Excerpts from the Chapter:
HOMOSEXUALITY (ORIGINS OF THE MODERN CONCEPT)
William Percy
HOMOSEXUALITY (ORIGINS OF THE MODERN CONCEPT)
The German term Homosexualitiit, the original form of the word, points to a concept of homosexuality that crystalized in Central Europe in the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century. With some changes, this concept is the immediate predecessor of the mainstream of present-day Western thinking about same-sex orientation. Familiarity has made the model seem simple and straightforward, almost a given of nature. It is none of these things. The notion that modem society has adopted is a hybrid that owes its existence to the interaction and fusion ofthree remarkable semantic innovations stemming from historically distinct cultural epochs, two of great antiquity and one of recent origin.
Three Conceptual Sources.
First, there was the Judaic law (Leviticus 20: 13) that treated the union of two individuals having male genitalia as a single offense. Other civilizations of antiquity had accepted as a matter of course a dichotomy between the active and passive sexual partners. The consolidation effected by the Judaic legislation boldly disregarded this tradition.
Second, there was the equation of male-male and female-female relationships in the more abstract thinking of the Greeks. By contrast, the ancient Near Eastern mind had never identified the two, and-as shown by the Babylonian myth reported by Berossus and echoed in Plato's Symposium-had traced male-male and female-female attraction to separate origins. But the Greek drive toward logical parallelism made it possible to regard pederasty and tribadism as two aspects of a single entity.
Third, modem Europespecifically nineteenth-century Germany-attempted a quantification of psychic phenomena.
The German Forensics.
The acceptance of a mathematical continuum (0 to 100' made it possible to distinguish individuals in whom sexual attraction to others of the opposite sex was completely absent [the zero degree of heterosexuality = HI] from those who merely experienced an attraction to their own sex that did not exclude the opposite one [H2]. The recognition of exclusively same-sex oriented individuals [Hl]-known to the ancients but denied by Christian theology and Christian society for centuries-was crucial to the emergence of the concept of sexual inversion in psychiatry with the classic papers of Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal (1869', Richard von Krafft Ebing (1877), and Arrigo Tamassia (1878' The investigators-being forensicpsychiatrists- didnot limit themselves to a descriptive analysis, but also entered the realm of the prescriptive and judgmental. They concluded that those who were incapable of feeling any attraction to the opposite sex [H1J could not, by vittue of the involuntary and exclusive character of their orientantation, beheld legally responsible for their sexual conduct, but that the others who, though primarily attracted to their own sex, could nonetheless function on occasion with the other sex [Hl] were by comparison morally blameworthy and legally responsible.
Nature and Implications of the German Concept.
The nineteenth-century conceptual innovation did not arise spontaneously, as a direct product of psychiatric insight or of the interrogation of homosexual patients. The new formulation was the outcome of a dialogue between the psychiatric profession and the spokesmen for the inchoate homophile movement, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karoly Maria Kertbeny. The word homosexual was invented by the litterateur Kertbeny and not by the psychiatrists, so that contrary to the almost universal assumption within today's gay community it did not originate as a medical term, though it was subsequently used as such. Rather the new concept was dialectical in origin and stemmed (in the case of the homophile apologists' from the polemic need to combat the deeply rooted theological-forensic tradition ofthe Christian world that stigmatized and penalized sexual activity between individuals having the genital organs of the same sex, and to exonerate those whom public opinion execrated as guilty of "unconditional self-surrender to the immoral." Only in this way could the burden of centuries of obloquy begin to be lifted. Yet few developments in human thought are completely new, and in this instance thenew distinctionwas superimposed upon the two long-standing equations noted at the beginning of this article, the Levitical assimilation of the active and passive partners, and the Greek conflation of male-male and female-female attraction.
The emergent concept was thus an "old wine in a new bottle/' or perhaps more correctly a cocktail blended from three different vintages. The two older strata had abolished two antinomies (active vs. passive; male vs. female' to create the theological notion of "crime against nature by reason of sex"; conversely, the modem stratum created a new antinomy: exclusive [HI] vs. elective [HlI, yielding the psychiatric notions of "homosexual" vs. "bisexuaI." The fact that the popular mind lumped both of the latter behavioral types together under the term "homosexuality" does not efface the historical reality that the concept arose out of the perception of duality.
The two authors of the concept themselves disagreed in that Ulrichs was more the spokesman for the [HIIcategory, while Kertbeny was concerned more with the rights of the [H2] group, since their behavior was equally culpable in the eyes of the law, yet he argued that they had the right to choose the same rather than the opposite sex for purposes of erotic gratification. In fact, to limit the application of the law to the [H2] category in practice would mean that the prosecution would have to prove that on other occasions the defendant engaged in heterosexual behavior which was perfectly legal-a logical impossibility from the standpoint of the law.
Problems.
As the outcome of its complex pedigree, the new concept was fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity: a century of medical and biological investigation has failed to discover any common denominator among the individuals labeled homosexual. Success in such a quest was precluded from the start since HI and H2 are typically treated as if they were one: the problem of the occurrence of homosexual attraction is notidenticalwith the problem of the absence of heterosexual attraction. Yet until a relatively recent date many researchers wrote of "the homosexual" in the singular, as if they were describinga discrete species. Though this linguistic habit is not common now, its long prevalence served to reinforce the misapprehension that a single phenomenon was under study. To the extent that the researchers did follow more attentively the nineteenth-century model, which focused on this single psychological trait of abilityornonability to respond to heterosexual stimuli, they perforce neglected the tremendous range of variation in constitutional and personality type found within both HI and H2. Of course, it cannot be excluded that at some future time a genetic basis for the absence of heterosexualdesire or response will be discovered, butthus far biology has furnished no evidence for this.
It is not surprising that in its perplexity the general public wavers on the issue, unable to secure any authoritative guidance from the experts. On the one hand, homosexuality is thought to be exclusive and innate [Hn so that fathering or giving birth to a child is regarded as indisputable proof that the parent is not homosexual-a "true" homosexual could not manage such a fundamental shift. On the other hand, when homosexuals are exhorted to entertherapy in order to change their orientation, by a sleight of hand the conceptualization moves over to pigeonhole H2, taken to imply that individuals who have been functioning homosexually should function heterosexually. In this way a claim is made that the first assumption had categorically denied.
Interference of Related Concepts.
The ultimate source of the confusion lies in the fact that the new termwas superimposed upon the already emotion-laden semantic fields of "pederasty/tribadism" and "sodomy/' neglecting the crucial element of the exclusive and involuntary character of HI, which had so impressed the rational minds of the pioneering nineteenth-century investigators. This lingering afterglow of the older attitude of condemnation hindered the progress of the movement for gay rights for many decades.
By confounding exclusive homosexual attraction [HIJwith elective homosexual attraction [H2] it played into the hands of an opposition that clung to the notion that "homosexuality is only a new name for an old vice," insisting that "homosexuality is a disease" that can be cured if the homosexual will only "renounce his way of life." To bc sure, the disease concept of homosexuality represents a modernization of the religious notion of sin. But the conversion from sin to sickness was made possible by the initial belief in the statistical rarity of HI, which suggests that homosexuality is a human variant outside the normal range: a biological anomaly. And yet the opposing H2 model underlies the notion ofchange of orientation through therapy. Thus at the present day onehalf of the inherited nineteenth-century concept is invoked to diagnose disease, the other half to insist on the possibility of cure.
Kinsey.
In 1948 Alfred Kinsey and his associates were to retain the category of same-sex exclusives [HI] in the 6 of their 0-6 scale, but because of their approach as evolutionary biologists they stressed a spectrum of sexual response and attached no significance to the crucial line of demarcation that had so impressed the European forensic psychiatrists. The Kinsey "rainbow" has had considerable influence on the academic discussion of homosexuality, but comparatively little impact on the popular mind.
Conclusion.
The intricacies ofthe formation of the concept of homosexuality illustrate the general principle in intellectual history that key ideas arenot forged through a simple conjunction taking place at a single moment in history. That moment represents at most a phase of crystalization, not of creation ex novo. Moreover, concepts are not simply the product ofan impartial evaluation of data, but rather take shape in human minds already equipped with semantic grids. As Blaise Pascal observed, "Chance smiles only on minds that are prepared." In the realm of thinking about sexuality the theories are almost inevitably contaminated with ideology, the strivings of interested parties, and the wish to preserve an existing value system or replace it with a new one. The world still awaits a conceptual system that overcomes the serious flaws of the one inherited from the nineteenth century.
See also Typology.Warren Johansson
