Blob 1: The term homosexuality was first used
in 1868.
Blob 2: Wow.
Blob 1: Yeh.
Blob 2: No way man.
Blob 1: It was made up by some random dude
who claimed to be a physician but was actually
a translator.
Blob 2: Wow.
Blob 1: Yeh.
Blob 2: But did anyone use the term?
Blob 1: No. Not till 1879, when Krafft-Ebbing
started writing about it.
Voice Over: And then it spread across the
world.
Very slowly.
And it got to the English Dictionary in 1898.
But still loads of people hadn’t heard of
it by the 1950s.
Blob 2: Who was Krafft-Ebbing?
Blob 1: Some dude who liked to write about
how the colonial climate caused the moral
degeneracy of European women.
Blob 2: Wow.
Blob 1: That was a science at the time, it
was called sexology.
Blob 2: Wow.
Blob 1: Yeh.
Blob 2: There really wasn’t a term like
homosexual before all this?
Blob 1: Nah, probably the closest term was
sexual invert, which referred to people who
did things which weren’t considered normal
for their gender. It was a pretty broad term,
including referring to political ambitions
in women and a fondness for cats in men.
Blob 2: Wow.
Blob 1: People were more conserned with sex
acts, and what acts were endorsed or transgresive.
They didn’t have the conceptual framework
to think in terms of sexual desires and sexual
identities.
Blob 2: So man, what happened once the term
became popular?
Blob 1: You can read through a load of old
journals and litrature which today we’d
think of as gay and find that they had very
little consern with weather their desires
were erotic or platonic, and they didn’t
have any sense of internalised guilt. Their
problems were more along the lines of wondering
how they could live together in a society
that didn’t like those sorts of same sex
living arangements, or of not seeming to be
engaged in morally transgressive sex stuff.
Once the term homosexual hit the mainstream
the gays ended up all sounding like angsty
teens, being like:
Voice Over: Am I a homosexual?
Should I be guilty about my sexual degeneracy?
I was just having a nice close same sex friendship,
but now it looks like I’ve got to think
deeply about the nature of my desires.
With this a homosexual became something you
could be, and a way of being which people
would sort of force you into if you seemed
to be doing anything too gay. By thinking
of yourself and being thought of as a homosexual
you became expected to lead a certain sort
of life, and you often ended up falling into
those expectations.
Equally, people who weren’t thought of as
homosexuals ended up avoiding things associated
with homosexuality, and the spread of the
term homosexual really helped cristalise a
notion of homophobia.
Blob 2: That’s not good man.
Blob 1: No man.
Blob 2: But eventually someone wrote Gay is
Good on a sign and now everything is fine?
Blob 1: That’s a story for another time
man.
Title Credit.
Blob 2: But man, who invented heterosexuality?
Blob 1: Oh, some dude in 1907 because they
wanted a word for the opposite of homosexuality.
