Jan gay

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What made her research all the more radical is that Gay herself was openly a lesbian. In honor of the 100th anniversary of her birth this year, I have reconstructed parts of Gay’s life through material held at the Library of Congress and the Johns Hopkins Medical Archives, as well as from letters sent to me from a family member of Gay’s.

After Sex Variants was published, Gay left science to work in public relations.

When Gay sent the same questionnaire to other schools, only some expressed greater openness to the idea that they might have queer students in their ranks. Were “the instances of sexual contact between girls numerous?”

Barnard College’s physician, Gulielma Alsop, wrote back the day after receiving her letter.

Gay contacted the gynecologist and birth control advocate Robert Latou Dickinson, who proposed that the two of them collaborate on a larger study of homosexuality.

Beginning at the end of the 19th century, American physicianschurned out case studies of patients suffering from a disease they sometimes dubbed “sexual perversion,” usually with an explicit tone of contempt. In the 1940s, she began dating the dancer Franziska Boas and lived with her in a shabby apartment in Chelsea.

She conducted in-depth interviews with many of her new acquaintances. The research team asked hundreds of questions about each person’s employment history, family background, and sexual experience—covering everything from their diet in early childhood to their relationship to animals. 1910 (Photo by Kirn Vintage Stock/Corbis via Getty Images)

Jan Gay was born with the name Helen Reitman on February 14, 1902 in Leipzig, Germany.

But there was a hitch—her publisher wanted a more established scholar to “validate” her work, according to the book Departing from Deviance.

Today, we have many ways to remember Gay: as a picture-book author, a nudist leader, and the one-time roommate of Andy Warhol. The doctor William A. Hammond warned at the start of one paper that the case studies he was about to present might be “distressing and disgusting” to readers, but “so long as human nature exists such instances will occur and physicians must be prepared to treat them.”

When Gay had finished her interviews, she compiled them into a 70,000-word book, which she tentatively titled Sociological Aspects of Female Homosexuality. She said in one 1935 letter that an unnamedLondon press had accepted it for publication.

In one series of letters in 1939, Gay sent a printed questionnaire to universities like Barnard College. Other types of organizing in the queer community hadn’t worked: In 1924, just months after a small queer organization called the Society for Human Rights formed in Chicago, police raided it and shut it down. In its initial outline, the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants noted that the subjects of its study “were to be obtained through the services of Miss Jan Gay,” adding—euphemistically—that Gay had “close contact with this field for a number of years.” (The committee knew that Gay was queer.

He recruited dozens of academics, many of whom were professional psychologists with little other connection to the queer community, to form the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants—the earliest research group in the United States to focus on queer people.

Gay was assigned a chaperone, a psychologist at New York Hospital named George W.

Henry.