11 - Strange Bedfellows: Gay Liberation

Summary

There is a moment in Michel Foucault's The Will to Knowledge (1976) that describes the creation of the homosexual in 1869:

The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and a possibly mysterious physiology. […] Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. (1978: 43)

This is not to say that men had not had sex with men prior to the late nineteenth century, but Foucault argued that such acts were not then seen as defining an individual's personal identity as homosexual, a term coined by Karl Maria Kertbeny in 1869. A number of sexual identities were described, defined and pathologised in the psychological, scientific and sociological press of the last third of the nineteenth century: a third sex (Karl Heinrich Ulrichs); an inborn constitutional abnormality (Henry Havelock Ellis); an inherited degeneracy, or a degeneracy caused by debauchery (Richard Krafft-Ebing); an intermediate sex (Magnus Hirschfeld and Edward Carpenter); a female psyche in a male body (Ulrichs); the next stage of evolution (Carpenter); or a failure to successfully navigate the Oedipus complex (Sigmund Freud).