Sexual Orientation

SEXUAL ORIENTATION

SEXUAL ORIENTATION. During the late twentieth century, "sexual orientation," rather than "sexual preference," became the preferred term among lesbian/gay civil rights activists in the United States for the classification they hoped to add to existing civil rights law. The terms of the debate grew out of the mix of moral, psychiatric, and legal discourses that had framed debates about sexual practice, sexual identity, and their significance since the 1860s. Those terms emerged from a much larger nexus of deeply embedded assumptions that began to undergo major changes during the second half of the nineteenth century as improving middle-class professionals conducted research and developed conceptual frameworks for organizing the varieties of human sexual functioning.

The prospect of building one's identity to some significant degree around the gender of one's sexual object choice is in all likelihood a mostly modern and urban phenomenon. Evidence clearly indicates that many cultures institutionalize same-sex sexual activity in some form. Much scholarly debate erupted during the 1980s and 1990s over whether other cultures ever developed meanings and practices around the belief that the gender of one's sexual object choice marks one as a particular type of person—a "homosexual" or a "heterosexual"—with identifiable personality characteristics and, in some accounts, some form of psychopathology if one's choices differ from the majority's.

Before the Twentieth Century

Historical evidence indicates that in the United States and western Europe, notions of "sexual orientation" in psychiatry, law, and politics emerged in the last third of the nineteenth century and have continued to develop since. Yet other evidence indicates remarkable continuity in the composition of gay male subcultures in the major cities of the United States and western Europe as far back as the seventeenth century. While many members of those subcultures were married, the subcultures' existence depended on the increased separation of economic production from family life that came about during the early modern period. That gay men were far more readily visible than lesbians reflects the extent to which cultural formations around same-sex desire were creations of individuals with significant access to disposable income and/or public space. Periodic police repression of those subcultures' denizens and institutions did not produce any systematic political organizing around a shared identity until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Germany and England.

Researchers first coined the terms we now associate with sexual orientation—"homosexual" and "heterosexual"—in 1869, with much of the important early work taking place in Europe. Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis wrote systematically about variations in sexual practice; their work paralleled, but remained distinct from, related developments in other areas of psychology. Germans Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld and Englishmen John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter pioneered advocacy of equal treatment for sexual minorities, borrowing from and modifying the ideas of Krafft-Ebing and Ellis. Krafft-Ebing and Ellis, Ulrichs, Hirschfeld, Symonds, and Carpenter also inspired the Chicago activist Henry Gerber, who in 1924 founded the Society for Human Rights, the first known homophile organization in the United States. In 1925 police raided his apartment, arrested him, and confiscated his membership list, all without a warrant.

Similarly, lesbian couples existed throughout early modern European and American history. The large cohort of never-married women who led the social reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States produced numerous "Boston marriages" of female couples who shared households. Any sexual activity these women engaged in typically caused little if any suspicion at the time, but has since produced considerable historical debate. More famous were such unapologetically lesbian expatriates as Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Natalie Barney.

Categories of Sexual Identity

The much-publicized 1929 trial to determine if British novelist Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness violated New York obscenity statutes with its depiction of a lesbian life encapsulated the debates of the previous sixty years and presaged future disputes about the characteristics associated with homosexual identity. The disinclination to attribute a sexual component to the intense romantic friendships between men and between women of the late nineteen century had increasingly given way to a strong suspicion about same-sex relationships as sexologists and psychiatrists began to impute sexual activity to such relationships with or without evidence. Contemporary observers found in The Well of Loneliness an overly positive portrayal of lesbian identity (in contrast to late-twentieth-century critics, who found in the novel the worst sort of negative stereotype), which they understood exclusively in terms of psychopathology. As indicated by the cases of Gerber and Hall, however, the emergence of a medical explanation for homosexuality in terms of mental illness did not automatically settle the question of how the law in the United States should treat such persons. Most sexologists and psychiatrists called for an end to legal persecution of what they called homosexuals in favor of treatment designed to "cure" what they considered a developmental failure. But major legislative and policy changes would have to await the increasingly militant social movement of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons that emerged after World War II.

Indeed, the efforts of certain medical experts notwithstanding, the new notion that acts of sodomy indicated a homosexual person served more often to buttress than undermine the sorts of moral condemnation that led to legal restrictions. The framework for efforts to cure lesbians and gay men, and to continue legal sanctions against them, rested heavily on psychoanalytic theory, which posited heterosexual identity and practice as the only "mature" outcome of sexual development. Sigmund Freud, the originator of psychoanalysis, famously wrote to an American woman in response to a letter asking about her gay son. Freud stated that he considered homosexual identity a failure of development, but he also stated that he saw no reason for either treatment or prosecution of homosexuals. American psychiatrists and psychoanalysts mostly disagreed until the 1970s.

From their own perspective, sexologists, psychiatrists, and others who conducted research into the proliferating categories of sexual identity from roughly 1869 to 1970 rigorously separated their scientific work from political considerations. They saw their proliferating taxonomies of sexual perversions as empirical reflections of the cases they observed. To modern historians, though, the conceptual frameworks that researchers brought to questions of sexual practice and identity clearly reveal anxieties and assumptions about proper gender roles and social order, especially in terms of race and class, as well as proper sexual activity. The first late-nineteenth-century studies of women who passed as men and/or engaged in sexual relationships with other women described those women as "inverts" and emphasized their gender nonconformity as much as their sexual practice. In the context of official assumptions about male sexual aggressiveness and female sexual passivity, any sexual initiative by a woman could be read only as her adoption of an inappropriately masculine identity. Such research into sexuality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries paralleled other attempts to naturalize the existing order by finding the roots not only of sexual identity, but also of racial, gender, and class identity and even of the propensity for criminal activity, in the physiological dictates of a biological body.

The conjunction between sexual and racial identity, on one hand, and national identity on the other became clear with restrictions on immigration, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In 1917, Congress adopted a set of exclusions based on the medical expertise of public health officials. The "constitutional psychopathic inferiority" category included "constitutional psychopaths and inferiors, the moral imbeciles, the pathological liars and swindlers, the defective delinquents, many of the vagrants and cranks, and persons with abnormal sexual instincts," according to a Public Health Service report. Exclusions aimed at lesbian and gay aliens, variously defined, would remain in American immigration law until 1990.

Debates among legal and medical elites had relatively little impact outside the self-improving middle class before World War II. Major cities continued to harbor significant subcultures of men and women for whom same-sex relationships were central to their lives, but the evidence from New York City indicates that it was still possible, especially for working-class men, to enjoy the occasional sexual encounter with a "fairy" or "faggot," a man who accepted a feminized gender identity as part of his decision to reveal his sexual attraction to other men. The man who played the insertive role, whether in oral or anal intercourse, could retain his identity as "normal," not "heterosexual," because that category was as class-specific and as recent as "homosexual."

Anti-Gay and Lesbian Policies and Practices

Henry Gerber's pioneering resistance to persecution based on sexual identity remained unemulated in the United States until after World War II, a conflict that would prove as significant for notions of sexual orientation—and for political organizing around them—as it did for all other areas of American life. During the 1930s, the Nazis systematically destroyed the work of sex researcher and reformer Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish physician who led a vigorous civil rights movement in Germany until Hitler assumed power in January 1933. The following May, Nazi youth raided Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexual Research and publicly burned its contents. The Nazis strengthened existing laws against same-sex sexual activity and sent violators to concentration camps.

In the United States, anti-gay policies were less heavy-handed. Before World War II, various state and local laws prohibited not only sodomy, but also such practices as appearing publicly in the dress of the "opposite" gender. Sodomy laws provided justification for arresting lesbians as well as gay men in those jurisdictions where the courts applied the laws to cunnilingus or other lesbian sexual activity. The vagueness of those laws, often relying on terms such as "crimes against nature," left wide latitude for decisions about enforcement. Even in the absence of arrest and trial, however, lesbians and gay men suffered by the existence of such legislation, which served as de facto permission for various forms of harassment, from garden-variety taunting on the street through denial of child custody to lesbian mothers, whom the court presumed to violate sodomy laws.

Despite the legal obstacles, lesbians and gay men managed to create relatively visible identities and enclaves at least in major American cities before World War II. A flourishing, highly visible gay male subculture emerged in New York City during the 1890s and continued through the beginnings of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Economic hardship brought cultural conservatism and a consequent crackdown on the bars, drag balls, and other spaces where gay men had congregated—often entertaining large crowds of "straight" or "normal" people in the process—during the preceding decades. Undoubtedly, New York City was unique in this respect as in many others, but evidence indicates the existence of lesbian and gay networks and subcultures in other cities during this period as well.

World War II and the Emergence of Political Activity

During World War II military leaders for the first time relied heavily on psychiatric classifications as the basis for excluding various "undesirables" from the military and for discharging those who managed to get in anyway. However, wide variation in the attitudes of military psychiatrists and officers combined with a dire need for personnel to produce huge discrepancies in the treatment of men and women whose same-sex activity became known. Official policy called for their dishonorable discharge, but many either conducted themselves such that they never got caught or had the good fortune to serve under a commander who looked the other way.

The war contributed to future political organizing around issues of sexual practice and identity in at least two ways. It created a pool of increasingly politicized veterans who saw their dishonorable discharges for homosexuality as an injustice. It also left large numbers of discharged military personnel and wartime industrial workers in major cities where they could build their identities around their sexual desires. During the 1950s, two major divisions emerged that through the rest of the twentieth century would undermine the social and political solidarity among homosexuals that the diagnostic term implied. These divisions were reflected in the creation of the first two major postwar homophile organizations, the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis.

The existence of two separate organizations was the result of distinct sets of priorities for lesbians and gay men, which constituted the first division. The mostly male Mattachine Society focused on the police entrapment and prosecution of men who cruised for sex in public places. The women who formed the Daughters of Bilitis were more concerned about problems such as child custody and the needs for social interaction of their members, who were less likely to have the sorts of public outlets that gay men had created. The two organizations adopted very similar approaches to reform, emphasizing education and efforts at conformity. But tensions between lesbians and gay men in political organizations persisted.

The second division lay in the distinction between radical and reformist agendas. The five men who formed the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950 were all current or former members of the Communist Party who used organizing techniques and tools of political analysis that they had learned from their Party work. They began to develop an account of homosexual identity as a distinct cultural and political phenomenon around which they could build a movement of resistance to oppression, including open challenges to police entrapment and other forms of discrimination. During the second Red Scare, the period of McCarthyism from roughly 1950 to 1954, the federal government fired more workers for suspicion of homosexuality than for suspicion of communism. But most members of the Mattachine Society proved unwilling to fight both battles at once. In 1953, conservative members took over as the communist founders and their allies left the organization. The conservatives chose to minimize the differences between homosexuals and the heterosexual majority by using activities such as blood drives to establish themselves as solid citizens. Just as gender difference would continue to define lesbian and gay civil rights organizing, so the movement would continue to split between those who saw sexual minorities as one among many that labored under an oppressive system in dire need of fundamental change and those who hoped to assimilate as lesbians and gay men with the surrounding society.

A surprising element entered the debate with the publication of the Kinsey Reports on the sexual behavior of human males in 1948 and of human females in 1953. Alfred Kinsey, an entomologist by training, changed dramatically the study of sex by focusing on individuals' reports of their activities without relying on a predetermined moral or developmental framework. He concluded that 95 percent of the population violated the law with their sexual activity, that one-third of adult males had had some sort of homosexual experience, and that roughly 10 percent of the United States population was lesbian or gay. Kinsey's figures, especially the estimate of the lesbian/gay population, would continue to play a central role in debates over lesbian/gay civil rights, with activists trumpeting the 10 percent figure as part of their demand for political recognition and opponents disputing it with their own estimates, while vilifying Kinsey himself at every opportunity.

Growing Militance and Growing Success

Discrimination in federal employment and security clearances became a major focal point for homophile organizing during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Washington, D.C., chapter of the Mattachine Society organized pickets at various major public buildings, including the White House, in 1965. Though small, these demonstrations involved public acknowledgment of lesbian and gay identity, which was a huge step at the time, even for activists. That same year, in a general liberalizing of immigration law that removed the racist national origins quota system, Congress reinforced the prohibition on lesbian and gay aliens. Ten years later, however, after losing a federal court decision, the Civil Service Commission announced that it would no longer claim homosexual identity as a basis for discrimination in federal employment. Therefore, President William Jefferson Clinton technically added nothing new in 1998 when he put "sexual orientation" on a list of categories by which federal employers must not discriminate. But the symbolic gesture did precipitate an amendment in the House of Representatives to repeal it, which failed by a vote of 252 to 176. The issue at that point had solidified into a dispute between those who supported extending protections against discrimination based on race and gender to include sexual orientation and those who opposed such extension.

A major prop used to justify discrimination based on sexual orientation was the claim that all homosexuals suffered some psychopathology. During the 1950s, psychologist Evelyn Hooker had established that mental health professionals using standard diagnostic techniques could not reliably distinguish homosexual from heterosexual men. Critics of the psychopathology claim noted that its proponents consistently based all of their findings on populations that were incarcerated or had sought counseling without bothering to determine if those populations were representative of homosexuals as a whole. With the growing militance of the lesbian and gay civil rights movement after the still-celebrated Stonewall Riots of June 1969, the official characterization of homosexuality as mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) became a target for protest. Activists at first disrupted APA meetings, shouting down psychiatrists who claimed to have cured lesbians and gay men by making heterosexuals of them. Sympathetic psychiatrists arranged for panels at subsequent meetings on which lesbian and gay activists could present evidence and argument for their mental health. In 1973, the APA officially decided to eliminate homosexuality as a diagnosis, but a significant minority dissented. Adherents of the thesis that homosexuality is a psychopathology increasingly allied themselves with political conservatives, emerging again during the late 1990s to support the Christian right's "ex-gay" movement of individuals who claimed to have converted to heterosexuality as part of their conversion to Christianity.

During the early 1970s, lesbian and gay activists enjoyed several successes, getting sodomy laws repealed and rights laws enacted in numerous jurisdictions. In 1977, however, voters in Dade County, Florida, repealed a lesbian and gay rights ordinance by almost 70 percent, setting off a series of similar repeals in Wichita, Kansas, St. Paul, Minnesota, and other locations. Christian conservatives led the charge in repeal efforts, claiming that homosexuality was a moral failing, not a minority identity, and therefore deserved no civil rights protections. Although the National Gay Task Force had existed since 1973, the Dade County ordinance fight was a major event in forging a national sense of political solidarity among lesbians and gay men. Similarly, the election of gay activist Harvey Milk to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978 cemented that city's status as the center of lesbian and gay culture and politics in the United States.

During the 1980s, the epidemic of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) dramatically increased the sense of political solidarity among lesbians and gay men around the nation. Persons with AIDS, facing indifference to their situation from the administration of President Ronald Reagan, began lobbying Congress successfully for increased spending on research and treatment. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court further galvanized the political movement of gays and lesbians by upholding Georgia's sodomy statute against a privacy rights challenge. By 2000, however, nine state supreme courts, including Georgia's, had struck down sodomy laws under state constitutions, while twenty-six state legislatures had repealed their sodomy laws.

The 1990s proved a banner decade. The Hate Crimes Statistics Act included crimes motivated by bias against the victim's sexual orientation; it was the first federal law to use the category. Also, Congress passed both the Ryan White CARES Act to provide major funds for AIDS services and treatment and an immigration reform law that removed the prohibition on lesbian and gay aliens. The 1992 presidential election brought about a resurgence of debate over various lesbian and gay rights issues, but especially the ban on openly lesbian and gay military personnel. Colin Powell, the African American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, claimed that race was a "benign" characteristic for military service, but that sexual orientation was not. That year, Colorado voters amended their constitution to repeal all existing local lesbian and gay rights ordinances and to forbid their enactment in the future. In Romer v. Evans (1996), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down that amendment on equal protection grounds but without specifying sexual orientation as a "suspect classification," which would have placed sexual orientation on a par with race as a category that automatically triggers the highest level of judicial scrutiny.

By the end of the twentieth century, much lesbian and gay rights organizing focused on same-sex marriage and the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, a bill to prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. Twenty-six years of organizing and lobbying had produced major changes in public understanding around issues of sexual orientation, but as yet, few of the public policy changes that the lesbian and gay rights movement sought.

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William B. Turner

See also Civil Rights and Civil Liberties ; Discrimination: Sexual Orientation ; Gay and Lesbian Movement ; Hate Crimes .