I’m not talking about whether or not the person is homosexual but whether the person identifies as homosexual.
But what you said was: “Being homosexual is today about making a choice to identify as homosexual.” and that’s what I was asking about. Did you actually mean “Identifying as homosexual is today about making a choice to identify as homosexual”? ’Cos if so, it’s probably true but doesn’t seem very interesting.
It seems to me that the idea of homosexual identity and the idea of homosexual orientation should be expected to have opposite effects on how much men with an insecure sense of their own masculinity would worry about physical contact with other men.
The concept of homosexual orientation gives them the ability to worry that they might be homosexual, not merely that they might have some attraction to men.
The concept of homosexual identity, on the other hand, gives them the ability to say “well, yes, I’m doing this, but I’m not one of Them” on account of “Them” having a clear boundary rather than just a matter of having one or another set of propensities.
Empirically, it does indeed seem that the emergence of both those things has come along with a new reluctance on men’s part to engage in nonsexual physical intimacy with other men; I suggest it’s the idea of homosexual orientation, not the idea of some stronger sort of homosexual identity, that’s more likely a cause.
(Does anyone have good estimates of (1) when men started being reluctant to engage in physical contact with other men, (2) when the idea of homosexual orientation first emerged, and (3) when the stronger notion of homosexual identity first emerged? According to the OED, the English word “homosexual” seems first to have appeared in 1892, in an English translation of Krafft-Ebing. According to Wikipedia, K-E’s use of the term (in German) is anticipated by a an anti-anti-sodomy pamphlet in 1869. Of course the word and the concept may have different histories.)
On this topic, “Love Stories” by Jonathan Katz is an informative source of western social developments around sexual orientation in the 19th century. There’s a particular focus on Walt Whitman (I think it was developed from a paper or lecture on the guy), but with plenty of focus on wider social mores and changes therein.
(1) I believe the turn of the century is when it started shifting in a big way in the United states, but this is a particularly finicky thing to measure and really contingent on geography. In the 1880s, it was still routine for a male visitor to a house to share his bed with other male residents in most places in the US. I am pretty sure it was unusual in by World War 2.
(2)The word was invented by what we would now think of as pro-gay activists in mid 19th century Germany, with the specific goal of creating a concept to describe people with innate, enduring preferences for both sexual and romantic couplings with the same sex. (There was also a fair bit of conflation with what we would now call transgenderism or intersex individuals, with homosexual men having a ‘feminized seed’.) The concept didn’t really cross the language barrier or the Atlantic ocean until about the last decade of the 19th century.
(3)The oldest real example I can think of is Plato’s symposium, the myth of Aristophanes. This myth (purporting to explain the origins of romantic love) describes an ur-human race with two faces, four arms, four legs, etc. Some of these had two male or two female, and some had one of each. The gods, being wrathful blokes, cut these ur-humans down the middle, and the two halves are reborn and spend their lives looking for the rest of their body- literally, their ‘other half’. Those with originally all-male or all-female bodies look for the match among members of the same sex, providing a mythological basis for a positive identity much like modern homosexuality. (Note that ancient Greeks in general didn’t seem to take this view as a consensus, often outlawing homosexuality between adult men even as they endorsed homosexual pederasty.)
I believe the turn of the century is when it started shifting in a big way in the United states, but this is a particularly finicky thing to measure and really contingent on geography. In the 1880s, it was still routine for a male visitor to a house to share his bed with other male residents in most places in the US. I am pretty sure it was unusual in by World War 2.
That’s mostly a function of society becoming affluent enough that people could afford to have a spare bed for when visitors come over.
But what you said was: “Being homosexual is today about making a choice to identify as homosexual.” and that’s what I was asking about. Did you actually mean “Identifying as homosexual is today about making a choice to identify as homosexual”? ’Cos if so, it’s probably true but doesn’t seem very interesting.
It seems to me that the idea of homosexual identity and the idea of homosexual orientation should be expected to have opposite effects on how much men with an insecure sense of their own masculinity would worry about physical contact with other men.
The concept of homosexual orientation gives them the ability to worry that they might be homosexual, not merely that they might have some attraction to men.
The concept of homosexual identity, on the other hand, gives them the ability to say “well, yes, I’m doing this, but I’m not one of Them” on account of “Them” having a clear boundary rather than just a matter of having one or another set of propensities.
Empirically, it does indeed seem that the emergence of both those things has come along with a new reluctance on men’s part to engage in nonsexual physical intimacy with other men; I suggest it’s the idea of homosexual orientation, not the idea of some stronger sort of homosexual identity, that’s more likely a cause.
(Does anyone have good estimates of (1) when men started being reluctant to engage in physical contact with other men, (2) when the idea of homosexual orientation first emerged, and (3) when the stronger notion of homosexual identity first emerged? According to the OED, the English word “homosexual” seems first to have appeared in 1892, in an English translation of Krafft-Ebing. According to Wikipedia, K-E’s use of the term (in German) is anticipated by a an anti-anti-sodomy pamphlet in 1869. Of course the word and the concept may have different histories.)
On this topic, “Love Stories” by Jonathan Katz is an informative source of western social developments around sexual orientation in the 19th century. There’s a particular focus on Walt Whitman (I think it was developed from a paper or lecture on the guy), but with plenty of focus on wider social mores and changes therein.
(1) I believe the turn of the century is when it started shifting in a big way in the United states, but this is a particularly finicky thing to measure and really contingent on geography. In the 1880s, it was still routine for a male visitor to a house to share his bed with other male residents in most places in the US. I am pretty sure it was unusual in by World War 2.
(2)The word was invented by what we would now think of as pro-gay activists in mid 19th century Germany, with the specific goal of creating a concept to describe people with innate, enduring preferences for both sexual and romantic couplings with the same sex. (There was also a fair bit of conflation with what we would now call transgenderism or intersex individuals, with homosexual men having a ‘feminized seed’.) The concept didn’t really cross the language barrier or the Atlantic ocean until about the last decade of the 19th century.
(3)The oldest real example I can think of is Plato’s symposium, the myth of Aristophanes. This myth (purporting to explain the origins of romantic love) describes an ur-human race with two faces, four arms, four legs, etc. Some of these had two male or two female, and some had one of each. The gods, being wrathful blokes, cut these ur-humans down the middle, and the two halves are reborn and spend their lives looking for the rest of their body- literally, their ‘other half’. Those with originally all-male or all-female bodies look for the match among members of the same sex, providing a mythological basis for a positive identity much like modern homosexuality. (Note that ancient Greeks in general didn’t seem to take this view as a consensus, often outlawing homosexuality between adult men even as they endorsed homosexual pederasty.)
That’s mostly a function of society becoming affluent enough that people could afford to have a spare bed for when visitors come over.
Also, see Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heteroxexuality by Hanne Blank.
After all, if homosexuality wasn’t a mental category, heterosexuality couldn’t be, either.