‘Homosexuality’ and ‘homosexual’ are terms of relatively recent vintage. It would have been meaningless for a man to claim ‘I am a homosexual’ prior to 1869 as the term did not exist. This is not to say that sexual relations between men—what will hereafter simply be called homosexuality—did not occur before this date; they did and have probably done so throughout human history (Greenberg 1988). But prior to the entry of the term into the languages of Western countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century it was not possible to classify a person or to classify oneself as a homosexual. Scholars are divided over whether the term ‘homosexual’ ought to be confine d men who identify themselves as members of a separate sexual category on the basis of their sexual orientation/preference in contrast to a heterosexual majority. Those who argue that it should be confined in this way are often indebted to Michel Foucault’s claim that the homosexual was invented as a sexual species in the second half of the nineteenth century and had a specific childhood, clinical history and personality (Foucault 1978).
Yet some kind of recognition that sexual preference is not always exclusively for the other sex has a history much longer than that of the term ‘homosexual’. Witness, for example, the famous myth of Aristophanes in which the world was once filled with people who were two-sexed—male and female, male and male, or female and female. Zeus split them all in two and since then people have searched for their other half, whether male or female.
The term ‘sodomy’ was used in Europe for centuries to refer to illegal forms of sexuality. It has often been conflated with homosexuality, but was used to refer to a wide range of sexual practices, not only homosexual relations between men. Neither does the term ‘sodomite’ seem to have denoted a specific type of person or identity, as ‘homosexual’ came to do. That said, it may have been the case that some men did recognise themselves to be different on the basis of their sexual preferences even if not to the same extent as today’s gay men. There is, for example, some evidence of this from the Molly subculture of eighteenth-century urban England (Norton 1992).
In the light of the complexity of historical and ethnographic evidence, perhaps it is reasonable to conclude that no clear or abrupt emergence of a ‘homosexual’ can be detected and that there are continuities between the modern category and identity of homosexual, which emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century as an object of medical and legal intervention, and earlier forms of homosexuality
Homosexual relations between men can be classified in different ways on the basis of whether they conform to class-stratified, agestratified, gender-stratified, or egalitarian systems (see Murray 2000). For the ancient Greeks, the distinction between the active and passive (penetrator—penetrated) roles in intercourse was of great importance. The passive role was only acceptable for social ‘inferiors’, women, slaves and male youths, but not adult male citizens. The ideal was a relationship between an adult male in his twenties or thirties and a youth (Halperin 1990; Dover 1978). Age-stratified homosexual relations are known from ancient Greece, Aboriginal Australian cultures and the samurai of Japan. Often, these relations were seen as masculinising boys and young men. Gender-stratified relations have been recorded among the plains Indians of North America, in the Middle East (for example the Xanith of Oman), as well as the Mahu of Tahiti, and in the Mediterranean and parts of Latin American cultures. In gender-stratified systems it is often the case that the man adopting the role of penetrator in anal intercourse is expected to be conventionally masculine while the man who is penetrated is ‘feminised’ and expected to display elements of conventional feminine behaviour. He is also sometimes derided and ascribed lower social standing. Egalitarian systems involve sexual relations between men of the same age and social standing, either during certain periods of life or as part of lifelong relationships. Egalitarian homosexuality has been reported from Dahomey (Benin) in Africa, and most famously, perhaps, at least in the West, in the fabled relations between mythic heroes such as Achilles and Patroclus, and, less mythic, Alexander the Great and Hephaestion. Modern-day western gay masculinities are the most widespread and recognisable expression of egalitarian homosexuality. Although these relationships are sometimes marked by inequalities of age and wealth, there is no cultural expectation or demand that they be so. However, none of the above categories is watertight even in their respective historical and cultural settings (Murray 2000; Herdt 1994). In some cases, homosexual relations are associated with specific cultural and social niches, such as shamanic traditions in Siberia and the berdaches or twospirit people among first nations of North America.
The category of homosexual, like that of heterosexual, took some time to develop. It did so in the context of nineteenth-century sexology which witnessed an explosion of works on forms of human sexual behaviour and an eagerness to classify them. For example, Richard Krafft-Ebing, in 1886, described homosexuality as a perversion among many others and an indicator of social degeneration. More positive in his appraisal was Karl Ulrichs, who considered homosexuality to be the result of a woman’s soul trapped in a man’s body. Homosexual men were ‘inverts’ who displayed the typical gender characteristics of the other sex, including their sexual preference. After his conviction in 1895, the ‘effeminate’ and dandified Oscar Wilde was, perhaps, the best known representative of the newly emerged sexual type. The British reformer Edward Carpenter took a slightly different position, arguing in his The Intermediate Sex (1908) that ‘uranism’, as he termed homosexuality, was not only on the increase but heralded the dawn of a new age of sexual liberation. In Germany, Magnus Hirschfeld campaigned for the rights of homosexuals. The Nazis destroyed his Institute for Sexology in 1933.
The emerging psychiatric profession in the late nineteenth century and onwards played a central role in the construction of the homosexual category. Freud, for one, argued that everyone has homosexual fantasies and dreams. However, he also claimed that these were sublimated into solidarity with persons of the same gender. In his view, it was pointless to try and cordon off homosexuality from heterosexuality, as both develop out of a universal polymorphous perversity or ‘bisexuality’. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Freud opposed the punishment and criminalisation of homosexuality. However, Freud’s teleological view of sexual development, which ought always to lead to genital heterosexuality, inevitably cast homosexuality as an example of arrested development, and hence a’perversion’. It was this aspect of Freud’s thinking that many of his more conservative followers were to emphasise.
Homosexuality was increasingly seen not as a deliberate choice, as in the acts of the sodomite, but as the result of involuntary characteristics over which the individual had little or no control. It became possible to speak of latent homosexuality: that is to say, a man with homosexual inclinations caused by his biological or psychological makeup who did not act on them.
While the terms ‘homosexuality’ and ‘homosexual’ originated as medical labels to denote a perversion or sickness and had stigmatising consequences, they also made it possible for the men so labelled to recognise themselves in the term, to realise that they were not alone, and eventually to organise on the basis of a homosexual identity, however stigmatised. The existence of large cities with a sufficiently large ‘homosexual’ population was an important prerequisite for this development. The first homosexual rights organisation appeared in Germany at the very end of the nineteenth century, and was followed by, for example, the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology (1914), the Mattachine Society in the USA (1950–1) and the Dutch COC (Cultur-en Ontspannings-Centrum (The Culture and Recreation Centre) (1966). Homosexual activists and academics eventually came to question or reject outright many of the theories and medical ‘truths’ about homosexuality and provide alternatives of their own.
The categorisation into predominantly two sexual populations of men, either homosexual or heterosexual, became dominant in Euro-American societies. However, the common belief that homosexual acts were confined to a small minority of exclusively homosexual men was challenged when the American sexologist Alfred Kinsey published the results of his studies into the sexuality of American men in 1948. In it, he reported that 37 per cent of men had been involved in homosexual sex to the point of orgasm. Kinsey’s finding s ca st do ubt ove r the assu mpti men can be neatly divided into a heterosexual majority and a homosexual minority. On the contrary, he devised his famous scale of 0 to 6 to illustrate that sexuality has the character of a continuum rather than clear-cut divisions into sexual types. A score of 0 on the scale denotes exclusive heterosexuality and a score of 6, exclusive homosexuality.
In a groundbreaking article published in 1968, Mary McIntosh argued against seeing homosexuality as a specific condition which you either do or do not have. In her view, the assumption generates an overly dichotomised view of sexuality. It also tends to focus attention on the aetiology of homosexuality. The ‘causes’ of homosexuality have been extensively debated. Explanations included seeing it as a choice, the result of faulty upbringing by dominant mothers or distant fathers, the consequence of being ‘recruited’ or ‘seduced’ into homosexuality at an early age by an older homosexual man, medical theories of hormone imbalance, and most recently the result of a homosexual gene or brain. The claims of these more recent medical searches for the aetiology of homosexuality are hotly debated and considerable doubt has been expressed as to the reliability of their findings (Murray 2000). One obvious difficulty with this research is that it takes as given the homosexual—heterosexual dichotomy and assumes that it refers to two distinct types of men and that the distinction is biologically generated. Situational homosexuality—in the military, in prisons or during certain periods of life (e.g. boarding schools)—casts doubt on this neat division, as do the different ways in which homosexual relations are institutionalised in cultures outside the Euro-American West, as well as the historical variability in homosexual relations found within the same cultural tradition. Another difficulty is that the research only looks for the causes of homosexuality, while viewing heterosexuality as a given in need of no explanation.
Those who believe in a biological cause may do so for very different reasons. Some advocates of homosexual rights argue that it proves the naturalness of homosexuality and therefore refutes the moralists who condemn it as sinful. Other advocates are more cautious and warn that a biological cause can easily be interpreted by the opponents of homosexual rights as a medical ‘fault’ or ‘abnormality’ that ought to be treated or eradicated altogether, either by the abortion of a ‘homosexual’ foetus or the removal of a ‘gay gene’ through genetic engineering.
One of the attractions of a biological explanation also lies in its function as a guarantee that heterosexuality is distinct from and cannot become homosexuality. A biological cause for homosexuality provides heterosexuality with a stable and permanent counterfoil against which to define and stabilise itself. The assumption that male homosexuality always coincides with gender nonconformity (i.e. that all homosexual men are effeminate), and that effeminacy is an accurate predictor of homosexuality, has served the same function of maintaining a clear boundary between homosexual and heterosexual men. The appearance of urban gay subcultures and distinctive gay masculinities in the 1970s to some extent reinforced the notion that two mutually exclusive sexual categories of men exist at the same time as it has helped to undermine the assumption that, with the exception of sexual object choice, homosexuality is always associated with gender non-conformity. Ironically, it was early gay liberation that frequently questioned the validity of the dichotomy. Indeed, in 1971 Dennis Altman looked forward to the day when there were no homosexuals and no heterosexuals either (cf. Hocquenghem 1978:36). This is unlikely to happen as long as sexual preference remains a primary means of categorising people and is expected to predict sex, gender and a host of other characteristics.
References and further reading
Altman, D. [1971] (1993) Homosexual Oppression and Liberation, New York: New York University Press.
Dover, K. (1978) Greek Homosexuality, London: Duckworth.
Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, New York: Pantheon.
Greenberg, D. (1988) The Construction of Homosexuality, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Halperin, D. (1990) One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, and Other Essays on Greek Love, New York: Routledge.
Herdt, G. (1994) Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, New York: Zone Books.
Hocquenghem, G. (1978) Homosexual Desire, translated by Daniella Dangoor, London: Allison and Busby.
McIntosh, M. (1968) ‘The homosexual role’, Social Problems, 16 (Fall): 182–92.
Murphy, T. (1997) Gay Science: The Ethics of Sexual Orientation Research, New York: Columbia University Press.
Murray, S. (2000) Homosexualities, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Norton, R. (1992) Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700–1830, London: The Gay Men’s Press.
Plummer, K. (ed.) (1981) The Making of th e Mode Homosexual, London: Hutchinson
