encourage the other APA to drop homosexuality as a diagnosis in the DSM. Which didn't seem all that radical. But then we went on to say that it was most important that the APA adopt a series of actions to help remove the stigma long associated with homosexual orientations.
We called all our demands “Remove the Stigma” for years. We have come a long way since the seventies.
Some of our members decided to boycott [a session on behavioral therapy for homosexuals] and they would, you know, one would get in a dress and the other would, you know imitate masturbation in the hallway as people were going in to hear the lecture. It culminated with having a conversation with this psychologist who hadn't really thought through the issues. And he turned to our side finally. So that was an interesting side bit from that convention.
It all seems absurd now what we were dealing with and what the general state of the psychology was at that time was ridiculous. But several people started writing papers and getting them published and that started the movement.
The most immediate reaction for me personally was that an article appeared after this press conference in the San Bernardino County Sun Telegram, which is a local paper in San Bernardino. And I immediately got a message from the president of the university saying I was to have no contact with any students. And I was relieved from my duties immediately, from having to teach. It wasn't quite being fired, but it was leading to it.
So I was kind of surprised. I didn't think first of all, I didn't think anyone read this paper. And second, I didn't think it would be that big a deal. But it was.
And I was treasurer of our local United Professors of California, which was a union of professors. And they came in and represented me in the negotiations. And out of it came a statement that openly homosexual faculty can teach anywhere in the in the system, the university system.
So we won that, which was a landmark kind of thing because most of the reasons that people were staying closeted was fear of losing their employment.
This is the early '70s. So. Yeah, that first thing that happened was very inconvenient. I was separated from my students for a while and then I fought back and everything worked out.
As far as all our demands, they were sent to this board of APA. And the next thing we demanded was representation; which was fun; since then and there they put me on that board.
And a lot of it they just went through and the association started adopting a much more progressive view, more aligned with our thinking than the previous general psychological thought.
And that also resulted in a backlash organized against us. And for a while they were, this was all being debated in the APA's Council of Representatives. Then debated through various symposia at the conventions. That went on for a while. ...
So. What was the next step? The next step was 1975 that I published a paper in the American Psychologist called “Heterosexual Bias in Psychological Research on Lesbians and Gay Men.” And I went through 100 and somewhat papers, all of which were trying to somehow diagnose or fix the perceived problem. And there were only a couple... I think there were 10 that looked at attitudes, but that was it. So that caused a bit of a stir.
It started me talking to Evelyn [Hooker] and of course we ended up being best friends after a while; but she was a character, and we had to get through her issues.
In 1975. I moved to San Francisco to start an internship and to teach one course at Cal State San Francisco. And then I got licensed and started private practice with Don Clark, who was pretty well known for his book, Loving Someone Gay; and you know it was a network of the more humanistic gay psychologists.
ALGP keeps on going here, but we got to a point where the debate changed to: Should we be a division or not? The question had arisen very early on, but the mood of the group in the early seventies was we prefer to be advocates rather than establish a division [of APA].
A lot of the people in the early days were more into various movements. There was gay liberation movement and all the women's movement, and it was anti-war and it was you know a time to be an activist. And they didn't want to give it up to just be doing research.
[Doug Kimmel] Right, we're talking about the late 1970s.
[Stephen Morin] Yeah. That changed over of the next – I don't know how many years it was, maybe 10, something like that.
It was about this time that Division 44 was established. But a lot of the people promoting that were people like Alan Malyon from Los Angeles and some of the others and some of the people who were more research inclined, Dorothy Riddle and some of the more academic members of the ALGP were leading.
The question that I always had and kept on raising is, do we have enough to fill up, you know, fill the allotted time at the convention with our papers in our research? And most of which was being conducted by young people and largely in social psychology.
And so it was timely when we had enough of a literature to move on to a division. Which it was a process of applying for division status with the [APA] Council of Representatives – which approved it on the first go, which is interesting. They often take a while to approve new divisions.
So thus we were founded and I can't remember the year [1985]. And I don't remember much of the detail.
[Doug Kimmel] And it was a wonderful, wonderful first convention and Kris Hancock became our first elected president.
[Stephen Morin] Oh, right. Yes, of course.
[Doug Kimmel] And I learned talking to her recently that she was a graduate student of yours.
[Stephen Morin] Yes, yes. Yeah, the California School of Professional Psychology. Also in Berkeley. ...
And even back in those early days I did a study where we interviewed – I had two graduate students interviewing people – about attitudes towards homosexuality and on one condition – they're male and female – they'd wear in one condition they'd wear a “Gay and Proud” button; the other condition they'd have no button. So male or female interacting. So the real measure was the social distance in a chair that they would move from the interviewer. And we didn't find any difference really with the women interacting with the supposed lesbian. But the men would sit like, 7 or 8 inches further away.
So right when we were publishing this on social distance and attitudes towards lesbians and gay men, the [APA] Council passed this resolution that you can't publish anything unless you've debriefed people who were deceived in the experiment. Which was fine, except it excluded publishing that paper!
So, yeah, so my original thoughts were show me some data that would be comparable to the science that was going on in some of the other divisions [before we applied to become a division].
And it took a while for people and they were largely graduate students who did these studies.
But there were studies; and there were things to put in a literature. And you know, you go all the way to today and there's a new name, new journal. And you know, the science is back. There, so it took a while.
It just took a while because people, as my 1975 paper pointed out, no one was really looking at these issues. They'd all started with an assumption of pathology. And they were trying to find out on the Rorschach or the MMPI or whatever what the trick was to diagnosing 'this problem' so that prevention could take its course.
[Editor's note: Excerpted from the transcript of the Division 44 History Project interview with Stephen F. Morin by Doug Kimmel on September 19, 2023.]