Sexual Orientation

Sexual orientation is defined by the sex of those to whom a person is attracted. In most societies, people are classified as homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, or asexual. Heterosexual is the term applied to those attracted to the other sex; homosexual covers those attracted to the same sex; bisexual applies to those attracted to both men and women; and asexual individuals profess to no sexual attractions at all. Heterosexuals are, in slang parlance, referred to as straight people; homosexuals often prefer the terms gay (for men) and lesbian (for women) because the word homosexual, a nineteenth-century construct, has, for some, a medical or negative cast to it.

Terms such as transsexual and transgender are often mistakenly used as sexual orientation categories when they actually refer to other things. Transsexuals, people who have surgical procedures to change their sex from male to female or female to male, assume a new sex and gender identity and usually have sexual relations with someone of the sex they were before surgery.

Transgender is a term that has transplanted the term transsexual and added to it. It refers both to transsexuals and to those who enjoy wearing the clothing of the other sex on occasion—also known as cross-dressers or transvestites. In broad terms, transgender refers to anyone who transgresses societal sex/gender categories and can include a wide array of people who resist or simply do not fit narrow boundaries of gender identity, appearance, or behavior. In the 1990s, activists in the Gay Liberation Movement, particularly in the United States, began to speak of a transgender community or transgender identity. A transgender community refers, in general, to those living a life with a gender identity other than the one to which they were born. This identity does not, however, indicate what a transgendered person's sexual orientation is, beyond how they themselves determine it.

An intersexual person, called a hermaphrodite in the past, refers to someone born with sex characteristics of both women and men. Typically, a child born with dual sex characteristics is treated with surgical and hormonal therapy. Known as sex reassignment (or in this case, initial assignment) a choice is made to have the child made into either a male or female. Sex assignment is embedded in binary sex/gender categorization and demonstrates that most societies are uneasy with blurred sex/gender characteristics (Dreger 1999).

Essentialism or Social Construction

The biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling examined the social nature of biological knowledge about human sexuality. She contends that the act of labeling a person a man or a woman or heterosexual/homosexual is a social decision. Fausto-Sterling acknowledges the importance of scientific knowledge, but considers our beliefs about gender to be the foundation that defines sex and sexual behavior, even affecting the kinds of knowledge scientists produce about sex (Fausto-Sterling 2000).

Cross-cultural and multicultural comparisons show that sexuality encompasses a wide range of behaviors and practices that are selectively chosen and conditioned by individual societies. Categories are coded as acceptable or not acceptable, even as those categories can, and often do, change over time. Thus, where one is born and when, leads to differing experiences of sexuality.

This range of meanings provides insight into sexuality and sexual orientation as social constructions and as arenas of social control. For example, before the forced assimilation of the Pueblo peoples in the nineteenth century, the Zuni included a category known as the berdache (or third gender people), providing an alternative role for homosexual and bisexual males and females (Roscoe 2000). Similarly, knowledge of boy-wives and female-husbands in Africa reveals a spectrum of sexual desires and behaviors beyond binary sex and gender categories (Murray and Roscoe 1998).

Variances in identity and behavior, however, do not establish sexual orientation as a social construction beyond categorization and social meaning. Moreover, socially defined characteristics are problematic because categories are determined by humans and open to misinterpretation. As Charlene Muehlenhard argues, categorization of sexual orientation is not objective or universal; these categories have political implications (Muehlenhard 2000).

Where does sexual orientation come from—is it innate or chosen? This is the question that lies at the heart of controversies over sexual orientation. Because most people are heterosexual and because the majority's sexual orientation is seen as the norm, this question is really asking, "What causes homosexuality?" Heterosexuals do not typically think of themselves as having a sexual orientation or wonder where it comes from. If asked, most would say, "That's just how I am," as if it was so much the natural order of things that it seems ludicrous to ask. But just as being white is a racial category, heterosexuality is a sexual orientation category.

Asking a causal question regarding homosexuality can be considered "politically suspect and scientifically misconceived." (Bem 2000, p. 91). Political motivation is linked to agendas for prevention/cure or justification to discriminate. The scientific flaw is found, as noted above, in the fact that heterosexual origins are also not understood. Nevertheless, countless researchers, political pundits, and religious zealots have authoritatively pronounced that sexual orientation equals homosexuality and homosexuality equals perversion, sickness, evil, and a threat to the social order.

Early Sex Research

Some of the earliest sex research that centered on homosexuality was done in 1864 by Karl Ulrichs who postulated a "third sex" and called them urnings—those that loved others of the same sex. Later in the nineteenth century, Magnus Hirschfeld, a founder of sexology studies, embraced the idea of an inborn sexual orientation. In 1919 he founded the Institute for Sexual Science and was at the center of the first modern gay rights movement. Some later researchers, finding that a large number of people had sexual experiences at least once with a member of their own sex, argued that one's sexual orientation was fluid and could change over the course of a lifetime. Alfred Kinsey suggested that everyone was bisexual but, because of social conditioning, most people chose heterosexuality. He felt it would be good for society if people experimented with both same sex and cross-sex partners, as these practices would promote tolerance for difference (Kinsey 1953).

Studies that have tried to link sexual orientation to genetic or hormonal factors have been inconclusive. Nevertheless, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) does not consider sexual orientation to be a choice, and current scientific explanations leave open the possibility that sexual orientation may well be something one is born with, indicating the possible existence of a gay or straight gene (Stein 2001).

Consideration of a biological link to the formation of sexual orientation has conflicting implications. A positive aspect of a genetic cause is the loss of a foundation to discriminate against gay men and lesbians because of something they have no control over. A negative consideration might be that science will look for a genetic marker that can be changed so no one in the future would be born with a homosexual gene.

No one knows with certainty the answer to the nature/nurture debate, but in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association (APA), based on clinical experience, removed homosexuality from its list of disorders. Since that time it is considered ethically questionable for psychiatrists and psychologists to attempt to alter a trait that is not a disorder and that is an essential component of identity and sexual health.

Given the agreement of SIECUS, the APA, and others that sexual orientation is, in general, not flexible, the study of sexual orientation must take into account the knotty problems of public self-identification and why people are often forced to live a dual life. Consider, for example, the problem of choosing a same sex partner while still identifying as a heterosexual person. Under conditions in which sexual behavior is situational, such as in prison populations, the term sexual orientation does not apply because the behavior is brought on by the impossibility to engage in any other consensual sexual acts. Beyond restricted settings, there are those who do not wish to be labeled bisexual or gay and may even feel convinced that they are not, yet lead a double life with regard to their sexual practices. For instance, a study by Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade (1970), revealed the lives of men who practiced anonymous sex with other men in public bathrooms but who otherwise led traditional lives with wives and children where they publicly identified as a heterosexual. Another example was the rise of political lesbians in the 1970s when feminism was developing a strong sex/gender consciousness in the women's liberation movement. By the 1990s, though, many of these women were leading heterosexual lives (Stein 1997).

Some researchers have suggested that biological arguments of sexual orientation apply to men to a much larger degree than to women (Veniegas and Conley 2000). A close look at gender shows social, cultural, and experiential differences account for women's often late recognition of same-sex desires. A primary explanation for gender differences between gay men and lesbians is the recognition that women's relationships (gay and straight) have been guided by cultural scripts that are deeply heterosexist (Rose 2000). This fact should be kept in mind when speaking in generic terms of homosexuality (or heterosexuality). When lesbians and gay men are studied together, the gay male experience becomes the norm, and the unique aspects of lesbian's lives get ignored (Garnets and Peplau 2000; Rothblum 2000).

Sexual behavior both within and beyond orientation often resembles a continuum, particularly for women. There is also no doubt that for most people (gay and straight), sexual orientation is experienced as set, not flexible, and nonchanging. The conflicting beliefs in essentialism and fluidity serve different purposes. Essentialism, the claim of biological origin, highlights the lack of preference in orientation. Fluidity calls for acceptance of diversity and, conversely, rejection of privileged hierarchies in sexual orientation, practices, and lifestyles.

Where sexual orientation comes from is not important except in how those beliefs are used. If the majority of people in society establish categories that fit their experience and draw lines that fail to account for difference, a sexual orientation that differs from the majority leaves the minority vulnerable to prejudice and discrimination.

Family and Social Relations

Awareness of sexual orientation usually occurs early, more so for men than for women, and often is established by adolescence, even before sexual activity begins. It is usually preceded by an awareness of attraction to one sex or the other. But acting on sexual attraction is more difficult, at least initially, for homosexuals than for heterosexuals because of social stigma, legal sanctions, and religious beliefs. Social conditioning from family and society toward heterosexuality acts as a constraint, leaving many youths and adults fearful of acknowledging their attraction to members of the same sex. The teen years are often a confused and anxious time; thus, it becomes particularly difficult for adolescents when their feelings contradict the social norms they have learned about sexuality. Indeed, gay, lesbian, and bisexual youths have been found to be three times more likely to attempt suicide as heterosexual youths (SIECUS 2001).

Passing, a tool for avoiding harm and gaining access to services, jobs, and housing, risks negative psychological affects including internalized oppression. Yet, once through the troubling period of recognition, teens and adults are able to construct a positive sense of self in spite of what they have been taught. An important part of this process is the support found in the gay and lesbian community. Acceptance, most importantly self-acceptance, allows people to feel comfortable with who they are.

Telling parents is often the hardest part of coming out, a term used to describe the open acknowledgement of one's homosexuality, to no longer keep it hidden, or in the closet, the common term for unacknowledged homosexuality. Today, in many societies, family members are more educated on sexual identity issues than in the past, and parents are more likely to be accepting of their adult children's lifestyle choices. European and North American popular cultures have produced positive images in literature, theatre, and television that increase acceptance of diversity, including sexual orientation, such as the television show Will and Grace, which normalizes homosexuality. Going beyond normalization is the Show-time cable program Queer as Folk that originated in England before coming to the United States. This show fits the militant gay message "We're Here, We're Queer, Get Used to It."

A police raid on a gay bar in Greenwich Village in 1969 led to the Stonewall Riots and the Gay Liberation Movement. Since that time, Gay Pride Parades can be found in every major city of Europe and North America. Lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered (LGBT) people in other countries, including most developing countries, have not attained that level of visibility yet. Urban areas, where a mixture of individuals from diverse cultural, racial, economic, and social backgrounds live in close proximity, are where lesbian and gay communities are found.

A major difference between heterosexual and homosexual couples is the kind of support they get from their extended families, institutions, and communities. Insurance eligibility, tax exemptions, and inheritance rights have a different legal standing based on marital status. Marriage is restricted almost universally to heterosexual couples, even though lesbian and gay couples often maintain long-term relationships (Blumstein and Schwartz 1983; Peplau 1991). Not only are gays unable to marry, but in many societies they must also lead clandestine lives as couples, as it is not only laws that prevent them from declaring their love, but cultural restrictions. His or her most important relationship is given no recognition or status. Holidays and visits from friends and relatives often necessitate the exclusion of a partner. In those places where a gay/lesbian community exists, couples might make up a family network, constructing their own kinship ties (Weston 1991).

Cross-Cultural Sexual Diversity

Cross-cultural data shows that sexuality changes its form and meaning in accordance with cultural context. The evidence reveals a wide range of sexual behaviors, even if the society itself may legitimate only a limited range of sexual expression. Many non-Western societies allow for some form of homosexual practice. In the early 1950s a survey found 64 percent of societies sampled considered homosexual behavior to be normal and socially acceptable (Ford and Beach 1951). More recent work has found homosexual practices and relationships play an acknowledged role in both the social and religious domains (Blackwood 1986).

Transgenerational homosexual relations are found in a number of societies such as has been found in some African groups where soldiers were given young boys to provide domestic and sexual services for them. Ritual homosexuality is found in New Guinea based on a belief that boys do not develop strength or masculinity until inseminated by older males (Herdt 1984). This belief supported a similar practice in ancient Greece, although the terms did not exist to describe it as we do today. Neither the term heterosexuality nor the term homosexuality existed before 1890.

In societies where women have control over their productive activities, both formal and informal lesbian relations may occur. Where women lack control over their lives, particularly in male-dominated class and caste societies, only informal lesbian ties, unrecognized by the larger society, may form. A formal lesbian relation is one that is recognized as part of the social structure and includes a bond of friendship. Azande women, or co-wives, in Sudan formalize their relationship with ritual. Chinese sisterhoods exist in the province of Kwangtung, where groups of women take vows not to marry and to live together. There are examples of age-defined relations among blacks in South Africa and in the Caribbean between older married women and younger women who are usually not married. Woman-marriage is a type of marriage in some parts of Africa in which a childless woman marries another woman to bear her a child (Evans-Pritchard 1970; Gay 1986; Sankar 1986; Smith 1962). Native North Americans called individuals who expressed both masculine and feminine attributes two-spirited people. They often co-habitated and had sexual relations with someone of the same sex but different gender (Williams 1986).

As the above and other research shows, sexual behavior and gender are social constructions, but sexual orientation probably is not. It is important to note the distinction between these related but distinct concepts.

Sexual Orientation and Social Policy

Heterosexuals tend not to question their sexual orientation, nor do they question or even notice the privileges and protections they enjoy because of it. Another question remains, however: although no one knows where sexual orientation comes from, and most researchers agree that it is a basic emotional need that persists even in the face of repression, why is there so much anger, prejudice, and discrimination against people who are homosexual, bisexual, or transgendered? Homophobia, an irrational fear and hatred of same-sex relations, is found in societies around the world, although the degree of hostility towards people in same-sex relationships varies considerably. Homophobia is a social construction; it is hatred "produced by institutionalized biases in a society or culture" (SIECUS 1993, p. 1).

As gays became more public and their homosexuality was more accepted by loved ones, the focus of activism changed from familial relations to public legal issues. Variance in laws and restrictions based on sexual orientation can be found around the world. Markers can be found in legal marriage, adoption, and military service. Inclusion in civil rights and human rights legislation are additional areas of contention.

LGBT people existed in every society before the 1970s, but gay identity and community did not. Even in those societies that formally legalized homosexuality, openness and the formation of gay groups often took longer. For example, homosexuality was legalized in Slovenia in 1974, yet it was 1984 before the first gay men's organization emerged and 1988 before the establishment of the first lesbian group. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, dozens of gay groups organized in Eastern Europe. In the 1990s, gay life became visible in some form, such as organized groups, newsletters, or Gay Pride Parades in countries as diverse as Pakistan, Bolivia, Curacao, Kenya, Moldova, Portugal, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Japan, Turkey, Nicaragua, Mexico, Estonia, Hong Kong, Brazil, Czech Republic, and Zimbabwe. Decriminalization occurred earlier in Germany, the United Kingdom, and in twenty-seven states in the United States.

A number of countries have national laws that protect gays, lesbians, and bisexuals from discrimination, including Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, and Sweden. Australia bans employment discrimination and has some states that provide legal protection. Nine states in the United States have civil rights laws that include sexual orientation, and the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that an amendment in Colorado disallowing an antidiscrimination law on sexual orientation was unlawful. Still, there are seven states that ban the practice of certain sexual acts between adults of the same gender; sixteen states include heterosexual couples in the same ban of specific sexual acts (SIECUS 1998/1999).

International organizations have become active in protecting sexual orientation through human rights policies. The United Nations, through programs and commissions such as The International Labour Office, The Development Program, and the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, are involved in promoting and monitoring the rights of gays and lesbians. United Nations Conference Resolutions, such as from the Fourth World Conference on Women, call on nations to recognize that women and men must be able to decide freely all matters relating to their sexuality. There are also nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that monitor states' repressive measures related to sexuality and sexual orientation.

Groups exist in countries with formal resistance, as in Nicaragua where same-sex relations were criminalized in 1992, and Zimbabwe, where the president in 1995, Robert Mugabe, called homosexuals subhuman animals who deserve no rights at all. In India, the topic of homosexuality has been one that is not spoken of, although by the end of the twentieth century, this forbidden subject began to slowly receive more attention. In China, homosexuality is not illegal, but it is seen as an illness.

The Gay Liberation Movement, as noted earlier, is a primary cause of increased social and self-acceptance. The greater access to education, particularly higher education, leads to generally more acceptance of difference (Gerek 1984). The Internet, which has made possible contact with others even when living in a remote environment, has played an important role in breaking down feelings of isolation. Also, there have been health concerns related to the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, which have led governments to be more open, particularly as gay groups have demanded government health services.

Even as greater tolerance and acceptance around the world increased in the late twentieth century, repressive societies remained, as did resistance to full equality in those countries that have become more progressive. The Islamic world is not accepting, nor is much of Africa. Early into the twenty-first century, Egypt sentenced twenty-three men to five years in prison for defaming Islam by their homosexual lifestyle (Schneider 2001, p. A11). Homosexuals can be jailed in Romania, the Caribbean, and Malaysia. In Saudi Arabia, homosexuals can be put to death. Indeed, Susan Greenberg makes the point that in spite of rhetoric and sometimes in spite of equality laws, "there are few societies around the world where homosexuals are not persecuted in some way" (Greenberg 2001, p. 28).

Marriage laws are a major area of discrimination by sexual orientation. Norway has recognized same-sex marriages since 1993, The Netherlands and Germany since 1991. Canada, Norwegian, and Danish laws permit registrations of homosexual partnership that are identical to legal marriage except that they must be done in a civil context, and the couple is not allowed to adopt children. Iceland, Hungary, and Sweden enacted legislation allowing couples to register their partnerships.

The rest of the world basically does not recognize marriage or legal partnerships between same-sex couples. Many countries provide some level of economic and inheritance benefits, but not on the same level that is granted to legally married couples. In the United States, Vermont is the only state that provides legal same-sex ceremonies with domestic partner benefits. Some activists have come to feel that civil unions rather than marriage may be a more realistic goal, resulting in equality by practice, even if not equality in principle. However, not everyone in the LGBT community agrees with gay marriage. As some activists see it, marriage, as practiced by heterosexuals, is an oppressive institution to individual freedom and women's rights.

Adoption is another issue the LGBT community has struggled with, and for the most part, lost. Even countries like Denmark, which allow registered partnerships with all the rights associated with marriage, make an exception for the adoption of children. Remarkably, the right to artificial insemination is also disallowed. Other countries that allow officially recognized same-sex unions modeled their adoption policy on Denmark's conditions. Although gay men and lesbians are allowed to raise children as foster parents, full adoption rights are not granted. There have also been cases of divorce when biological parents have been denied custody because of their sexual orientation.

Gays in the military is an issue that has international differences. In 1993 the Israel Defense Force established an antidiscrimination policy and in 1997 the Tel Aviv Military Court recognized a gay male as the legal widower of a male officer (Gamson 1999). Israel's policies contrast sharply with the United States's government response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC, where surviving gay partners were denied recognition from the Victim Compensation Fund, or the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy of the U.S. military.

The number of countries that ban homosexuals from serving in the military is declining. Australia no longer excludes gays, nor does Canada. The United Kingdom decriminalized homosexual acts in the military in 1992, but still regards homosexuality as incompatible with military service and can use a sexual orientation argument as grounds for dismissal. Italy followed suit and has a policy similar to the United Kingdom. Most NATO countries do not, as a matter of policy, exclude homosexuals from military service, with the exceptions of Turkey and Greece. Germany, in practice, has a highly exclusionary military, even though official policy states that homosexuals are fit for service and cannot be discharged for their sexual orientation. Countries that have decriminalized homosexuality in the military are Spain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Poland. The Netherlands represents the most tolerant position on gays in the military (Segal, Gade, and Johnson 1993).

Policies and practices in the military appear to follow social norms of each country, and heterosexuality is clearly the norm. Thus, almost everywhere in the military, homosexuals keep their sexual orientation hidden except around people and situations where they know they are free to be themselves, express their desires, and behave in similar ways that heterosexuals have been allowed to do.

Conclusion

Sexual orientation is not something the heterosexual majority often thinks about simply because they are the mainstream. But for those whose sexual orientation lies at either end of the bell curve of sexual behavior, thinking about sexual orientation is a matter of survival. Livelihoods, family relationships, social contacts, even life itself can be imperiled if one transgresses what is considered the norm. To love someone of the same sex in some societies is to risk their very lives; in other societies they risk imprisonment along with the loss of the comforts of family and friends, and the ability to hold a job; in still other places they risk discrimination both blatant and subtle. The desire to live an open life, the need to live with integrity, and the hope to love the person of their choice is at best a daily struggle in most societies in the world.

Integral to the idea of sexual orientation is the idea of love; human beings are attracted to others and are brought to those others through the biological, psychological, and emotional aspects of sex. This initial physical attraction can lead to love. It is not solely whom people are attracted to sexually but whom they love that makes sexual orientation a controversial issue. Same sex marriage is contentious and divisive not because legalizing such unions will confer financial and legal benefits upon same sex partners, but because it validates a love that is outside the mainstream; it equalizes the love of same sex couples with the love of heterosexual couples.

Learning about the dynamics of sexual orientation and developing an appreciation of the differences and diversity in that field will help to deepen understanding of others, to change attitudes and, eventually, to make life better for people of all sexual orientations.

See also:Family Law; Family Policy; Gay Parents; Gender; Gender Identity; Lesbian Parents; Sexuality; Sexuality Education; Sexuality in Adolescence; Sexuality in Adulthood; Sexuality in Childhood

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barbara ryan

joseph r. g. demarco

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.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abelove, Henry, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Rout-ledge, 1993.

Bérubé, Allan. Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women during World War II. New York: Free Press, 1990.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

Clendinen, Dudley, and Adam Nagourney. Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.

D'Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1945–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

———, and Estelle Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

———, William B. Turner, and Urvashi Vaid, eds. Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Duberman, Martin. Stonewall. New York: Dutton, 1993.

Eskridge, William N., Jr. Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Faderman, Lillian. "The Morbidification of Love between Women by 19th-Century Sexologists." Journal of Homosexuality 4 (1978): 73–90.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Random House, 1978.

Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Katz, Jonathan Ned. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.: A Documentary History. Rev. ed. New York: Meridian, 1992.

———. The Invention of Heterosexuality. New York: Dutton, 1995.

Murdoch, Joyce, and Deb Price. Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Roscoe, Will. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On: People, Politics, and the AIDS Epidemic. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987.

Turner, William B. A Genealogy of Queer Theory. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

William B.Turner

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

Sexual Orientation

The phrase sexual orientation is used to describe different forms of erotic attraction: toward people of the same gender (homosexual), the opposite gender (heterosexual), or both (bi-sexual). Like any simplistic categorization, such definitions quickly become mired in contradictions and complications. For instance, is the label "heterosexual" to be reserved for people who only have sexual interactions with members of the other sex, so that those who deviate from this pattern are classed as homosexuals regardless of the number of same-sex relationships they have had, even if the opposite-sex relationships far outnumber them? When can an individual be labeled bisexual, homosexual, or heterosexual?

The influential study of Alfred Kinsey on American males in 1948 and his later study of females first pointed out the difficulties of such classification. To overcome it, he developed a 7-point scale with 0 representing individuals who only had heterosexual intercourse, and 6, those who only had same-sex activities. Unsurprisingly, Kinsey found that 37 percent of the males and 13 percent of the females in their sample had at least one homosexual encounter. The scale, however, did not establish numerical ranges for categorizing sexual orientation. Is a man who has sexual relations with females 70 percent of the time and with males 30 percent of the time a homosexual? Is a woman who has sex with males 30 percent of the time and with other women 70 percent a lesbian? Are they both bisexual? The issue is further complicated by the fact that many people do considerable experimentation before confining themselves to one sex. Others might originally have only partners of the opposite sex, but as they age they have increasing numbers of partners of the same sex and settle down with a same-sex partner. This pattern is even more marked in many non-Western societies, where same-sex sexual experimentation may be expected as a premarital phase; a highly institutionalized version of the age-specific structure was documented by Gil Herdt in parts of Melanesia, where before Christian missionizing changed sexual mores, every male was expected to progress through a series of alternating same-sex and heterosexual phases.

Some Factors to Be Considered

There are other factors to be considered, particularly the relation between actual practice, fantasy, and feelings. Anna Freud, for example, maintained that the crucial determination of homosexuality or heterosexuality was one's thoughts and images when masturbating or becoming sexually aroused. A woman who becomes sexually aroused by same-sex fantasies while having sex with her husband would be classed as homosexual even though she never engaged in homosexual behavior. The opposite case with males would be equally true. The question of whether erotic attraction or sexual practice is the defining characteristic of sexual orientation continues to be debated by researchers.

Another approach taken by scholars attempting to discover the true "nature" of sexual orientation has been to look at nonhuman species. Frank Beach, for example, held that homosexual activity among animals was usually an expression of the dominant or submissive role of that particular individual animal vis-à-vis another. He cautioned, however, that the existence of homosexual behavior in some animals says little about homosexual relations in humans, that is, it could not prove that homosexuality is "biologically normal." The empirical evidence from animals, he felt, was irrelevant.

Another knotty question has to do with the relationship between sexual orientation and gender. Whereas stereotypical images of the homosexual associate same-sex desire with male effeminacy and masculine-appearing women, in actuality the relationship between gender and sex is far less predicable.

Cross-cultural data further complicate the picture. Clellan Sterns Ford and Frank A. Beach (1951) examined 190 cultures for information about sexuality using what was then called the Human Relations Area Files, a collection of reports of a variety of cultures. The information was extracted from reports of observers in earlier periods, many of them missionaries or explorers, while later reports were more often made by trained anthropologists. They found that homosexual behavior was not a predominant sexual activity among adults in any of the societies but that in the majority of the seventy-six groups for which information on homosexuality was available, same-sex relations were considered to be normal and socially acceptable, at least for certain members of the society. In about one-third of these societies where homosexuality was reported, it was said to be rare, absent, or carried on only in secrecy. The fact that it was not mentioned in the reports of the majority of societies, however, should not be taken to say it was nonexistent since the observers might well not have been looking for it.

For example, Balinese society was classified by Ford and Beach among the 36 percent minority where homosexual activity was rare, absent, or carried on only in secret. Yet the crossing of sex roles is common among the Balinese, and their religious beliefs place a high valuation on the hermaphroditic figure of Syng Hyan Toengaal, also known as the Solitary or Tjinitja. Tjinitja existed before the division of the sexes and is regarded as both husband and wife. Are the transvestic ceremonies connected with god homosexuality? Other examples of gender and sexual variation in non-Western and tribal societies, such as the Native American berdache or "two-spirit person" or Polynesian mahu, have all been objects of fascination to European and U.S. homosexuals looking for evidence of sexual freedom, but in reality, it is very difficult to map Western notions about sexual orientation onto non-Western contexts. Even in closely related societies, such as those of Latin America, the United States, and Canada, ideas about male homosexuality have been shown to vary considerably, so that, for example, the nature of the sexual activity (active versus passive) may be more important than the sex of the partner in determining sexual identity. Furthermore, within complex societies, distinct sexual subcultures with their own notions about sexual orientation flourish within different racial, class, ethnic, and regional groups. For instance, while upper-middle-class lesbians in the United States embraced a model of androgyny and equality between partners in the latter half of the twentieth century, working-class lesbians chose to be either "butch" or "femme," a pattern that later came to influence their wealthier and better-educated sisters as well.

In the early twenty-first century, although some social and biological scientists continue to pursue other methods of identifying sexual orientation, most observers simply ask the person in question, leaving sexual orientation as a question of self-identity. Such an approach assumes a more tolerant attitude toward homosexuals and bisexuals than in the past, when such an identity was widely regarded as "sick" and their "illness" as illegal. It was not until 1974 that members of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) adopted a resolution that being "homosexual did not imply any impairment in judgment, stability, reliability or general social or vocational capabilities" (Bullough, 1994). Such a conclusion was based on research dating from at least the beginning of the twentieth century, but change in psychiatric opinion was slow and occurred only in response to activists in the gay and lesbian community, who confronted both the American Psychiatric Association and the legal system. Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the American Law Institute began agitating for change in the 1950s and the early 1960s, as did a growing number of people in the gay community, an agitation culminating in the 2003 decision of the U.S.. Supreme Court declaring sodomy laws unconstitutional.

Acquiring an Identity

As the barriers fell, increasing numbers of gays and lesbians came out of the closet, proclaiming their sexual orientations. Acquiring a public gay identity is extremely important but not always an easy process even though most gays and lesbians indicate they felt that somehow they were different in childhood and adolescence from others. Only gradually in their teens did they begin to identify themselves as homosexual. Those who do so tend to be culturally defined by society as a single homogeneous class.

In reality, of course, gays and lesbians, either as individuals or in groups, are a very mixed collectivity of individuals with a wide-ranging variety of behaviors, although most seem to be gender atypical in some traits. Attempts to identify the precise relationship between sexual orientation and gender by researchers have led only to contradictory and very tentative results, possibly because such relationships tend to change rapidly in response to changing social conditions.

Most theories fall into one of two categories: psychosocial dynamic or biological dynamic, sometimes simplified as nurture versus nature. Psychosocial dynamic theories attempt to explain development of a person's sexual orientation in terms of internal mental processes and the interaction of these with reward and punishment. Examples of these include the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud or socialization theory such as put forth by Ira Reiss, who held that the greater the rigidity of gender role in male-dominant societies, the higher the likelihood of male homosexual behavior. This was, he said, because the rigidity of the gender role could lead a male child who did not conform to find conformity with other nonconformists, that is, male homosexuals.

In the 1990s biological theories that explain sexual orientation in terms of biological phenomena, such as brain circuitry, hormones, genes, and evolution, became increasingly popular. Researchers have looked at such factors as prenatal hormones as well as other physiological and anatomical features, but all of these theories have limitations, some more serious than others. Since homosexuality is thought to run in families, there has been a search for genetic influence; but while some researchers have found what they think is evidence along these lines, there generally has been a failure to replicate the findings.

So far there are too many variables involved to come up with any definitive answers. At the moment, sexual orientation seems best left up to the individual to define for himself or herself.

See also Gender ; Identity ; Love, Western Notions of ; Psychology and Psychiatry .

bibliography

Beach, Frank A., ed. Human Sexuality in Four Perspectives. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Bullough, Vern L. Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

——. Sexual Variance in Society and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Ford, Clellan Sterns, and Frank A. Beach. Patterns of Sexual Behavior. New York: Harper, 1951.

Freud, Anna. The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense. Translated by Cecil Barnes. Reprint, New York: International Universities Press, 1953.

Herdt, Gilbert. Guardian of the Flute: Idioms of Masculinity. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948.

Kinsey, Alfred C., et al. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953.

Lippa, Richard A. "Gender-Related Traits of Heterosexual and Homosexual Men and Women." Archives of Sexual Behavior 31 (2002): 83–98.

Reiss, Ira. Journey into Sexuality: An Exploratory Voyage. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1986.

Vern L. Bullough

sexual orientation

Assumptions about the exceptions

The idea of an innate and idiosyncratic direction to the sexual drive of the individual — like so many ideas around sex — largely originated in the efforts of late-nineteenth-century sexologists to classify the vagaries of human sexual behaviour. Influenced by evolutionary science and developments in psychology, authorities such as Krafft-Ebing or Havelock Ellis wished to remove the stigma of sin or wanton debauchery from those whose sexual conduct diverged from the received model of heterosexual marriage for reproductive purposes. They endeavoured to suggest that those who did not conform, or conformed only with difficulty, to this model, were not necessarily lascivious sinners committing perverse acts for a corrupt thrill, but individuals who could not help themselves — individuals for whom, in fact, behaviour which might seem bizarre to the majority felt ‘normal’.

However, while the late nineteenth century saw the codification and elaboration of the idea of sexual orientation, the idea that there were certain kinds of people with certain kinds of drives which set them apart from their neighbours did have a less formal and scientific existence before that. It has been plausibly argued that, as a result of increasing urbanization facilitating meeting with individuals of like desires and the formation of subcultures, and additionally in response to legal penalization, a sense of homosexual identity was emerging from the early eighteenth century. ‘Sodomites’ began to perceive themselves not as men who might from time to time commit acts defined by the law as sodomy, but as men with a particular sexual identity, forming part of a community of similar men.

Initially, sexual orientation was very much about desires which did not fit into a simple model of a biological drive intended for the reproduction of the species. Being attracted to members of the same sex, aroused by pain or domination, or sexually stimulated by wellington boots, had no apparent biological purpose and could become completely detached from sexual activity with another person. The notion that being heterosexual and becoming a parent were possibly equally problematic was seldom registered: few scholars of sex took Freud's ruthlessly logical line in the Three Lectures on the History of Sexuality (first published in German in 1905), that ‘the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together’ and therefore the development of a heterosexual preference also required explanation and was by no means a given.

Those who are aware that their sexual preferences are such as to preclude them from living the kind of life society designates as normal are conscious of those preferences and the difficulties they bring with them, and may also present problems to society at large, if only by complicating categories which are assumed to be clear cut. Those who have never had to question the path set out for them are unlikely to have as clear a sense of their own desires and preferences as being distinct from what society deems appropriate. They may be dissatisfied with their lot in a greater or lesser degree without ever querying whether society's prescriptions meet their needs. As Freud noted in Civilised Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness (1908), ‘what a degree of renunciation, often on both sides, is entailed by marriage, and to what narrow limits married life … is narrowed down.’

Coping with it

Some cultures deal with same-sex-preference, the form of diverse sexual orientation that is perhaps most obvious, by assimilating the anomaly of sexual object-choice into an anomaly of gender. This may place the individual who prefers his or her same gender as an intermediate ‘third sex’, or situate the male homosexual as effeminate and the female homosexual as masculinized. In some cases these are recognized social roles associated with specific sexual practices, but in many societies although the roles exist as categories they are stigmatized and marginalized to various degrees, from being subjected to mild social disapproval and mockery to being penalized by death. Another way of integrating homosexual orientation into society has been through the structuring of male homosexual relationships into older man–younger man (or adolescent boy), in which the senior man is supposed to have a tutelary function in inducting the younger into full adult manhood. Behaviour which does not fit into these categories may be stigmatized, or else invisible. The macho male who took the insertive, ‘masculine’ role with an effeminate male, or the female partner of the crossed-dressed ‘passing’ woman, created problems for theorists. The first was often seen as hypermasculine with an excessive sexual drive, ‘perverted’ in his search for sensation rather than ‘inverted’ in his desires, the second was assumed to have been deceived by her partner or to be a shy, passive creature more scared of men than actively attracted to women.

While these may be the most obvious (and to many, the most disturbing) examples of sexual orientation, few individuals are completely free from some form of preference as to their sexual partner or type of activity. When someone is attracted to persons of the opposite gender, there may be quite a narrow range of actual individuals who are found attractive within that larger category. Again, those preferences which coincide with societal norms may go unremarked: a man who seeks out female partners younger than himself and physically smaller is not going to arouse much comment, whereas a man who manifests desire for women older or larger than himself is more likely to be conscious of a potentially embarrassing personal idiosyncrasy. Awareness of a particular orientation may also arise when an individual finds features attractive which are not currently fashionable: for example, plumpness in women when the trend is for supermodel slenderness. Individuals may also have specific situations in which their desires are most acutely stimulated: this is perhaps most noticeable in the case of people who invariably fall for unattainable others, or for partners who treat them badly in some way. Particular forms of sexual stimulation may also be desired, which may present problems unless the partner's desires are complementary.

Attempts at explanation

The reasons for such preferences are extremely hard to account for. There are many elements within sexual preference which it is exceedingly difficult to interpret as innate and part of the biological make-up. While identical twins are more likely than non-identical both to be homosexual, the likelihood only runs at about 50%: Bancroft, in Human Sexuality and its Problems (1989), hypothesizes a genetically-determined predisposition to react in similar ways to environmental influences. Though there may, debatably, be some innate predilection to become homosexual, the ways in which homosexual identity may be expressed are manifold and subject to a large degree of structuring by particular societies. In differing individuals in different societies such a predisposition might result in bisexual behaviour, in celibacy, or in becoming a drag queen or an activist for gay rights.

There are also individuals who may indulge in a particular type of sexual behaviour without its impinging on their sense of preferred identity. For example, homosexual behaviour is relatively common in single-sex institutions but does not necessarily lead to self-identification as homosexual or to similar activity outside the institution. Conversely, homosexual men and women may marry or have sexual intercourse with members of the opposite sex, without losing the belief that their ‘innate’ sexual leanings are entirely different. Furthermore, individuals have been known to undergo radical changes in their sexual preferences over the course of a lifetime.

Animal studies are not particularly illuminating. In some birds, imprinting takes place at an early age, and exposure to something seen at the critical stage of development is crucial for later object choice. However, such a mechanism does not seem to operate to anything like the same extent in mammals. Various forms of same-sex contact have been observed in different mammalian species, but these often serve the purpose of establishing dominance or submission for social purposes between individual animals or within the group, and to have a dubious relationship to sexual gratification as such. There are also cases in which animals in single-sex groups will mount one another, often at the dictates of a hormonal cycle: cows and heifers mounting one another is taken as a reliable sign that they are ready for breeding. There is little evidence, however, that homosexual relationships in any species are formed when opposite-sex partners are available and receptive.

Childhood influences of various kinds play an important role in the evolution of adult sexual orientation in the individual — for example, certain experiences can become associated with sexual arousal. Emotional experiences, in particular relationships with parents, can form patterns which are reiterated in the sexual sphere in later life. The reasons why similar influences (for example, among different members of the same family, with both heredity and environment in common) may result in different outcomes is, however, still obscure. Complex factors, involving idiosyncrasies of biological make-up, the individual's personal experiences, and the wider social environment, are probably all involved in the evolution of a person's sexual orientation.

Lesley A. Hall

Sexual Orientation

The biological basis of sexual orientation (heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality) has long been a topic of controversy in both science and society. A growing body of research supports the view that genetics and the environment work together to determine sexual orientation. Some issues remain unclear. First, how much of sexual orientation is genetic and how much is shaped by environmental influences, including family, society, and culture? Second, is sexual orientation a fixed trait, or is it subject to environmental influence and changeable over time? Two types of genetic studies, classical family/twin/adoption studies and biological/molecular studies, support multiple genetic and environmental determinants in male and female sexual orientation.

Twin and Family Studies

Twin studies are a classic tool for examining the role of genes. Twins brought up together share a similar environment. Monozygotic twins share all their genes, while dizygotic twins share only half their genes. Early twin studies by Franz Kallmann in 1952 and Leonard Heston in 1968 reported that if one monozygotic twin was homosexual, there was a greater chance the other twin would be homosexual. The likelihood of this was greater than for dizygotic twins. These studies were potentially biased. They recruited homosexual subjects and had relatively small sample sizes. Recent twin studies have examined all twins in a community without regard to sexual orientation, providing large, less biased sample sizes. In 2000 Kenneth Kendler and colleagues evaluated genetic and environmental factors in a large U.S. sample of twin and nontwin sibling pairs. Sexual orientation was classified as heterosexual or nonheterosexual (bisexual or homosexual) and was determined by a single item on a self-report questionnaire. There was a greater chance for both monozygotic twins to be nonheterosexual than for dizygotic twins or sibling pairs. Results suggested that sexual orientation was greatly influenced by genetic factors, but family environment might also play a role. One problem with this study is that a single item was used to assess the complexity of sexual orientation.

Katherine Kirk's study in 2000 involved a community sample of almost 5,000 adult Australian twins who answered an anonymous questionnaire on sexual behavior and attitudes. Multiple measures of sexual orientation (behaviors, attitudes, feelings) provided stronger evidence for additive genetic influences on sexual orientation. Heritability estimates of homosexuality in this sample were 50 to 60 percent in females and 30 percent in males. In 1999 J. Michael Bailey found that if a man was homosexual, the percentage of his siblings who were homosexual or bisexual was 7 to 10 percent for brothers and 3 to 4 percent for sisters, higher than would be due to chance.

Some family studies have reported more homosexuals had homosexual maternal relatives but not paternal relatives. This might support a genetic factor on the X chromosome and/or environmental influences. Other, similar studies did not find this. Thus, evidence exists for both genetic and environmental determinants of sexual orientation which may be different for men and women.

A 2000 study examined whether sexual orientation is fixed or changes with time through environmental influence or the effects of aging. J. Michael Bailey recruited a community sample of twins from the Australian Twin Registry and assessed sexual orientation, childhood gender nonconformity (atypical gender behavior), and continuous gender identity (an individual's self-identification as "male" or "female"). Familial factors were important for all traits, but less successful in distinguishing genetic from shared environmental influences. Only childhood gender nonconformity was significantly heritable for both men and women. Statistical tests suggested that causal factors differed between men and women, and for women provided significant evidence for the importance of genetics factors.

Birth-order studies found homosexual males were not usually first born, having older siblings. Extremely feminine homosexual men had a higher than expected proportion of brothers, not an equal numbers of brothers and sisters.

Biological and Genetic Linkage Studies

Biological studies looking at the hypothalamus have found differences between homosexual and heterosexual men and women. Some researchers found differences in parts of the hypothalamus, while others did not. What these findings mean is not clear because they were inconsistent.

In 1995 William Turner examined the ratio of males to females among relatives of the mothers of male homosexuals. He reported that the sex ratio was not normal in maternal relatives. The normal ratio, for relatives of heterosexual males, was an even split: 50 percent male relatives, 50 percent female relatives. The number of male relatives of homosexual males, on the other hand, was significantly lower than the number of female relatives. Also, 65 percent of the mothers of homosexuals had no live-born brothers, or else they had only one live-born brother. On the paternal side, however, the number of male and female relatives of male homosexuals was same as that found for heterosexuals, and the sex ratio of relatives on both the maternal and paternal side for female homosexuals was the same as for heterosexuals. These findings would support genetic factors on the X chromosome, which males inherit from their mothers, as a factor that may cause fetal or neonatal loss of males.

Molecular studies found a linkage between male homosexuality and the X chromosome. Dean Hamer and colleagues in 1993 and Nan Hu and colleagues in 1995 conducted DNA linkage analyses in U.S. families with two homosexual brothers. There was significant linkage at Xq28 for 64 percent of homosexual male siblings but not for homosexual females (Xq28 is band 28 of the long arm of the X chromosome). George Rice and colleagues in 1999 examined four alleles at Xq28 in fifty-two Canadian male homosexual siblings but did not find any such linkage. This could represent genetic variation, diagnostic differences, and/or different methods of data analysis.

In summary, family, biological, and molecular data support multiple genetic and environmental bases for sexual orientation, and evidence exists for childhood gender nonconformity.

see also Complex Traits; Gene and the Environment; Public Health, Genetic Techniques in; Nomenclature; Sex Determination; Statistics; Twins; X Chromosome; Y Chromosome.

Harry Wright

and Ruth Abramson

Bibliography

Bailey, J. Michael., M. P. Dunne, and N. G. Martin. "Genetic and Environmental Influences on Sexual Orientation and Its Correlates in an Australian Twin Sample." Journal of Personal and Social Psychology 78 (2000): 524-536.

Friedman, R. C., and J. I. Downey. "Homosexuality." New England Journal of Medicine 331 (1994): 923-930.

Hamer, Dean H., et al. "A Linkage between DNA Markers on the X Chromosome and Male Sexual Orientation." Science 261 (1993): 321-327.

Kendler, Kennneth S., et al. "Sexual Orientation in a U.S. National Sample of Twin and Nontwin Sibling Pairs." American Journal of Psychiatry 157 (2000): 1843-1846.

sex·u·al o·ri·en·ta·tion • n. a person's sexual attraction toward members of the same, opposite, or both genders: a draft ordinance that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.