EVELYN HOOKER, STUDIED BEHAVIOR OF HOMOSEXUALS.

Byline: The New York Times

Dr. Evelyn Hooker, a psychologist who defied conventional wisdom and greatly emboldened the fledgling homosexual rights movement in the 1950s by finding there was no measurable psychological difference between homosexual and heterosexual men, died Monday at her home in Santa Monica. She was 89.

Hooker, who spent 30 years teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, began studying homosexual men in the late 1940s, a period in which they were considered maladjusted - at best - and generally ignored or anathematized by the medical and mental health professions.

``She never treated us like some strange tribe,'' recalled writer Christopher Isherwood, who knew her at the time, ``so we told her things we never told anyone before.''

Her most significant work was a paper delivered in 1956 to the American Psychological Association in Chicago and published the next year as ``The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual'' in The Journal of Projective Techniques.

Hooker administered three standard personality tests, including the Rorschach ink-blot test, to two groups of 30 men, one heterosexual, one homosexual, who had been matched in IQs, age and education levels.

She then asked a panel of expert clinicians to assess the results without knowing the subjects' sexual orientation. To their surprise, the judges were unable to discern between the two groups on the basis of the test.

``The most striking finding of the three judges,'' Hooker wrote, ``was that many of the homosexuals were very well adjusted. In fact, the three judges agreed on two-thirds of the group as being average to superior in adjustment. Not only do all homosexuals not have strong feminine identification, nor are they all `somewhat paranoid,' but, according to the judges, some may not be characterized by any demonstrable pathology.''

Her study was criticized in many quarters, not least because it upended psychological orthodoxy. Among other objections was that she recruited her homosexual subjects through the assistance of ``homophile'' groups like the Mattachine Society, meaning that the men might be more content with their lives than the average homosexual and eager to prove that they were well adjusted.

Moreover, the study was published in a journal that did not reach a wide public audience. Nonetheless, it was considered a precursor to the decision 17 years later by the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

``Her work in the 1950s really provided the framework within which the American Psychiatric Association could rethink its viewpoint,'' said Dr. Richard A. Isay, clinical professor of psychiatry at the Cornell University Medical College.

And 36 years after Hooker addressed the American Psychological Association, the organization gave her its award for distinguished contribution to psychology in the public interest.