ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the contours and limits of the paradigm shift away from a disease paradigm to a stigma paradigm for making sense of homosexuality that led up to Laura Brown's speech. Thomas Kuhn critiqued the assumption that knowledge develops by accumulation, and instead foregrounded moments of revolutionary change in science – paradigm shifts – periods when it becomes unclear which of several paradigms should have epistemological priority in making the best sense of reality. In Kuhnian terms, homophobia research was in something of a pre-paradigm-shift state in the late 1970s; researchers independently developed several questionnaires that made incommensurate assumptions about what homophobia and homosexuality were. Two theoretical developments originating within counseling psychology in the 1980s have had particularly lasting effects on lesbian and gay psychology: stage models of identity and the explanation of identity failures as effects of internalized homophobia.
