Donald Webster Cory
Edward Sagarin, better known by his pseudonym Donald Webster Cory, was a sociologist who played an important role in the homophile movement. He was born in 1913 in Schenectady, New York, and under his real name, Sagarin, received a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University in 1966 and became a professor of sociology at City College of the City University of New York. He wrote about homosexuality in his professional life, framing homosexuality as deviant, which was common at the time.
Under the name Cory, however, he published a 1951 book titled The Homosexual in America, which had a very different tone. This book presented gay men and lesbians as an oppressed minority and advocated for LGBTQ+ people to come out in order to achieve equal rights. The book influenced several other early leaders of the homophile movement, including Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameny. Building on the success of The Homosexual in America, he started the Cory Book Service, which distributed books with LGBTQ+ themes. He also became a contributing editor for ONE Magazine and a member of the Mattachine Society.
As the gay and lesbian movement became more radical, Cory became more critical. In particular, he disagreed with the belief that homosexuality was not a mental illness. Influenced by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Cory thought that an unstable home life and strong attachment to one parent led to homosexuality. While he wrote in The Homosexual in America that gay people deserve fair treatment, he disliked the fact that many readers interpreted this statement to mean that homosexuality was not a mental illness. His later writings, including The Homosexual and His Society (1963) and the introduction to Albert Ellis’s book Homosexuality: Its Causes and Cures (1965), argued that gay men and lesbians were inherently compulsive and neurotic and could never be well-adjusted.
Sagarin refused to acknowledge his pseudonym, but was outed at the 1974 convention of the American Sociological Association. Speaking on a panel about homosexuality, he criticized scholarship that conflicted with his views about homosexuality and mental illness. Another panelist, Laud Humphreys, referred to him as “Mr. Cory.” After the incident, Sagarin stopped studying homosexuality professionally.
Sagarin was born with severe scoliosis, a lateral curvature of the spine. Historian Martin Duberman reports that Sagarin referred to his condition as “his posture problem…, wryly distancing himself from the memories of childhood pain.” Additionally, while Sagarin wrote about the rights of certain disabled people, including people with schizophrenia and little people, he never explicitly connected disability rights with his own experiences, reflecting another attempt to further distance himself from disability. Writing as Cory, he did not acknowledge disability at all, aside from the stigmatizing ways that he depicted all LGBTQ+ people as mentally ill. His refusal to come out as gay may be connected to his distancing from disability, demonstrating an intention to separate himself from pathologized identities in a time of significant systemic ableism and homophobia.