HOMOSEXUALITY

HOMOSEXUALITY. Like modern homosexuality, early modern homosexuality is better understood in the plural than in the singular. Homosexualities in different parts of early modern Europe were profoundly divergent, with equally profound differences existing between rural and urban settings and between diverse social groups in the same geographic areas. Class and other hierarchical differences added further dimensions to this divergence. Just as modern male and female homosexualities may be seen as the outcome of historical processes, their histories, despite their occasional intersections, are quite different. Until the eighteenth century, there were no societal, psychological, or self-identifying concepts of "gay" and "lesbian" as we know them today. But the eighteenth century was an era of transition that gave rise to modern homosexualities, in particular in northern France, England, and the Dutch Republic.

TERMINOLOGY AND SOURCES

The words "homosexuality" and "lesbianism" were first coined in the second half of the nineteenth century. Previously, aside from words in the vernacular, the common European term for homosexuality was "sodomy," which had profound theological and legal connotations. The term derived from the biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and of God's wrath for presumably widespread homosexual practices in those cities. Religious connotations affected words in the vernacular as well. "Buggery" and "bugger" (which had derivations in different languages, like the French bougre or Dutch bogger ) came from Latin bulgarus and connected sodomy with heresy; this is because Bulgaria supposedly had been a center of Manichaeism, which espoused an indulgence in heterosexual and homosexual sodomy. Sodomy was also referred to as crimen nefandum, the 'umentionable vice', the crime not to be known or mentioned among Christians.

From a strictly legal or penal perspective, sodomy did not refer exclusively to a same-sex configuration. The term could refer to anal intercourse, sets of prohibited sexual acts between men or between men and women, bestiality, and in some instances or places, sodomy referred to sexual contacts between Christians and Jews or Christians and Muslims. Although the word sodomy, at least in legal practice, was sometimes applied to sex between women, usually the terms "tribady" or "sapphism," as well as the more obscure Latin terms fricatrices, subigatrices, and clitorifantes, were used in vernaculars and in legal discourse. These words lacked the negative social and moral connotations of the term sodomy and instead referred specifically to sexual acts. By the end of the early modern period, the term sodomy referred to homosexual intercourse and bestiality in the general parlance. Throughout the era, a "sodomite" was a man who engaged in same-sex behavior. By the end of that period, words like "sapphist" and "sapphism," referring to same-sex female relations, had gained such currency in popular parlance in England. Early modern documents, such as love letters, that provide unmitigated personal accounts of men or women with same-sex orientations are extremely rare. However, some of these have survived, mainly as components of court records from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The latter provide the most substantial (if somewhat problematic, having been filtered by judicial systems) documentation on same-sex behavior and desires in early modern Europe. Although there certainly was no impunity for women who engaged in lesbian acts, the numbers of women prosecuted for same-sex behavior are small in comparison to men, and consequently documents on lesbian behavior are rare indeed.

LEGISLATION

Presumably, the East Roman emperor Justinian, in his sixth century writings against sodomy, had been the first to justify legislation against homosexuality. He claimed that natural disasters, like floods and earthquakes, diseases, and the negative outcome of wars, were collective penalties for homosexual behavior. Those ideas would affect legislation and legal practices in many parts of Europe for centuries to come. In 1120, the Council of Nablus turned sodomy in canonical law into a capital offense. Those convicted of the crime were punished by burning at the stake. The council also designated sodomy a crime that could be prosecuted by ecclesiastical and civil authorities. Local and regional laws in the next centuries provided a variety of penalties for sodomy, ranging from fines and mutilations for repeat offenders to death.

At the beginning of the early modern period, more penal unity was achieved in continental Europe with the enforcement of the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (ruled 1519–1558) in 1532, followed a year later in England by Henry VIII's (ruled 1509–1547) "buggery" act. In many places prosecutors or judges deciding in sodomy cases could still call upon custom, local or regional laws, mosaic law, or rather arbitrary interpretations of Roman laws such as the Lex Scantinia from the third century b.c.e. and the Lex Julia de Adulteriis Coercendis from the first century b.c.e.

The Carolina and the English act both placed the death penalty on sodomy offenders: the first stipulated burning at the stake, the latter called for hanging or decapitation. Joost de Damhouder (1507–1581), an advisor to Charles V, in his Praxis Rerum Criminalium (1554), a commentary on the Carolina that was authoritative in many parts of Europe into the first half of the eighteenth century, once again invoked the Sodom story and claimed that natural disasters and pestilence would be God's wrath for the existence of sodomy. Although the main focus was on male homosexual and heterosexual sodomy, commentators on legal issues at the time often did include female same-sex relations as well.

Enlightenment writers like Beccaria in Italy, Montesquieu in France, and Bentham in England rejected (in their works on penal reform) the penalties for same-sex behavior. With the exception of Bentham (who never published his most radical writings on this issue), they had nothing positive to say about same-sex love, yet they rejected the idea that the inherent harm in homosexual behavior was so great that it warranted interference of the state through punitive action. Pursuing a separation of church and state, radical penal reformers also rejected antisodomy laws because those were believed to originate in theology. Reformers emphasized the political abuse of antisodomy laws and maintained that confessions of defendants were all too often obtained through torture. While rejecting the death penalty for sodomy, not all Enlightenment legal reformers rejected penalization, and in many places some form of punishment remained in place. At the end of the early modern period, those countries that adopted the French Napoleonic penal code (or had that code forced upon them) decriminalized same-sex behaviors.

PROSECUTIONS

The late Middle Ages also saw prosecutions and executions of individuals in Europe who were charged with same-sex intimate behavior. Sometimes legal actions were politically inspired, like the accusations in England against Edward II in 1372, or those against the Knights Templar. Prior to the early modern period, accusations of homosexual or heterosexual sodomy were also leveled against groups of heretics who at times faced extreme persecution.

In the late Middle Ages and at the beginning of the early modern period, religious and civil authorities in cities in Tuscany tried to stamp out widespread practices of so-called age-based homosexuality. Venice, Lucca, and Florence created special courts to deal with the offenders. In its seventy years of existence, the court in Florence dealt with over 10,000 cases. Although death penalties and incarcerations were sometimes applied in Venice, in Florence most cases offenders were merely fined, creating the belief (especially later in Protestant countries) that Italians considered sodomy to be a peccadillo, a minor sin. A century later, cities like Geneva and Ghent saw serious persecutions, yet in both places mostly foreigners, and especially Italians, faced trial. In Ghent, as in some other places in Flanders at the beginning of the Reformation, a number of monks were burned at the stake after having been found guilty of sodomy. Autos-da-fé (the public burning of offenders) occurred on the Iberian Peninsula especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Sodomy trials in rural parts of Europe like Prussia and Sweden usually involved charges of bestiality. This was the most common sexual offense in Sweden well into the twentieth century. No serious persecutions have been reported in eastern European countries. In Denmark sodomy seems to have been a crime without offenders: there have been no sodomy trials in that country.

France had witnessed limited numbers of sodomy trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the eighteenth century the Parisian police documented and policed sodomites' lives in a way unheard of before, but this hardly ever resulted in trials. However, such observations did provide ample documentation on sodomite subcultures in Paris. England and the Dutch Republic also had few sodomy trials up to the late seventeenth century. From that time on and well into the next century, there is ample documentation on raids on "molly houses" (from Latin mollis, referring to softness and effeminacy) in London. Offenders often were seriously injured by being put on the pillory for their crimes.

After the 1670s in the Dutch Republic, the number of sodomy trials gradually increased until a major wave of arrests erupted in 1730, which was to be repeated several times during the eighteenth century. Persecutions here turned into the most severe in early modern Europe. Between 1730 and 1811, when the French penal code was enforced in the Netherlands, some 800–1,000 sodomy trials were held there, resulting in about 200 death penalties and as many (often de facto lifelong) solitary confinements when mutual masturbation was the only proven offense. Most of the rest of the men prosecuted were forever expelled from their countries, often after they had already taken refuge abroad.

Trials against women for same-sex activities were rare. Occasionally, cross-dressing women who had sex with other women were brought to trial. Only in a three-year period in late-eighteenth-century Amsterdam were lower-class women prosecuted regularly for having sex with one another. They faced up to several years of incarceration.

EARLY MODERN HOMOSEXUALITIES

Divergent patterns of male same-sex behavior dominated different parts of Europe and the rest of the world at different times; upon closer examination, several patterns of behavior—cross-gender, class-based, intergenerational (age-based), and equal-status—could be distinguished. These patterns could also be mixed. The first three patterns, generally speaking, were related to assigned passive and active roles. Only in the equal-status pattern could adult men interchange active and passive roles with one another. Patterns of same-sex behavior could be permanent or temporary. Unlike in the modern West, these patterns did not necessarily represent an alternative sexuality, but were part of male social bonding and also of the socialization process from boyhood into adult masculinity.

In the cross-gender pattern, men dressed as women and took on a female role. Although crossing class barriers (which is what the second pattern is about) is a persistent and apparently enticing feature of same-sex behavior, traditionally the class-based homosexuality is mostly relevant to societies in which free-born men engaged in sexual activities with male slaves. European colonizers met the first among indigenous populations of the Americas, and may have engaged themselves in the second form.

The two most dominant patterns of male homosexual behavior in early modern Europe are the age-based and equal-status homosexualities, although the latter only began to emerge in the later part of the seventeenth century in northwestern Europe—England, northern France, and the Dutch Republic—and may have been present in urbanized western parts of Germany. Age-based homosexuality was the most dominant pattern in southern Europe throughout the early modern period, in particular in Italy; adult men strictly upholding active and passive roles sought sex with pubescent and sometimes prepubescent boys. Those boys, on reaching adulthood, switched from passive to active roles, started to have sex with women (mostly prostitutes), and ideally left all of that behind them when they were married in their late twenties or early thirties. Florence had gained such a reputation in Europe that "to Florence" had become a verb in German and Dutch, referring to same-sex activities. By the late Middle Ages, Italy had already earned a reputation for its apparent widespread homosexual activities: during most of the early modern period in western Europe, the word "Italian" was synonymous with "sodomite." Although documentation on homosexuality in eastern European countries is still scant, reports suggest that in a city like Moscow in the seventeenth century, patterns of behavior existed that were not unlike those in Tuscan cities. Once St. Petersburg started its ascendancy as capital and as window to the West, more "modern" patterns of homosexual behavior may have emerged here.

Prior to the emergence of equal-status homosexuality in northwestern Europe, far more hierarchical forms were dominant there, usually taking the forms of class- and age-based same-sex behavior, or some combination thereof. Homosexual behavior could manifest itself between masters and apprentices, or officers and privates. Such hierarchical and age-based forms involving young cabin boys show up persistently in documents of ship councils far into the eighteenth century.

The rise of the equal-status homosexuality in the late seventeenth century marked the beginning of a period of transition into modernity, which would eventually result in modern homosexualities and identity formations. This rise went hand in hand with the emergence of same-sex subcultures. Meeting sites for sodomites have been reported since the late Middle Ages in cities like Cologne, but they meant little compared to the numerous places—pubs, brothels, parks, gardens, and urban sites like city halls, commodity exchanges, and theaters—that show up in court documents from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in cities like Paris, London, and Amsterdam, and some smaller cities.

In Amsterdam, sodomites who had met someone could go to any number of public toilets underneath bridges. Some of those toilets had a reputation as places where sodomites could pick up partners, too. European societies with a dominant age-based homosexuality have also documented some sites at which men used to meet, yet those were typical places where men used to socialize and bond. The meeting sites frequented by sodomites in Holland and elsewhere from the late seventeenth century onwards were often the places where female prostitutes picked up their customers.

The rise of the sodomitical subcultures was accompanied by the development of a distinct homosexual role. Sodomites developed an often effete body language and deportment, and used gestures and an argot that sometimes resembled that of prostitutes. At one of the most notorious meeting sites for sodomites in Amsterdam, men used to walk to and fro with their arms akimbo and hit another man with their elbow if they were interested in him. Prostitutes of the time may have used similar tactics. In London's so-called molly houses sodomites staged plays and rituals in which they mocked marriage ceremonies and childbirth. While in the agebased same-sex pattern men could be infatuated with particular boys, in this equal-status homosexuality some men engaged in jealously guarded love affairs. By the end of the early modern period, to have a lover had become a definite goal for many members of these subcultures.

While in previously dominant patterns male desires were generally not directed exclusively towards other males, but were epitomized by the literary and also printed image of a man holding a boy on one arm and a woman on the other, in the eighteenth century the "new" effete sodomitical role became more solely geared toward males. Upon being arrested, some of these men in northwestern Europe would acknowledge that they never had had any desire for women. For some that would also mean acknowledging a preference for a passive role in sex.

Patterns of female same-sex behavior are far more difficult to discern. As with some male homosexualities, some forms of lesbian behavior must be looked at from a wider perspective. One of these is the tradition of amply documented female transvestism. Throughout the early modern period, women cross-dressed to masquerade as soldiers, sailors, pirates, or sometimes just to travel safely. Whether some of these women originally dressed up for sexual reasons is unknown, yet there is also documentation of women who in their male attire courted and even married other women. Some had sex while using artificial penises they had made. Women who cross-dressed had to adopt a male role in such a way that even people in close quarters like ship bunks did not become suspicious.

Women did not have subcultures like those men had in northwestern Europe, that is, clandestine spots and physical cues that exclusively served male-to-male desires. There is some evidence, especially from the Netherlands, that lower-class women did have subcultures, in which (although not exclusively) female-to-female desires could be fulfilled. These women, often widowed, abandoned, or left behind by sailor husbands, formed mutual support networks in which (sometimes through prostitution) they could pursue sex with men but also with one another. These women may have lived together in inconspicuous manners. Upper-class women and, for instance, actresses, although not cross-dressing, sometimes dressed in sufficiently ambiguous ways, mixing male and female attire, to raise suspicions if not of same-sex behavior, at least of having loose ways.

PERCEPTIONS

Separating theological from penal views is difficult, since the latter were mostly based upon theological perspectives on sexuality. Thomas Aquinas's thirteenth-century distinction between natural and unnatural sexual offenses (even though Thomism temporarily lost its influence) bore upon the early modern consciousness. In his morphology of sex crimes, rape and adultery were at least natural because they did not stand in the way of procreation and therefore were not as heinous as sodomy. While later Protestant writers would not refer to Aquinas, they by and large adhered to the same morphology. For Aquinas as much as for these writers, the only thing worse than sex between men or between women was sex with an animal.

The acknowledgment by Protestants and Catholics after the Counter-Reformation that sexual pleasure was a means for strong bonding between spouses, and was therefore primarily an environment to create offspring, probably engendered even more virulent rejections of same-sex behavior. After all, by bringing pleasure into the equation, a dangerous border was crossed that required constant vigilance. Since the Middle Ages and perhaps before, same-sex behavior had already been seen as the ultimate form of hedonism.

Such hedonism began with indulgence in other, corporeal pleasures, the luxuria. Indulgence in fine or copious food and drink, in dancing and smoking, in fine clothes, and also abuse of leisure through card playing or gambling was thought to provoke desires and lust for more pleasure and worse acts, such as womanizing, adultery, whoring, and, ultimately, homosexual acts. Unnatural behavior could thus originate in natural needs for food, drink, dress, and rest, and then only deteriorate from there. This was supposedly what had happened in Sodom and Gomorrah, which had been located on a fertile plain. The riches of these cities led to indulgence in all kinds of debauchery and, eventually, to God's wrath.

Women were considered to have less perfect bodies than men and were supposed to be, by nature, insatiable; thus submitting to the hierarchy of the sexes was seen as the only way for women to control their cravings. However, men could also lose control and become as insatiable as women were supposed to be, resulting in effeminate behavior and indulgence in all kinds of sexual vices. Hence, effeminacy in the eighteenth century was still seen as the hallmark of a womanizer. Womanizing was, after all, seen as only one step away from sodomy with men. This potential for sodomy was seen as destructive not just on the individual level, but on a national level as well. People feared eventual destruction by fire and sulfur, just as God had once destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Hedonism, abuse, and loss of control represented chaos, and chaos could eventually become the undoing of society and creation, as the very purpose of creation had been to bring order into chaos.

To the extent that this way of thinking was a psychological theory about the causes of same-sex behavior, it attributed little if any agency to the mind, and it was profoundly distrustful of the temptations the body put in the way of even the righteous. In its prediction of individual and collective behaviors, of the rise and fall of nations, this theory was also social and political. It explained the demise of southern European countries as well as the ascendancy of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. Sodomy supposedly did not exist there until the sobriety that had characterized its inhabitants gave way to indulgence in the wealth that God had once bestowed upon them as a reward for their sober ways.

In the course of the eighteenth century, although remaining largely implicit, more individualized theories took hold; some commentators began to speak of inner proclivities rather than of bodies that had run amok. In a sense, the historical paths of male and female homosexualities also met around the 1750s. Lesbian activities at the time were attributed to "whores," that is, women who were not necessarily prostitutes but who had loose morals. Whereas previously effeteness among males had been the characteristic of womanizers, after the mid-eighteenth century it became more and more the hallmark of sodomites. The effete sodomite was like a he-whore, an English author wrote at the time, and that was also the way sodomites were perceived in the Dutch Republic. Consequently, fears of the spread of same-sex practices diminished somewhat in the course of the eighteenth century, although among some groups they persist to this very day. Nevertheless, authorities—and as indicated before, penal reformers—in many parts of Europe felt the need to "contain" the vice, no longer because they feared God's immediate wrath, but because they feared that the male sex was undermined, and with it nations' capacity to pursue political, economic, and military power.

SELF-PERCEPTIONS

By the late eighteenth century, sodomites in northwestern Europe had not only developed a distinctive societal role, but also perceived themselves as a separate category from men and women. They also talked about these issues among one another. Early in the eighteenth century they would refer to other sodomites as men who liked to do this kind of thing as well. Some seventy years later sodomites talked about "being a member of the family," "people like us," and "you and me and thousands like us." It especially allowed devout men to look upon themselves as morally responsible human beings. From the 1750s onward sodomites arrested in the Dutch Republic would refer to the biblical story of David and Jonathan, and increasingly they would claim to have been born with their inclinations intact. More than half a century before Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in Germany in the 1860s formulated the theory of the existence of a third sex—men born with a female soul—sodomites in the Netherlands spoke among one another of their "condition" or "way of being" as an inborn weakness. There is no documentation about women who clearly spoke in such a way of themselves. For men, one might say this newfound homosexual identity culminated in the contents of a love letter from one Dutch male servant to his male lover early in the nineteenth century. He used still-current terms for boyfriend, talked about "being of the family," and he called upon innate weaknesses to explain their desires, while also legitimizing those desires by telling his lover that God had not created any human being for its own damnation.

See also Crime and Punishment ; Gender ; Sexual Difference, Theories of ; Sexuality and Sexual Behavior .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. London, 1982.

Everard, Myriam. Ziel en zinnen. Over liefde en lust tussen vrouwen in de tweede helft van de achttiende eeuw. Groningen, 1994.

Faderman, Lilian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York, 1983.

Greenberg, David. The Construction of Homosexuality. Chicago and London, 1988.

Halperin, David. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago and London, 2002.

Healey, Dan. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent. Chicago and London, 2001.

Liliequist, Jonas. "Peasants against Nature: Crossing the Boundaries between Man and Animal in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Sweden." In Forbidden History: The State, Society and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, edited by John Fout, pp. 57–87. Chicago and London, 1992.

Merrick, Jeffrey W., and Michael Sibalis, eds. Homosexuality in French History and Culture. New York and London, 2001.

Monter, William. "Sodomy and Heresy in Early Modern Switzerland." In Historical Perspectives on Homosexuality, edited by Salvatore J. Licata and Robert P. Petersen, pp. 41–55. New York, 1981.

Mott, Luiz. "Loves Labors Lost: Five Letters from a Seventeenth-Century Portuguese Sodomite." In The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, edited by Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma, pp. 91–101. New York and London, 1989.

Rey, Michel. "Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle, 1700–1750: The Police Archives," Eighteenth Century Life 9, no. 3. Unauthorized Sexual Behavior During the Enlightenment. Edited by Robert P. Maccubbin. (1985): 179–191.

Rocke, Michael. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. New York and Oxford, 1996.

Trumbach, Randolph. Sex and the Gender Revolution. Vol. 1, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London. Chicago and London, 1998.

Van der Meer, Theo. "Sodomy and the Pursuit of a Third Sex in the Early Modern Period." In Third Sex/Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, edited by Gilbert Herdt, pp. 137–212. New York, 1994.

Von Rosen, Wilhelm. "Sodomy in early modern Denmark: a crime without victims." In The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, edited by Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma, pp. 177–204. New York and London, 1989.

Theo van der Meer

HOMOSEXUALITY

The term homosexuality designates a sexual orientation in which a person of the same sex is the object.

The term was apparently coined in 1869, from the Greek homos ("same"), by K. M. Benkert, a writer who published his works under the pseudonym Kertbeny Karoli. He was a defender of sexual rights, and he used the term "homosexual" during discussions on whether to change paragraph 143 of the Prussian Constitution of April 14, 1851, which punished acts of "unnatural indecency" committed between men, or between a man and an animal.

It is highly surprising that Freud took no interest in this manifestation of sexual life during the first years of psychoanalysis, despite the abundant literature on the topic by such writers as Jean-Martin Charcot, Valentin Magnan, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Albert Moll, Magnus Hirschfeld, and others. Though Freud views neurosis as the "negative of perversion" (without mentioning homosexuality), this is because he supposes that psychic processes do not undergo repression in the "pervert." Moreover, the theory of bisexuality (Freud-Fliess) introduces the question, albeit under the veil of biology. However, Freud did undertake to analyze a homosexual patient at the end of the nineteenth century, but the patient concerned apparently committed suicide at Trafoi.

The arrival of Isidore Sadger in Freud's circle in 1906 was to be decisive. As dialogue between him and Freud led to the laying down of an "etiological formula": masculine homosexuality results from a boy's childhood repression of the existence of a "strong" mother and a weak or absent father (Freud, 1910c). In the debate with Sadger, who adhered to the seduction theory, Freud proposed etiological variants in which the boy's arousal is transposed from the mother onto men (1905d [1910]), or else there is identification with the mother, hatred towards boys is converted into love, there is a "narcissistic" fixation on the penis, or we see identification with the mother leading to repression of love for the mother (Nunberg, Federn, 1962-75). The theory of narcissism that developed in tandem with that of homosexuality opened up a path that Freud left relatively unexplored: the transmission of narcissism. Thus, Freud's descriptions in "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914c)—"A person may love . . . according to the narcissistic type . . . (a) what he himself is (i.e., himself), (b) what he himself was" (p. 90)—could be supplemented by formulae such as "a person loves that which the other wants him to be" and, eventually, "a person loves in himself that which the other would have liked to have or to be" (p. 90).

The other area barely outlined by Freud in the discussions of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society is that of the passage from autoeroticism to narcissism: "In general, man has two original sexual objects and his later life depends on the one upon which he remains fixated. These two sexual objects are, for each individual, the woman (the mother, the children's nurse, etc.) and his own person. It is a question of getting rid of both of them and not lingering over them. One's own person is the one which, most often, is replaced by the father; the latter soon enters the hostile position. Homosexuality bifurcates at this point. The homosexual is unable to detach himself from himself so soon" (1914c). This heavily significant appearance of the father-figure was not followed up in the etiology of masculine homosexuality but it was later to be found in the analysis of male paranoia (the Schreber case, reported in "Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia [Dementia Paranoides]": 1911c [1910]), in which a pathological defense against homosexuality develops, though the role of the father is never specified. Is he an agent of culture because he brandishes castration in the name of the law that forbids masturbation and the mother? Might he not also fill a role as seducer?

In 1910, homosexuality was defined by the characteristics of the object or the subject, but in 1915, in place of this distinction, Freud returned to the conception he had earlier developed with Fliess: the object is merely the reflection of the bisexual nature of the subject ("Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality," 1905d [1915]).

Homosexuality in women would remain less well explored ("The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman," 1920a), because the transposition of the etiological formula for men—specifically, excessive love for the father—often works less well.

As Sándor Ferenczi remarked in 1914, drawing a distinction between "subject homoerotism" and "object homoerotism" (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, note added in 1920, p. 147), psychoanalysis relied right from the start on a model of the "feminine man" and thus neglected the masculinity present in other homosexual men, just as it ignored the femininity of certain lesbians.

Since the 1970s, as homosexuality became more openly discussed, several authors (Chasseguet-Smirgel, J., et al., 1964; Isay, R. A., 1986) have communicated clinical observations that suggest other etiologies. But the psychoanalytic perspective has again become clouded by the way the question of "gender" has been biologized (Robert Stoller). Gays themselves have embraced theories of innate or physiological homosexuality in order to defend themselves against the inquisitorial persecution long meted out to them by justice, medicine, and even psychoanalysis.

Nonetheless, a first step towards the lessening of homophobia, on a basis other than that of moral principles, was taken by Freud, who put forward the idea that a manifest sexual tendency (heterosexuality, for instance) could conceal another, opposite tendency that remains latent (such as homosexuality). However, although Freud went along with increasingly progressive attitudes in society, he remained just as reserved as did society—witness this rather ambiguous and nuanced letter that he wrote in 1935 to the mother of a homosexual, whose sexuality he did not view as an illness but as a case of arrested development (while only heterosexuality is treated as normal): "Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them. (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.) It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime—and a cruelty, too. . . . By asking me if I can help, you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. The answer is, in a general way we cannot promise to achieve it. In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies, which are present in every homosexual; in the majority of cases it is no more possible" (Letters of Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939, p. 423). However, such permissiveness was contradicted by the fact that from 1920 onwards many psychoanalytic societies refused to admit openly homosexual candidates.

The response to the theoretical and practical debate around homosexuality was nevertheless present, in embryonic form, in Freud's conceptualization of the sexual instinct in 1905. Indeed, at the beginning of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality following Charcot and Magnan, he used the highly inappropriate word "inversion" to prove demonstrate that the instinct has no predefined object.

Bertrand Vichyn

See also: Activity/passivity; Alcoholism; Anality; Dark continent; Eroticism, anal; Female sexuality; Fetishism; Heterosexuality; Identification; "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood"; Libido; Narcissism, secondary; Neurosis; Paranoia; Paranoid position; Persecution; Perversion; Phallic mother; Projection; Psychology of Women, The: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, Psycho-pathologie de l'échec (Psychopathology of Failure); Sadger, Isidor Isaak; Suicide; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality .

Bibliography

Bieber, Irving, et al. (1962). Homosexuality, a psychoanalytical study. New York: Basic Books.

Chasseguet-Smirgel, Jacqueline, et al. (1964). Female sexuality: New psychoanalytic views. London: Virago.

Freud, Sigmund. (1960). Letters of Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939. (Ernst L. Freud, Ed.; Tania and James Stern, Trans.). New York: Basic Books.

Isay, Richard A. (1986). The development of sexual identity in homosexual men. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 41.

Lewes, Kenneth. (1988). The psychoanalytic theory of male homosexuality. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Socarides, Charles W. (1978). Homosexuality. New York: Jason Aronson.

Further Reading

Friedman, Robert. (1988). Male homosexuality. A contemporary psychoanalytic perspective. New Haven and London: Yale University Press

Roughton, Ralph. (2002). Rethinking homosexuality: What it teaches us about psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 50, 733-764.

Homosexuality

Gay Politics

The dynamic of homosexual politics in the 1990s consisted of gays and lesbians trying to establish themselves in mainstream American life and the efforts of conservatives to resist such a fundamental cultural change. Many Americans, meanwhile, seem to have drifted toward a somewhat uneasy accommodation with homosexuality. According to a Time/CNN poll conducted in 1998, 64 percent of those questioned believed that homosexual relations were acceptable, while 48 percent thought them morally wrong. Twenty years earlier, in 1978, 53 percent of Americans thought homosexual relations were morally unacceptable and only 41 percent found them permissible. Indisputably, there were more gay men and women visible in American society during the 1990s than at any other time in U.S. history "think we've done a great deal of persuading people that we are not a countercultural force," explained Andrew Sullivan, the author of Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival (1998) and former editor of the New Republic. "We are a mainstream force." As a consequence of the homosexual embrace of mainstream society, antigay activists had to alter their basic strategy. No longer able to demonize homosexuals, critics, such as Senate majority leader Chester Trent Lott (R-Mississippi), compared them to individuals who were afflicted with alcoholism or kleptomania, regarding homo-sexuality as an illness that can be cured. A major effort in this respect came from Transformation Ministries, a branch of Exodus International, a nondenominational Christian fellowship dedicated to helping homosexuals change their orientation. According to a 1998 Newsweek poll, 56 percent of respondents believed that gay men and lesbians could alter their sexual orientation through therapy, will power, or religious conviction. Even as the debate raged over whether homosexuality was genetically inherited or the result of experience and environment, gay and lesbian organizations went from being outcasts to being an expected, and even welcomed, presence in politics, at least among Democratic coalitions. "The whole public attitude on gay issues has become much more mainstream," observed Al From, cofounder and president of the Democratic Leadership Council. "A lot more people are dealing with gays in their families."

The Clinton Administration

Many activists on both sides of the question regard the election of Bill Clinton as a turning point in the debate over gay rights, even though Clinton's support for gays was unsteady and equivocal. His policy of "Don't ask, Don't tell" for gays in the military satisfied no one. In addition, he signed the Defense of Marriage Act (21 September 1996), which denied federal recognition to same-sex marriages. Yet, Clinton also ended the federal policy of treating homosexuals as security risks and was the first president to invite gay activists to the White House. The message Clinton sent was that gays were not only a part of America but that they were becoming an important political constituency as well. Meanwhile, a new kind of gay-lobbying group emerged during the 1990s. Gone was the militant tribalism of ACT UP and Queer Nation. In their place was the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Founded in 1980, the HRC corresponded to the impulses within the gay community to join the main-stream. As of 1998, membership in the HRC stood at 250,000. "The Clinton elections took the wind out of the sails of the street activists," declared John Gallagher, national correspondent for the Advocate, a gay monthly news magazine. "They used to be outside shouting. Now people have to be inside talking, which is a new experience." Even the Republican Party had to respond. In 1998, Jim Nicholson, chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), made a point of welcoming gays into the party. In the Senate, a small number of conservatives, including presidential candidates Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and John S. McCain III (R-Arizona), quietly moved closer to gay advocacy groups on such issues as hate-crime legislation, although they remained aloof on the issue of gay marriage. Opponents on the Christian Right, however, became more adamant in their condemnation. One-time presidential candidate Gary Bauer, head of the Family Research Council, made opposition to gay rights a defining issue of his campaign. Pat Robertson, president of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), insisted that "the acceptance of homosexuality is the last step in the decline of Gentile civilization."

Hate Crimes

Violent assaults against homosexuals were nothing new in the 1990s, but the savage attack on University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard that took place in Laramie, Wyoming, on 7 October 1998 (Shepard died from his injuries on 12 October) focused renewed national attention on the issue. A Time/CNN survey conducted at the time, the results of which were no doubt influenced by Shepard's murder, revealed that 76 percent of those questioned favored increased penalties for those who commit "hate crimes" against homosexuals. By the end of the decade, forty-two states had passed hate-crime statutes, and twenty-two specifically listed homosexuals as a possible class of victims. Nevertheless, Kris Pratt, a policy advocate at HCR, argued that "America is still largely ignoring hate crimes against gays and lesbians." In part, Pratt and others have suggested, the rising violence against homosexuals was simply a response to the more visible public presence of gays in American life. "When the larger society is faced with the gay and lesbian experience," said Pratt, "the more violent segments of that society often react in very heinous ways by bashing back."

The Antigay Backlash

Less dramatic but equally revealing about American attitudes toward homosexuality was the growing backlash against gay rights. In West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1998, for example, the city council denied a gay couple the right to purchase a reducedrate family pass to a municipal swimming pool. This incident, hardly a major setback in the struggle for gay rights, nevertheless represented to many a new set of barriers that gays faced. Although partner benefits were not placed in jeopardy, the accumulation of similar setbacks raised questions about whether Americans had reached the limit of their tolerance for gay rights as the decade drew to a close. On the national level the backlash took familiar forms. Most glaring, the number of hate crimes rose while the overall crime rate declined. Despite the Clinton administration policy of "Don't ask, Don't tell" the dismissal of gay servicemen and servicewomen increased 67 percent between 1994 and 1997. At the same time, twenty-eight states enacted legislation outlawing gay marriages. In February 1998 Maine became the first state to reverse a gay-rights ordinance prohibiting discrimination in housing and employment. Although polls suggested that the majority of Americans accepted civil rights for gays, those same persons became uneasy with the morality of homosexuality. In a Newsweek survey conducted in 1998, 83 percent of those queried agreed that gays deserved equal rights to employment and 75 percent agreed that housing discrimination against gays ought to be against the law. Fifty-two percent believed that homosexuals ought to be able to inherit their partner's property and Social Security benefits. Yet, 54 percent declared that homosexual relations were sinful.

Same-Sex Marriage

Moral reservations also explained why most Americans during the decade did not support same-sex marriages. Despite this widespread opposition, however, scholars as well as advocates and critics of gay rights regarded the ruling of the Supreme Court of Vermont in the case of Baker v. State (December 1999) as a legal landmark in the controversy about equal marriage rights for homosexuals. The justices declared that "the extension of the Common Benefits Clause [of the Vermont Constitution] to acknowledge plaintiffs as Vermonters who seek nothing more, nor less, than legal protection and security for their avowed commitment to an intimate and lasting human relationship is simply, when all is said and done, a recognition of our common humanity/1 In response to the decision, the editors of the New Republic wrote: "legalizing gay marriage … is not a radical reformation of an unchanging institution. It is the long-overdue correction of a moral anomaly that dehumanizes and excludes a significant portion of the human race." Most Americans disagreed: a Newsweek survey showed that only 33 percent supported the legalization of gay marriage. In Vermont, 52 percent opposed the Supreme Court ruling.

Sources:

Scott Baldauf, "Do Homosexuals Need More Legal Protections?" Christian Science Monitor (14 October 1998): 3.

John Leland and Mark Miller, "Can Gays "Convert'?" Newsweek 132 (17 August 1998): 4h-50.

Marc Peyser, "Battling Backlash," Newsweek 132 (17 August 1998): 50 52.

"Separate but Equal?" New Republic, 222 (10 January 2000): 9.

Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex and Survival (New York: Knopf, 1998).

Homosexuality

Enduring emotional, romantic, or sexual attraction to individuals of one's own gender.

For most of history, open discussions about homo-sexuality—sexual attraction to people of one's own gender—have been taboo. Men and women with a homosexual orientation are referred to as gay, while the term lesbian refers to women only. Homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder until 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association removed "homosexuality" from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders . Two decades later, bias and discrimination against gays and lesbians still exists, but sexual orientation is discussed more openly.

There are no reliable statistics on the number of people who are homosexual. The American researcher Alfred C. Kinsey conducted extensive surveys on sexual behavior in the 1950s, and estimated that about 4% of men and 3% of women were exclusively homosexual; however, his research found that 37% of men and 28% of women had had some sexual experience with a person of their own gender. Most researchers in the 1990s estimate the percentage of the population with homosexual orientation at about 5%, while recognizing that the estimate is based on projections, not hard statistics.

The four components of human sexuality are biological sex, gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female), sexual orientation, and social sex role (adherence to cultural norms for feminine and masculine behavior). Sexual orientation refers to enduring emotional, romantic, sexual, or affectionate feelings of attraction to individuals of a particular gender. Sexual orientation may or may not be reflected by the individual in his or her behavior, because feelings of attraction may be repressed or ignored for any number of reasons.

Three sexual orientations are commonly recognized: homosexual, attraction to individuals of one's own gender; heterosexual, attraction to individuals of the opposite gender; bisexual, attractions to members of either gender.

Through history, various theories have been proposed regarding the source and development of sexual orientation. Many scientists believe that sexual orientation is shaped for most people at an early age through complex interactions of biological, psychological, and social factors. In most cases, sexual orientation emerges for most people in early adolescence without any prior sexual experience. Many reports have been recorded by people recounting efforts to change their sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual with no success. For these reasons, psychologists believe that sexual orientation is not a conscious choice that can be voluntarily changed. In addition, scientific research over 30 years confirms that homosexual orientation is not associated with emotional or social problems. Based on research conducted in the 1960s, psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals concluded that homosexuality is not an illness, mental disorder, or emotional problem.

The process of identity development for lesbians and gay men, usually called "coming out," has been found to be strongly related to psychological adjustment. Being able to discuss one's sexual orientation is a sign of positive mental health and strong self-esteem for a gay man or lesbian. But even for those gays and lesbians who have adjusted psychologically to their sexual orientation, false stereotypes and prejudice make the process of "coming out" challenging. Lesbian and gay people must risk rejection by family , friends, co-workers, and religious institutions when they share their sexual orientation.

In addition, violence and discrimination are real threats. In a 1989 national survey, almost half of the gay and lesbian people surveyed reported being the target of some form of discrimination or violence during their lifetime. Legal protection from discrimination and violence for gay and lesbian people is important. Some states categorize violence against an individual on the basis of her or his sexual orientation as a "hate crime" with more stringent punishment . Eight U.S. states have laws against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

There is no scientific evidence to support the idea that sexual orientation can be changed through therapy. Some well-meaning parents have sought therapy to help their child change his or her sexual orientation, especially when the admission of homosexuality seems to be causing the child great emotional pain . In fact, there have been reports of cases where such therapy was successful; however, several factors in these reports cause psychologists to question the results. First, none of these cases have been reported on by objective mental health researchers; rather, many of the reports about sexual orientation being changed through therapy have been generated by organizations who are ideologically opposed to homosexual orientation. In addition, the reports have not allowed for a realistic follow-up period. In 1990, the American Psychological Association stated that scientific evidence does not support conversion therapy; in fact, the evidence reveals that it can actually be psychologically damaging to attempt conversion. Sexual orientation is a complex component of one's personality not limited to sexual behavior. Altering sexual orientation is to attempt to alter a key aspect of the individual's identity.

Like people of other sexual orientations, a percentage of gays and lesbians seek counseling. They may see a therapist for any of the reasons many people seek help—coping with grief, anxiety, or other mental health or relationship difficulties. In addition, they may seek psychological help in adjusting to their sexual orientation and in dealing with prejudice, discrimination, and rejection. Families who are adjusting to the news that one of their members is homosexual may also seek counseling to help with the complex feelings and prejudices that such news may elicit.

Since sexual orientation emerges in adolescence— already a stage of challenging emotional, social, and physical development—families of adolescent gays and lesbians should learn as much as they can about sexual orientation. Educational materials and support and discussion groups exist for both adolescents and their family members.

See also Bisexuality

Further Reading

Bass, Ellen, and Kate Kaufman. Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Youth—and Their Allies. New York: HarperPerennial, 1996.

Dynes, Wayne R., et al. Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. New York: Garland, 1990.

Garnets, L. D., et al. "Issues in Psychotherapy with Lesbians and Gay Men." American Psychologist 46:9, pp. 964-72.

Garnets, L. D. and D. C. Kimmel. Psychological Perspectives on Lesbians and Gay Male Experiences. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Gonsiorek, J.C., and J.D. Weinrich. Homosexuality: Research Implications For Public Policy. New York: Sage Publications, 1991.

Goodchilds, J. D., Psychological Perspectives on Human Diversity in America. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1993.

Michale, Robert T., et al. Sex in America: A Definitive Survey. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994.

Miller, Deborah A., and Alex Waigandt. Coping with Your Sexual Orientation. New York: Rosen, 1990. [For adolescents]

Rafkin, Louise, ed. Different Daughters: A Book by Mothers of Lesbians. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1989.

Schulenburg, Joy. The Complete Guide to Gay Parenting. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985.

Further Information

American Psychological Association. Office of Public Affairs, 750 First St., N.E., Washington, DC 20002-4242, (202) 336–5700. Email: public.affairs@apa.org.

Federation of Parents and Friend of Lesbians and Gays. P.O. Box 27605, Washington, DC 20038, (202) 638–4200.

National Federation of Parents and Friends of Gays. 8020 Eastern Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20004, (202) 726–3223.

National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. 1734 14th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20009, (202) 332–6483.

National Institute of Mental Health. 5600 Fishers Lane, Room 7C02, Rockville, MD 20857, (301) 443–4513.

Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. 1012 14th Street, NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20005, (202) 638–4200.

Sex Information and Education Counsel of the United States. 130 W. 42nd Street, Suite 2500, New York, NY 10036.

homosexuality a term created by 19th cent. theorists to describe a sexual and emotional interest in members of one's own sex. Today a person is often said to have a homosexual or a heterosexual orientation, a description intended to defuse some of the long-standing sentiment among many Westerners that homosexuality is immoral or pathological. Homosexual practices are not afforded any special moral or psychological significance in many other cultures. A survey of 190 societies around the world (1951) reported that homosexual practices were considered acceptable behavior in approximately 70% of them.

The description of homosexuality as an orientation also suggests, as some contemporary theorists have argued, that the boundaries between "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are not necessarily rigid. Some studies have indicated that most individuals have some erotic interest in both sexes, whether overt or not. The open expression of interest in both sexes is known as bisexuality. Transsexuals are distinguished from homosexuals by the feeling that they are really members of the opposite sex. Male and female homosexuals are now commonly known as gays and lesbians, respectively.

Theories of Homosexuality

Psychiatric theories of homosexuality have included the following: that homosexuality is a regression to the earliest (oral) stage of development; that most families of homosexuals are characterized by an overprotective mother and an absent father; or that homosexuals fear engulfment by a dominant mother in the pre-Oedipal phase. Some authorities have suggested that homosexuality may be an expression of nonsexual problems, such as fear of adult responsibility, or may be triggered by various experiences, such as having sexual relationships with members of one's own sex at an early age that prove to be very satisfying. Arguments regarding the roots of lesbianism include disappointing heterosexual love experience, a father who displays distaste for men who express interest in his daughter, and memories of abusive relationships with men.

Many of these theories have been discredited in recent years, particularly by those who cite biological causation. Some researchers have contended that a disruption in the hormonal processes of the mother while she is pregnant may be one explanation. Simon Levay, a neurobiologist at the Salk Institute, has suggested that homosexuality may be related to brain functioning, as part of the hypothalamus in homosexual men is about a quarter to half the size it is in heterosexual men. Subsequent studies have shown that homosexual men react to certain substances believed to be human pheromones differently from heterosexual men. Several studies have pointed to a genetic predisposition governed by one or more genes on the X chromosome.

Other recent studies, while not directly supporting biological explanations for homosexuality, suggest that it may be a predisposition that can be detected at an early age among children who do not appear to have traditional gender identification. Whether it can be easily detected or not, most theorists agree that homosexual orientation tends to arise at an early age. Substantially fewer studies of homosexuality have been performed among lesbians, perhaps because of the greater stigma which is often attached to male homosexuality in many Western cultures.

The American Psychiatric Association no longer considers homosexuality a disorder, unless sexual orientation becomes an object of distress for the individual. In such cases, the individual—referred to by psychologists as ego-dystonic—may choose to seek psychiatric treatment. Also, beginning in the late 20th cent., biologists more openly examined and discussed the occurrence of homosexual behaviors among animals, which has been documented in several hundred species. Such behaviors, which may include courtship, sexual contact, bond formation, and the rearing of young, are found both in wild and captive animals. Many gay-rights activists have criticized the various theories which try to "explain" homosexuality, particularly those that treat it as an illness in need of treatment.

The Gay-Rights Movement

In the United States today, the law's approach to homosexual acts has varied from state to state: In most states, unharmful private sexual acts of any kind between consenting adults were by the late 20th cent. considered to be outside the province of legal authority. The Supreme Court upheld state laws prohibiting homosexual conduct in 1986, and gay activists subsequently focused their efforts on overturning antisodomy laws in those states that retained them; in most, the laws applied also to heterosexuals but were seen as likely to be used chiefly against homosexuals. By 2003, when the Supreme Court reversed its 1986 decision and voided all antisodomy laws, 13 states still had such laws. In recent years, gays and lesbians have struggled to gain rights accorded other Americans as well as public acceptance, but the Judaeo-Christian tradition's condemnation of homosexuality as immoral has made such goals as acceptance of same-sex marriage and adoption by gays elusive. The Clinton administration's much discussed "don't ask, don't tell" policy, announced as a way to allow gays in the military to serve without fear of discharge or other penalty as long as they did not reveal their sexual orientation, appears to have done little to change the precarious status of gay soldiers.

The outbreak in the early 1980s of AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), which initially came to public notice as occurring among male homosexuals in the United States, galvanized the American gay community and brought support also from the wider community for recognition of the menace posed by AIDS, for increased funding for AIDS research, for wider access to information regarding safe sexual practices, and even, to some degree, for legal recognition of same-sex couples. But AIDS, even as it appeared in the nonhomosexual population (e.g., hemophiliacs), also sparked moralistic reactions; some felt, for example, that it represented a form of judgment on homosexuality.

See also gay-rights movement .

Bibliography

See K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (1978); L. Nungesser, Homosexual Acts, Actors and Identities (1983); B. Cant and S. Hemmings, Radical Records: Personal Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay History (1988); D. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (1988); R. Troiden, Gay and Lesbian Identity (1988); D. Halperin, 100 Years of Homosexuality (1989); J. Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (1994); D. Hamer and P. Copeland, The Science of Desire (1994); A. Sullivan, Virtually Normal (1995); J. Loughery, The Other Side of Silence (1998); B. Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (1999); L. Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization (2003); G. Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (2004).

Homosexuality The Supreme Court has protected some aspects of sexual autonomy within the context of a constitutional right of privacy. It has recognized an individual's right to use contraceptives in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), and upheld a woman's right to decide whether or not to terminate her pregnancy in Roe v. Wade (1973). Initially, however, the Court refused to construe the right of privacy to protect consensual homosexual activity by adults in their own homes. The 5‐to‐4 majority in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) upheld a Georgia law that criminalized both homosexual and heterosexual sodomy. At that time, twenty‐four states plus the District of Columbia outlawed sodomy. Writing for the majority, Justice Byron White maintained that the right to privacy did not confer a general right to sexual autonomy but was limited to questions of marriage, family, and procreation, concluding that homosexual conduct bore no connection to any of those. In a strong dissent, Justice Harry Blackmun insisted that the majority had focused on the wrong question. The case was not about a “fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy,” as the majority claimed, but “about ‘the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men,’ namely, ‘the right to be let alone’ Olmstead v. United States (1928).”

In the 1990s, the Court accorded a degree of protection to homosexuals by way of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court did not recognize homosexuality as a suspect classification. Instead, it used a rational basis test in Romer v. Evans (1996) to strike down Amendment 2 to Colorado's constitution. Enacted by voter initiative as a response to municipal ordinances banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in housing, employment, education, public accommodations, health and welfare services, and other transactions and activities, Amendment 2 precluded any action by any branch of state government to protect the status of individuals based on their “homosexual, lesbian or bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships.” Writing for a 6‐to‐3 majority in Romer, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that Amendment 2 “seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class it affects” and concluded that it “lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests” (517 U.S. 620 at 632).

However, in *Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000), a 5–to–4 majority overturned a state supreme court ruling that the Boy Scouts, a private, not‐for‐profit organization, had violated a New Jersey public accommodations law (banning discrimination on the basis of several traits including “sexual orientation”) when it revoked the adult membership of James Dale, an assistant scoutmaster, solely because of his avowed homosexuality (no conduct was involved). Chief Justice William Rehnquist ruled that forced reinstatement of Dale would violate the organization's First Amendment right of expressive association. Five years earlier, a unanimous Court ruled in *Hurley v. Irish‐American GLB Group (1995) that using a Massachusetts public accommodations law to require the organizers of Boston's St. Patrick's Day parade to include an organization of Irish‐American gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals would violate the organizers' First Amendment right to control the message that the parade would impart.

In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the Court overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, and expressly recognized that the right of privacy protects private consensual homosexual conduct among adults. The Texas law at issue (unlike the Georgia law in Bowers) criminalized homosexual sodomy but not heterosexual sodomy. Thus, the Court could have sustained Bowers and simply ruled that the Texas law violated equal protection by criminalizing sodomy only among same‐sex partners. This is what Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recommended in her concurring opinion. In his opinion for the Court, Justice Kennedy admitted that the equal protection argument was a “tenable” one, but insisted that the Court go further and reconsider the Court's holding in Bowers. Lawrence, he wrote, “should be resolved by determining whether the petitioners were free as adults to engage in the private conduct in the exercise of their liberty under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution” (539 U.S. 558 at 564). He, along with four other members of the majority, concluded that they were: “The Texas statute furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual.” In so doing, a five‐person majority explicitly overturned Bowers, saying that it “was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today” (539 U.S. 558 at 578). O'Connor's concurrence added a sixth vote for overturning the Texas statute.

Left unclear by the majority's decision in Lawrence was how the Court might rule on issues such as gay marriage and the ban on gays in the military (which, despite the 1993 “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” law, remained in effect). Every earlier constitutional claim against the latter had failed in federal court, though the Supreme Court itself had never ruled on the issue. Even before Lawrence, many legal observers believed that Congress's 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which allowed states to disregard same‐sex marriages contracted in other states, violated the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution.

The issue of gay marriage came to the fore in 2003 when the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled 4‐to‐3 in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (440 Mass. 309) that “barring an individual from the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage solely because that person would marry a person of the same sex violates the Massachusetts constitution” p. 344). Although the U.S. Supreme Court refused in November 2004 to hear a challenge to a subsequent Massachusetts law allowing same‐sex couples to wed, it is likely that this issue will come before the Court again—especially as same‐sex couples who marry in a state where it is legal move to other states and demand that their marriages be recognized there.

See also Discriminatory Intent.

Bibliography

Jean L. Cohen , Regulating Intimacy: A New Legal (2002).
Andrew Koppelman , The Gay Rights Question in Contemporary American Law (2002).
Arthur S. Leonard, ed., Homosexuality And The Constitution (1997).

John Anthony Maltese

homosexuality The term homosexual describes those who have sex with, or are sexually attracted to, persons of the same (Greek:homo) sex. It was devised in 1869 by a Hungarian doctor ( Benkert), as part of the emerging medical and scientific discourse around sexuality, discussed by Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality (1976). During the following century, a great deal of scientific writing was concerned with depicting homosexuality as a morbid pathology, although several more sympathetic strands of thought did emerge during the early part of the twentieth century. For Sigmund Freud homosexuality was not an illness; for Alfred Kinsey it was a statistically widespread phenomenon; William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson saw it as physiologically normal; and, by 1973, it was no longer classified as a disease by the American Psychiatric Association.

In modern Western usage, male homosexuals are referred to as ‘gay’ and female homosexuals as ‘lesbian’. In all societies men have had sex with men (and probably women with women, though this is less well documented), but having this behaviour as a basis for a social—and especially an organizing or life-long—identity is a recent and Western phenomenon. Other societies have had other arrangements: generation–specific (and often mandatory) ritualist homosexuality in Melanesia; age–and role–specific relationships (Ancient Greece); and specified inter-role or third–role identity (American Indian Berdache). Even in well–documented Western societies, the varieties of homosexual identity, arrangements, and life–styles show considerable diversity, including episodic and time-limited activity (for example same–sex institutions), admixture with heterosexual activity (bisexuals and married gays), and wholly casual and anonymous encounters (‘cottaging’ and ‘cruising’).

Although the shift in both popular attitudes towards homosexuality and the social organization of homosexual identity and subculture must be seen largely as a consequence of the rise of a lesbian and gay movement, the sociological analysis of this field has proved important. The pathbreaking article was by Mary McIntosh (‘The Homosexual Role’, Social Problems, 1968)
, in which she argued that homosexuality was not a condition at all, but a social role which has emerged since the seventeenth century in the Western world—a proposition which sponsored the so-called social constructionist theory of homosexuality.

It is useful to distinguish homosexual behaviour, feelings, and identity, which may or may not be congruent. Estimates of prevalence are notoriously difficult to establish due to the stigmatized and often socially invisible nature of the gay and lesbian identities. The pioneering studies by Kinsey in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s introduced a seven–point scale, ranging from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual, and showed that changes in the definition of what counts as homosexual behaviour lead to estimates of male homosexuality between 4 per cent (life–long, exclusively homosexual activity) and more than 40 per cent (some significant homosexual activity to orgasm during sexually active life). Recent studies converge on a figure between six and twelve per cent for those exclusively or predominantly homosexual for most or all of their sexually active life.

Studies of the aetiology of homosexuality, though extensive, are inconclusive and make little sense outside the context of the aetiology of sexual orientation in general. Much sociological attention has been focused instead on the nature of homosexual identity and whether it is primarily inherent (essentialism) or socially elicited and moulded (constructionism). For an overview see Jeffrey Weeks , Against Nature (1991
). See also HETEROSEXISM; HOMOPHOBIA; SEX, SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF.

Homosexuality. The attitude of religions to homosexuality is obscured by the extremely wide reference of the term (in some religions, for example, particular acts may be condemned, but not the disposition itself, and not all acts), by the ambiguities in the status of eunuchs, and by the uncertainty whether the term covers both males and females. In general, homosexuality is regarded as abnormal (standing outside the norms of nature and practice); there is then much difference concerning the ‘normativeness of the norm’—i.e. how much it has to be covered by law. In Judaism, certain kinds of sexual activity are forbidden, including incest and adultery. The prohibitions against ‘men lying with men as with a woman’ occur in Leviticus (18. 22; 20. 13). According to the rabbis, the prohibition is a part of the Noachide Laws, and thus applies to all people (i.e. to gentiles as much as to Jews). The penalties are karet (being cut off from the people of Israel, Leviticus 18. 29) and death (Leviticus 20. 13). Very little is said about relations between women (known as mesoleloth). Christianity inherited the prohibitions and amplified them with the condemnations of homosexual acts in Romans 1. 26–7 (including women), 1 Corinthians 6. 9, and 1 Timothy 1. 10. While some Christian exegesis has drawn attention to a distinction between (i) context-dependent applications and the more fundamental context-independent command to love, and (ii) the condition of homosexuality which lies in nature and particular acts which would have to be assessed for morality just as heterosexual acts have to be, the Roman Catholic Church has moved strongly to maintain the condemnation, describing the homosexual orientation as ‘an objective disorder’ (On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, 1986); the Catechism of the Catholic Church recognized that homosexuality is basically not a matter of choice, but insisted that homosexual persons are called to a life of chastity. In Islam, homosexuals (qaum Lut, the people of Lot, or Lutis) are condemned in the story of Lot's people in the Qurʾān (e.g. 15. 73 f.; 26. 165 f.), and in the last address of Muḥammad. Some argue that since penetration has to be involved, homosexual acts between women should be less severely punished. In any case, shariʿa is, as usual, concerned with public behaviour, so there is no strong condemnation of homosexuality if it is not displayed in public.

In India, the evaluation is more complex, because of the many strands of religious life. In general, it is clear that for twice-born Hindus, ‘homosexual acts’ (maithunaṃ puṃsi) are condemned (e.g. Manusmṛti 11. 174 f., both men and women). But attitudes vary. The Kāma Sūtra specifically states that physical sex between two people of the same sex (as also of the opposite) ‘is to be engaged in and enjoyed for its own sake as one of the arts’. The evaluation depends on the context and on what is appropriate (i.e. dharma) for it. Among Buddhists, the issue is subsumed under the general dynamic of Buddhist societies, in which the choice is between monastic celibacy and lay life. While consideration is given to homosexual acts within communities, there seems to have been little isolation of homosexuality as such.

All these considerations were formed at a time when the ‘natural nature’ of homosexuality (and particularly of the genetic contribution to this widespread human condition) were not known. Religions which affirm the goodness of sexuality in its own right are adjusting more easily to new knowledge than those which hold that sexual acts must be open to life, and that the other functions of sex are always subordinate.

homosexuality The condition of sexual attraction to a person of the same sex. There does not exist a precise or unambiguous Hebrew or Greek word for this inclination, though it may be implied by the relationship of David and Jonathan (2 Sam 1: 26); but fear of sinking to the mores of Egypt and Canaan may have led to the condemnation of homosexual genital activity in Lev. 18: 22. The word ‘sodomy’, derived from the story of Gen. 19: 1–29, is inappropriate for individual homosexual behaviour, for the story is one of intended gang rape (see Sodom). In the NT Paul cites homosexual relations as an instance of human perversion in the Gentile world. Paul shares contemporary Jewish revulsion at what was not merely usual but socially approved male behaviour in the Graeco-Roman world. The intellectual élite of Athens had long been accustomed to making love to attractive boys; it was part of normal educational life. The same culture prevailed in 1st-cent. Rome. Homosexual relations, however, were far more widely practised—slaves sometimes being forced to play the passive role, according to Seneca. So common and so generally known were homosexual practices in the Gentile world, that Jewish writers were shocked. Philo condemns homosexual activity as almost as bad as bestiality (Special Laws 3: 37–42), and Paul in Rom. 1: 24–32 shares this Jewish disgust at what, no doubt, many of his Gentile converts had some experience of (1 Cor. 6: 11), and at the least he has in mind the exploitation, as he would have seen it, of minors and male temple prostitutes. His condemnation must also embrace the deviation of heterosexual men and women from their procreative function to a homosexual relationship (Rom. 1: 26–7). Many scholars hold on the basis of Paul's ‘natural’ . . . ‘unnatural’ that this is the extent of his Christian judgment and that he is not uttering a blanket condemnation of homosexual inclination or activity. At any rate, as with medical knowledge in general, much that is now understood about the psychology and biochemistry of this condition was unavailable in the 1st cent. Nothing explicit is recorded in the teaching of Jesus; but according to Matt. 8 Jesus responded to the request of a Roman centurion to heal his paralysed ‘servant’ or boy (Greek, pais). Since it was the accepted practice for officers on foreign assignments to be accompanied by youths for sexual recreation, his disease may have been related to this. At any rate Jesus acted compassionately.

332. Homosexuality

1. Albertine discovery of her promiscuous lesbianism breaks up her impending marriage to Marcel. [Fr. Lit.: Proust Remembrance of Things Past ]
2. Bilitis putative singer of Sapphic lyrics. [Fr. Lit.: Les Chansons de Bilitis, NCE, 1621]
3. Cage aux Folks, La farce, with serious overtones, about a night-club owner and his homosexual lover and employee. [Fr. Cinema: La Cage aux Folles ]
4. Charlus, Baron de fails to conceal his homosexual relations with a young tailor and a talented violinist. [Fr. Lit.: Proust Remembrance of Things Past ]
5. Christopher Street magazine for homosexuals. [Am. Pop. Culture: Misc.]
6. City and the Pillar, The portraying a young gay separated from “normal” people. [Am. Lit.: The City and the Pillar ]
7. Death in Venice aging successful author loses his lifelong self-discipline in his love for a beautiful Polish boy. [Ger. Lit: Death in Venice ]
8. Edward II weak English king whose love for Gaviston, Earl of Cornwall, so arouses the anger of the nobles that he loses the crown and is murdered. [Br. Drama: Marlowe Edward II in Magill II, 286]
9. Ganymede beautiful shepherd entrances Jupiter. [Rom. Lit.: Metamorphoses ]
10. gay liberation organization that supports equal rights in jobs, housing, etc. for homosexuals. [Am. Pop. Culture: Misc.]
11. lambda Greek letter adopted as symbol by gay liberation movement. [Am. Pop. Cult.: Misc.]
12. Molinier, Oliver loved by two writers, his uncle Edouard and Count Robert de Passavant. [Fr. Lit.: Gide The Counterfeiters in Magill I, 160]
13. Oglethorpe, John his sexual preference causes marital problems. [Am. Lit.: The Manhattan Transfer ]
14. Sappho Greek poetess from Lesbos; hence, lesbian. [Gk. Hist.: Brewer Dictionary, 962]
15. Sodomites insisted on having sexual intercourse with angels disguised as men. [O.T.: Gen. 19]
16. Venable, Sebastian his homosexuality and morbid fascination with vice are revealed by a witness to his horrible death. [Am. Drama: Tennessee Williams Suddenly Last Summer in Weiss, 448]
17. Well of Loneliness, The novel about female homosexuality; once banned, but defended by eminent authors. [Br. Lit.: Barnhart, 530]
18. Willard, Jim his first homosexual fulfillment at seventeen, adheres to his erotic life-style. [Am. Lit.: Gore Vidal The City and the Pillar ]

homosexuality. Buddhist sources from the earliest period contain references to homosexuality and homosexual practices. The matter is not discussed as a moral issue, however, and the subject of sexual ethics in general receives little attention. This is largely because Buddhism regards monastic life as the ideal and enjoins strict celibacy upon those who follow it. Any kind of sexual activity, whether of a heterosexual or homosexual nature, is prohibited by the monastic code (Vinaya), and there are severe penalties for those who break the rules. Sexual intercourse is the the first of the four most serious monastic offences (pārājika-dharma), and any monk or nun found guilty of it faces the penalty of lifelong expulsion from the community. Rather than an ethical issue, homosexuality is treated instead as a practical matter that arises in connection with admission to the order. Certain classes of individuals were not allowed to be ordained as monks. Among these were hermaphrodites and a class of individuals known in the Pāli Vinaya texts as paṇḍakas, who appear to have been sexually dysfunctional passive homosexuals who were also transvestites. These were excluded on the grounds that their admission into a celibate community would be inappropriate. The question of whether homosexual acts are in some sense worse than heterosexual ones and perhaps intrinsically immoral is not pursued in the literature. However, Buddhism is generally conservative in matters of sex, and references in certain texts suggest it was regarded with disapproval by some ancient authorities. Contemporary Buddhist groups concerned with gay rights, on the other hand, argue that such comments reflect the taboos of pre-modern society and need to be reassessed in the light of more tolerant contemporary attitudes. To a large extent the arguments in Buddhism mirror the debate taking place on the issue of homosexuality within other religious traditions.

homosexuality. In the OT the only definite references to homosexual behaviour are the story of Sodom in Gen. 19: 4–11, the probably dependent incident recorded in Jgs. 19, and in Lev. 18: 22 and 20: 13. In the NT it is condemned in 1 Cor.6: 9–11, 1 Tim. 1: 10, and most influentially in Rom. 1: 27 which many moralists have seen as supporting the view that homosexuality is, with other sexual acts which are not procreative, contrary to Natural Law.

Patristic, medieval, and later Christian moralists accepted this judgement, and it is only in modern times that some have argued that it is the quality of a relationship, be it homosexual or heterosexual, that determines its moral value. In 1991 the House of Bishops of the General Synod of the C of E issued a report which did not reject homosexual activity in permanent relationships among the laity, but insisted that the clergy had a special responsibility to maintain the biblical ideal. The 1998 Lambeth Conference, however, expressed the belief that for all Christians ‘abstinence is right for those not called to marriage’.

209. Homosexuality

See also 364. SEX .

homoeroticism, homoerotism

1. the tendency to obtain sexual gratification from a member of the same sex.

2. homosexual activity. —homoerotic , adj.

homophobia

fear of or apprension about homosexuality.

lesbianism

the practice of homosexual relations between women. Also called Sapphism. —lesbian , n., adj.

tribadism, tribady

a sexual activity between women that imitates heterosex-ual intercourse. —tribade , n. —tribadic , adj.

uranianism

Obsolete, homosexuality.

uranism

the practice of homosexuality between males. —uranist , n.

uranophobia

an abnormal fear of homosexuals and homosexuality.

urningism

male homosexuality. Also urnism. —urning , n.

homosexuality Emotional or sexual attraction to members of one's own sex. Male and female homosexuals are popularly known as gays and lesbians respectively. Historically, homosexuality was seen as a pathological condition, however, doctors now agree that homosexuality is a normal aspect of sexuality. In the UK, gay liberation groups, such as Stonewall, struggled for an end to discrimination. The pressure group Outrage created controversy in its policy to ‘out’ public figures. Another modern political and ethical argument involves the possibility of homosexual marriages.

ho·mo·sex·u·al / ˌhōməˈsekshoōəl/ • adj. (of a person) sexually attracted to people of one's own sex. ∎  involving or characterized by sexual attraction between people of the same sex: homosexual desire. • n. a person who is sexually attracted to people of their own sex. DERIVATIVES: ho·mo·sex·u·al·i·ty / -ˌsekshoōˈalitē/ n. ho·mo·sex·u·al·ly adv.

homosexuality (hoh-moh-seks-yoo-al-iti) n. a pattern of sexuality in which sexual behaviour and thinking are directed towards people of the same sex (see also lesbianism). Counselling can benefit people who are concerned about their sexual orientation.
—homosexual adj., n.

Homosexuality

SeeGay Parents; Gender; Gender Identity; Lesbian Parents; Sexual Orientation

Homosexuality. See Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement; Sex and Sexuality.

HOMOSEXUALITY

HOMOSEXUALITY. SeeSexual Orientation .

homosexual •denial, dial, espial, Lyall, mistrial, myall, Niall, phial, trial, vial, viol •sundial •knawel, withdrawal •avowal, Baden-Powell, bowel, disembowel, dowel, Howell, Powell, rowel, towel, trowel, vowel •semivowel •bestowal, koel, Lowell, Noel •loyal, royal, viceroyal •accrual, construal, crewel, cruel, dual, duel, fuel, gruel, jewel, newel, renewal, reviewal •eschewal •artefactual (US artifactual), contractual, factual, tactual •perpetual •aspectual, effectual, intellectual •conceptual, perceptual •contextual, textual •habitual, ritual •conflictual • instinctual • spiritual •mutual • punctual • virtual • casual •audio-visual, televisual, visual •usual • gradual • individual •menstrual • actual •asexual, bisexual, heterosexual, homosexual, psychosexual, sexual, transsexual, unisexual •accentual, conventual, eventual •Samuel •annual, biannual, Emanuel, Emmanuel, manual •Lemuel •consensual, sensual •continual