| Sumario: | Homophile organizations at midcentury have long been linked to the "rise and fall" of professions like psychiatry in the American political landscape. In this paper, I engage the various ways that leaders of the homophile movement engaged the professions. In particular, I interpret their close attention to the sources of scientific authority as a "waystation to freedom," a term I borrow from political theorist Nancy Luxon. I suggest that homophile organizations' engagement with psychiatric and social scientific research transformed homosexual audiences from subjects-as-patients into subject-participants, carved out a newly authoritative role for the magazines' audiences, and marked their self-knowledge as methodologically and politically central. These engagements with research perform a kind of "temporal drag" on the present and suggest new ways for contemporary queer theory to engage the homophile movement.
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