The shift from a disease model of homosexuality to the view of lesbians and gay men as a stigmatized group targeted by homophobia is one of the most dramatic shifts in the ideology of the social sciences in the late 20th century. Evelyn Hooker’s 1957 challenge to the “projective hypothesis” that a signature homosexual personality could be discerned from responses to the inkblots ambiguous figures is often credited with ending a widespread belief that the Rorschach test could diagnose homosexuals. Her paper is pivotal to this narrative in which social psychology – rather than clinical psychology – comes to define homosexuality in the discipline of psychology.

This paper aims to complicate this celebratory narrative by examining where the relationship between homosexuality and the Rorschach returned in the emerging science of social psychology, and how that relationship became forgotten, in the decades after Hooker’s critique. In the early 1960s, Dana Bramel examined men’s likelihood to project homosexuality onto Rorschach responses of others in cognitive dissonance studies. Later that decade, belief in the projective hypothesis around the homosexual personality was used by Lauren and Jean Chapman to ontologize stereotypes and clinical biases as the workings of a cognitive mechanism called the “illusory correlation.” However, social psychologists have written both studies out of the historical memory of the field for reasons that pertain to ethics, and the prioritizing of studies of racial prejudice over homophopbia. There were only a handful of studies examining homosexuality and the Rorschach prior to Hooker’s work, and that work did not definitively excise the projective hypothesis from the psychology of homosexuality. Rather, Rorschach researchers into the 20th century debated the validity of ‘homosexual signs’ even into the 21st century. Even after depathologization, the Rorschach remained associated with homosexuality as researchers explored projective hypotheses around schizophrenia, HIV/AIDS and gender nonconformity and transsexuality.