Touchstone Archives: The Gay Invention Interesting read - learn about the coining and the terms of hetero- and homo- sexuality. This is particularly about the language behind and the emergence of labels in a world that is not different in terms of the sexuality spectrum, but deals with it so very differently over time. When he writes that homosexuality is a linguistic construct, I think he means more broadly that the idea of homosexuality as a term as distinguishing some humans from others is wrong. He concedes the innateness of sex in general, traces the castigation or reverence of same-sex relationships throughout classic history, and concludes (sort of oddly) that the homo- and hetero- labels ought to be trashed altogether. Not sure if I agree with it all, but this is a damned well written and informative article if you want to get in touch with the intellectual streams running through LGBTQQ life. Preview: "In fact, Latin also lacks these terms and the same is true of Old and Middle English. Among modern European languages the word that corresponds to the English “homosexual” is generally a variant on the same word: in Spanish homosexual and in Dutch homoseksueel, for example. German also offers gleichgeschlechtlich, which is simply a combination of two Germanic roots, gleich and Geschlecht, that correspond to the Greek (homo = same) and Latin (sexus = sex) of the English word. This English word is itself a very recent coinage. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, both “homosexual” and “homosexuality” first appeared in English in 1892, along with “heterosexual” and “heterosexuality,” in an English translation of Richard von Kraft-Ebing’s Psychopathologia Sexualis (1886) and turn up again five years later in Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex."
