The Daily Agenda for Saturday, December 26

Jim Burroway

December 26th, 2015

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From Data Boy,December 23, 1982, page 29.

From Data Boy,December 23, 1982, page 29.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Body Build of Male Homosexuals: 1959. In many ways, just about everyone (including most of the mental health community) saw gay people, particularly gay men, as being so alien as to almost constitute a different species. Well, maybe not a different species literally, but for some, gay men were at least some sort of a mutation of homo sapiens, and were not like just any common man on the street. On December 26, 1959, the august British Medical Journal published a short paper by Dr. A.J. Coppen, of the Institute of Psychiatry in London who believed that he had proven, on the basis of physical measurements of just thirty-one gay men, that there was a distinct body build associated with homosexuality in men — and it was the same body build associated with mental patients.

He came to this determination by measuring the shoulders and hips of three groups of people. “The homosexual group,” he wrote, “consisted of 31 patients who had been either exclusively homosexual or predominantly homosexual, with only occasional heterosexual activity. The patients had attended the Maudsley Hospital primarily for homosexuality; the majority had been referred from the courts after they had been convicted of homosexual offences.” Because a number of them had “psychiatric symptoms” of “mainly depression or anxiety” (is there any wonder?), he included “another control group of 22 heterosexual neurotics, … as any differences found in the homosexuals may be related to the differences widely reported in psychiatric patients rather than to their specific sexual abnormalities.” The third group, a control group, consisted of 53 members of a business organization “who were attending for mass radiography,” and who agreed to be part of the study.

For all three groups, Coppen measured the circumference around their shoulders (biacromial) and hips (bi-illiac), calculated an equivalent diameter (he doesn’t say how), and used those measurements to determine what he called an “androgyny score” (3 x biacromial – x bi-iliac diameters, in cm.). Coppen scoured the literature to provide evidence to support his contention that such a score could detect deficiencies in masculinity in men — because, as they all knew in the 1950s, all homosexuals suffered from this very deficiency:

Raboch (1957) found a decreased biacromial diameter in hypogonadal men and in men with female sex chromatin. Lindegard (1956) showed that size of penis was correlated with the androgyny score. Patients suffering from pre-eclamptic toxaemia and frigidity have been found to have abnormally masculine androgyny scores (Coppen, 1958). Thus there is evidence that subjects who suffer from certain abnormalities related to sexual function will show abnormalities in their androgyny score. The hypothesis tested in the present investigation is that homosexuals have abnormally feminine androgyny scores.

And with those measurements, Coppen determined that:

Androgyny ScoresThe results show that homosexuals have a decreased androgyny score and biacromial diameter compared with the control group. This difference, however, is not specific for homosexuality, as the neurotic patients in this study also differ from the controls to approximately the same extent as regards both androgyny and biacromial width. The androgyny score does not discriminate between homosexuals and controls better than does the biacromial diameter, though, as the Chart shows, three homosexual patients have very low androgyny scores, outside the range of the other two groups. It appears, therefore, that homosexuals are similar to people with other psychiatric disorders in having decreased breadth measurements, but that their sexual abnormality is not specifically related to these. Rather it seems that the homosexual is influenced by the similar (unknown) factors that produce the abnormalities in body-build found in other psychiatric patients.

This article from 1959 is an interesting holdover from an early path of investigation that is reminiscent of nineteenth-century Phrenology. That discarded science is perhaps best known today for its busts and diagrams of human skulls with dotted outlines of areas denoted with labels like “Friendship” or “Adhesiveness” (see Aug 6). Phrenologists believed that different areas of the brain consisted of “organs” relating to different character traits. Early on, they also believed that it was possible to determine the different developmental levels of these “organs” by relating them to the shape of an individuals skull with its various bumps and bulges.

That last theory was soon discarded, but the idea that an individual’s character traits could somehow be imprinted on that person’s physical development was firmly established in the scientific imagination. In the late 1800s the Italian Cesare Lombroso, who is credited for founding the discipline of Criminology, drew on phrenology, Degeneracy Theory (see Aug 16Sep 9, or Oct 26 for brief explanations) and Social Darwinism to argue that criminality was an inherited trait rather than an impulse of human nature. Lombroso argued that criminals, would-be criminals, and other “defectives” could be diagnosed via their anatomical features such as the shape of the forehead, ear sizes, limb sizes, asymmetrical features and other “stigmata of degeneracy.” The appearance of children with Down’s Syndrome, for example, only seemed to confirm these theories.

By the end of the first third of the twentieth century, such theories had been largely discarded. But some of the ideas that took root in those theories took a lot longer to die off.  Texts on homosexuality right up through through the 1950s often had several paragraphs dwelling on the physical characteristics of their study subjects, and some even included nude photos to illustrate purported masculine deficiencies. By the late 1950s, those descriptions had mostly disappeared from the literature, which make this 1959 article something of an interesting anachronism.

[Source: A.J. Coppen. “Body-Build of Male Homosexuals.” British Medical Journal no. 5164, vol 2 (December 26, 1959): 1443-1445. Available online here.]

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

Ben in oakland

December 26th, 2015

Silly Doctor! Don’t you know it was the tiny bit of heterosexuality in the subjects, coupled with seeing a psychiatrist, that made them queer?

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