homosexuality

1. Sexual orientation to persons of the same sex.
2. Sexual activity with another of the same sex.

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

For more information on homosexuality, visit Britannica.com.

Another term for homosexuality, sodomy, derives from the immoral practices of the people of Sodom. In ancient times, the Sodomites practiced homosexual rape, as when the entire population surrounded the home of Lot, Abraham's nephew, and demanded that he release his guests (the two angels) to them "that we may know them" (Gen. 19:5). Judges 19 records the decimation of the tribe of Benjamin as a result of the desire of some of its members to commit homosexual rape.

The incidence of homosexuality was practically nonexistent among Jews. For this reason the sages permitted two bachelors to sleep in the same bed, though R. Judah prohibited it (Kid. 4:14). Maimonides followed the opinion of the sages and explained that "Jews are not suspected of practicing homosexuality" (Yad, Isuré Bi'ah 22:2).

Various reasons are advanced for the ban on homosexuality. Since this sexual act cannot result in procreation, it denies one of the major functions of sexuality (Gen. 1:28). Secondly, the married man with homosexual tendencies may abandon his wife and family in order to indulge his perversion. He would thereby destroy the unity of the family, whose preservation is a supreme value in Judaism. Transcending these explanations is the Bible's designation of homosexuality as an "abomination." This indicates that the act is repulsive, no matter how it may be accepted in other cultures.

Jewish law rejects the view that homosexuality is a disease, morally neutral, or an alternate life style. It is condemned even when two adults mutually consent to live together in a love relationship. Orthodox Judaism opposes the modern tendency to legitimize homosexual behavior, but distinguishes between the homosexual act and the homosexual person. It is the homosexual act that is condemned as an abomination, not the individuals involved. Judaism encourages compassion for the individuals and efforts to change their sexual habits.

In recent years, "gay" congregations have been established in the United States by homosexuals, male and female, who have felt themselves rejected within the general Jewish community. The validity of such congregations has been accepted by the Reform movement, which has taken them under its auspices. The Reform movement has, in fact, officially sanctioned gay or lesbian marriages, as have fringe clergymen of the Conservative movement.

Sexual relations between members of the same sex. The question whether homosexual practices are of legal concern raises questions of the proper extent of the law, and of the way a distinction may be drawn between the public and the private. It has also been a focus for discussing the relation between law and morality, between morality and nature, and, when it is accepted that homosexuality is not a moral issue, for querying the relation between law and majority preferences and prejudices. See also sex

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.

Since the seventeenth century, homosexuality has been the target of condemnation and discriminatory laws, public policies, social customs, and cultural beliefs. By making gay men and lesbians the object of scorn, this hostility has kept much homosexual behavior hidden.

Religion has been of central importance in shaping this climate. Until the thirteenth century, the Christian tradition was ambiguous in its attitude toward homosexuality. But with the recodification of canon law under the influence of Thomas Aquinas, new attitudes set in. Homosexual behavior was thereafter excoriated as a heinous sin. The English carried these beliefs to North America, and the power of religion in early America guaranteed that such beliefs would shape colonial attitudes.

Colonial ministers spoke out frequently against the "sin of Sodom," castigating its appearance and warning of its dangers. For seventeenth-century settlers, with a precarious foothold on the edge of an unknown continent, the metaphor of an angry God destroying Sodom and Gomorrah must have been potent. The language of colonial sodomy statutes was drawn from the Bible. In Connecticut, the wording was taken from Leviticus 20:13: "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." The statute remained so worded until the 1820s. Colonial statutes severely punished homosexual activity. In every colony, sodomy was a capital offense--at least five men were executed during this era--and other homosexual acts, from "sodomitical practices" to lewdness between women, were punished with whippings and fines. To be sure, many other sexual acts, such as adultery and fornication, were also subject to punishment. But officials tended to single out homosexual offenses for especially severe treatment.

After the American Revolution, although the states reformed their criminal codes in the spirit of Enlightenment philosophy, revision of the sodomy statutes and the "crimes against nature" laws came very slowly; North Carolina did not eliminate capital punishment until 1869. Thomas Jefferson proposed that death be replaced by castration. Moreover, as time went on, legislatures and courts broadened the statutes to include a wider range of acts, such as oral sex between men and sexual activity between women. And even though the ties between religion and the state had become attenuated, religious language continued to surface. In 1897, for example, an Illinois court described sodomy as a crime "not fit to be named among Christians."

In the late nineteenth century, medical science added to the negative evaluation of homosexuality. The medical profession grew in influence, and almost without exception, American physicians diagnosed homosexuality as a form of illness. At first, opinion varied as to whether it was acquired or congenital; with the ascendance of Freudianism the acquired model became dominant.

A prolific medical literature, as well as records of treatment, suggest that many doctors viewed homosexuality with dread. Remedies included castration, hysterectomy, lobotomy, electroshock, and aversion therapy. Moralistic judgments permeated the "scientific" study of homosexuality. One physician described a case of homosexuality as "shocking to every sense of decency, disgusting and revolting," phrases that he surely would not have applied to a case of pneumonia or yellow fever.

The medical model gathered still more force in the mid-twentieth century. The immigration of German and Austrian psychoanalysts during the 1930s and the widespread use of psychiatrists by the military during World War II gave the profession more influence. In the years after World War II, more than half the states enacted "sexual psychopath" laws. Studies of their application reveal patterns of selective enforcement that singled out male homosexuals. In Sioux City, Iowa, for instance, in the late 1950s, the district attorney, employing a psychopath law, committed twenty-nine male homosexuals to asylums. Under these laws, homosexuals were often given indeterminate sentences in mental institutions as punishment. By the middle of the century only murder, rape, and kidnapping elicited heavier penalties of any sort than did private consensual sexual activity.

The shifting definitions of homosexuality, from sinful criminal act to diseased condition, have pointed historians toward important theoretical formulations, especially the distinction between homosexual acts, which can be documented across history and culture, and homosexual identities. In the United States it seems apparent that an important change occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a modern gay identity began to take shape.

In the colonial era, some individuals experienced homosexual desire. But given the era's system of family-based subsistence agriculture, marriage and procreation was central to survival, and such desires could hardly form the basis for structuring one's personal life. "Heterosexuality," as yet undefined, was as critical to individual survival as planting the crops in the spring. Indeed, much of the evidence of homosexual behavior that survives in court records points to its coexistence with marriage. Nicholas Sension of Windsor, Connecticut, for instance, who was brought to trial in the 1670s on charges of sodomy, was a married man. His case was not unique.

In the nineteenth century, as American life was restructured in part around the separation of female and male spheres, and as sexuality came to be understood in romantic, spiritualized terms, homosexual desire often occurred in the context of intense, passionate friendships in which physical intimacy was expressed un-self-consciously. These relationships frequently coexisted with marriage, and little connection was made between the passionate embracing of friends or their sharing of beds and the dreaded "crime against nature."

Late in the century, as large cities allowed for greater anonymity, as wage labor apart from family became common, and as more women were drawn out of the home, evidence of a new pattern of homosexual expression surfaced. Among men and women and across the spectrum of class and occupation, individuals were organizing their personal lives around their homosexual attractions. The doctors who wrote about homosexuality during these decades developed their theories through case histories of men and women whose lives exhibited these new patterns.

At first, these individuals developed ways of meeting one another and institutions to foster a sense of identity. Certain parks, streets, and bathhouses became meeting places for men. Bars and clubs appeared in or near the red-light districts of major cities. Women in female-dominated occupations formed private friendship networks. By 1915, one participant in this new gay world was referring to it as "a community distinctly organized." For the most part hidden from view because of social hostility, an urban gay subculture had come into existence by the 1920s and 1930s.

World War II served as a critical divide in the social history of homosexuality. Large numbers of the young left families, small towns, and closely knit ethnic neighborhoods to enter a sex-segregated military or to migrate to larger cities for wartime employment. It became easier for gay men and women to meet others, explore the gay world, and form extensive friendship networks. As one young gay man, Donald Vining, described it in his diary, "The war is a tragedy to my mind and soul, but to my physical being, it's a memorable experience." In many ways, the war was something of a nationwide "coming out" for gays.

After the war, many of them made choices designed to support their gay identities. Pat Bond, a woman from Iowa who first met other lesbians while in the military, decided to stay in San Francisco after her discharge. Vining remained in New York City rather than return to his small hometown in New Jersey. They, along with countless others, sustained a vibrant gay subculture that revolved around bars and friendship networks. Many cities saw their first gay bars during the 1940s. The publication of Alfred Kinsey's studies of human sexual behavior, moreover, confirmed for this generation that their sexuality was neither rare nor aberrant but a widespread pattern in society.

This new visibility provoked latent cultural prejudices. During the cold war era, as the nation searched for scapegoats, homosexuals were labeled a danger to society. Senate investigations portrayed a homosexual menace that was as threatening to American strength and security as communism. Firings from government jobs and purges from the military intensified in the 1950s; President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued an executive order in 1953 barring gay men and lesbians from all federal jobs. Many state and local governments and private corporations followed suit. The fbi began a surveillance program against homosexuals.

The lead taken by the federal government encouraged local police forces to harass gay citizens. Vice officers regularly raided gay bars, sometimes arresting dozens of men and women on a single night. In the 1950s, arrests in Washington, D.C., exceeded one thousand per year; in Philadelphia, misdemeanor charges against gay men and lesbians averaged one hundred a month. Wichita, Dallas, Memphis, and Seattle were among the cities that witnessed extensive antigay offensives. In some cities, such as Boise, Idaho, the fear of homosexuality led to a virtual witch-hunt.

Under these conditions, some gays began to organize politically. In November 1950 in Los Angeles, a small group of men led by Harry Hay and Chuck Rowland met to form what would become the Mattachine Society. Mostly male in membership, it was joined in 1955 by a lesbian organization in San Francisco, the Daughters of Bilitis, founded by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. In the 1950s, these organizations remained small, but they established chapters in several cities and published magazines that were a beacon of hope to their readers.

In the 1960s, influenced by the model of a militant black civil rights movement, the "homophile movement," as participants dubbed it, became more visible. Activists, such as Franklin Kameny and Barbara Gittings, picketed government agencies in Washington to protest discriminatory employment policies. In San Francisco, Martin, Lyon, and others targeted police harassment. By 1969, perhaps fifty homophile organizations existed in the United States, with memberships of a few thousand.

Then, on Friday evening, June 27, 1969, the police in New York City raided a Greenwich Village gay bar, the Stonewall Inn. Contrary to expectations, the patrons fought back, provoking three nights of rioting in the area accompanied by the appearance of "gay power" slogans on buildings. Almost overnight, a massive grass-roots gay liberation movement was born. Owing much to the radical protest of blacks, women, and college students in the 1960s, gays challenged all the forms of hostility and punishment meted out by society. Choosing to "come out of the closet" and publicly proclaim their identity, they ushered in a social change movement that has grown substantially. By 1973, there were almost eight hundred gay and lesbian organizations in the United States; by 1990, the number was several thousand. In 1970, 5,000 gay men and lesbians marched in New York City to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots; in October 1987, over 600,000 marched in Washington to demand equality.

The changes were far-reaching. Over the next two decades half the states decriminalized homosexual behavior, and police harassment was sharply contained. Many large cities included sexual orientation in their civil rights statutes, as did Wisconsin and Massachusetts, first among the states to do so. In 1974, the American Psychiatric Association eliminated homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses; the following year, the Civil Service Commission eliminated the ban on the employment of homosexuals in most federal jobs. Many of the nation's religious denominations engaged in spirited debates about the morality of homosexuality, and some, like Unitarianism and Reformed Judaism, opened their doors to gay and lesbian ministers and rabbis. The lesbian and gay world was no longer an underground subculture but, in larger cities especially, a well-organized community, with businesses, political clubs, social service agencies, community centers, and religious congregations bringing people together. In a number of places, openly gay candidates ran for elective office and won.

These changes spawned opposition. In 1977, the singer Anita Bryant led a campaign to repeal a gay rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida. Her success encouraged others, and by the early 1980s, a well-organized conservative force had materialized to target the gay rights movement. Politicians, such as Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and fundamentalist ministers, such as Jerry Falwell of Lynchburg, Virginia, who formed Moral Majority, Inc., joined forces to slow the progress of the gay movement.

The onset of the aids epidemic in the 1980s, although it intensified the antigay rhetoric of the New Right, also stimulated further organizing within the gay community. aids made political mobilization a matter of life and death. With a large majority of the cases striking male homosexuals, the gay community in short order created a host of organizations, such as the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City, to provide services and assistance to those infected. Local and national gay civil rights groups also grew in size and number, as the community sought to increase funding for research and education and to win protection against discrimination. A personal and social tragedy of immense proportions, aids paradoxically strength- ened the political arm of the gay movement.

One result of the changes wrought by the gay movement was the gradual recognition that gay men and lesbians had made important contributions to American society, culture, and politics in previous eras. The work of such literary figures as Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, and Langston Hughes was reinterpreted in the light of their homosexuality. Major figures in the history of women's education, such as M. Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr, Mary Woolley of Mount Holyoke, and Katherine Lee Bates of Wellesley, lived in communities of women with longtime partners. The civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, the songwriter Cole Porter, the depression era journalist Lorena Hickok, and many other notable Americans of the past were gay men and lesbians whose homosexuality, though hidden, deeply influenced their sensibility, their values, and their careers.

Bibliography:

John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (1983); Jonathan Katz, Gay American History (1976).

Author:

John D'Emilio

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.

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.

—BERTRAND VICHYN

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.

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—THEO VAN DER MEER

A sexual attraction between persons of the same sex. (See gay and lesbian; compare heterosexuality.)