Welcome back. Today, we will be looking at the emergence of same-sex sexuality and how it has been used to both enforce and resist social norms. In other words, we'll be talking about what queer theorists call, the invention of homosexuality. Last time, we explained that sexual identity or sexuality didn't emerge until the 1700s and 1800s. The change in how people understood and labeled their sexuality was connected to two major changes in economic and political life in Western societies. First, when industrial capitalism became the dominant economic system, it changed where and how people lived. More people left agricultural work in rural areas and move to cities and towns to work in factories. This brought them into closer proximity with people other than their immediate family members and neighbors. As a result, people began to engage in different kinds of social and sexual activity that had previously not been available to them. Second, global trade increased as nation states and companies began to look beyond national borders to find new resources, workers, and markets. Cross-cultural contact increased and people needed to find ways to explain the differences in norms, beliefs, values, and practices that they were encountering. Frequently, cultural differences often related to bias in sexual activity who used to justify the kinds of enterprises that were already underway, such as settler colonialism and slavery. For example, in North America between the 1600s and 1700s, British colonists claimed indigenous people's sexual and marital practices were evidence that they were, quote "barbaric" and needed to be civilized. Similarly, European and American slavers claim that African styles of dress, which revealed significantly more of a person's body than European and US social norms allowed, was evidence of African sexual immorality and therefore justified the enslavement of blacks. By the mid to late 1800s, these major economic and political changes had brought about two key results. First, people were beginning to form communities based on sexual desire, behavior, and non-normative gender expression. Second, scientists and policymakers were beginning to try to categorize, classify, and label certain kinds of desire, behavior, and expression as good and others as bad. Sexual and gender subcultures began to form in large cities. These subcultures developed their own gathering places, terminology, and customs. For example, in New York City between the 1870s and the 1930s, people who engaged in taboo sexual and gender behavior gathered in neighborhoods such as the village in Harlem and they develop their own terminology and their own customs for establishing sexual partnerships. For example, some members of these communities used the terms fairy and gay to describe themselves, instead of terms like pervert or degenerate which were used by the police. But as these subcultures flourished, people became increasingly vulnerable to imprisonment or commitment to an asylum as scientists began to study and categorize sexual and gender behavior as either normal or abnormal. New fields emerged in the 1800s to study these behaviors. Some of those new fields where sexology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Sexologist studied and tried to explain human sexual and gender behavior of all kinds but they were especially interested in same-sex sexual activity and non-normative gender expression. Researchers like Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Magnus Hirschfeld came up with new systems of categorization and began to classify people according to their sexual desires and behaviors in terms of having an identity, not in terms of committing a sin or crime. Many of these sexologists actually campaigned to decriminalize certain sexual acts in Europe and the US that affected people who they were labeling homosexuals and inverts. Inverts referred to people who sexologists believed were born with inverted gender traits, causing them to be attracted to those of the same sex. Many sexologists proposed essentialist theories of sexual and gender identity, arguing that homosexuals and inverts shouldn't be criminalized because they were born that way and couldn't change their very nature. This is an early example of the "born that way" narrative that we've discussed previously. While the sexologists' attitudes were condescending and pitying, they contrasted with other attitudes that promoted punishment for anyone who engaged in certain sexual acts or who didn't conform to gender norms and were therefore labeled degenerate perverts. Similarly, as psychiatrists and psychoanalysts began to study sexual practices, they proposed theories of sexuality that sought to both explain and sometimes fix certain behaviors and desires. Sigmund Freud is the most well-known figure from this period who like other scientists assumed opposite sex sexual attraction and activity were preferable and natural. Overall, the emergence of these fields resulted in more stringent and specific definitions of what were considered normal versus abnormal forms of sexual practice and identity. While knowledge of human sexual behavior and desire increased, so too did the ability of medical and state authorities to monitor, criminalize, and institutionalize people based on those behaviors and desires. In other words, the invention of categories to describe same-sex sexuality, such as homosexuality, fairy, faggot, and queer was a double-edged sword. These categories allowed people to find one another and form subcultures, but they also allowed authorities to harm them. See you next time when we dive further into queer history.
