In addition to the biologization of gender differences, a further central feature of the biological model of sexuality was the assumption that ‘natural’ sexual behaviour included heterosexual acts and desires only. Heterosexuality was thus treated as the implicit norm, whereas homosexuality, in particular, came to be conceptualized as, somehow, an abnormal departure from the norm. However, when the American doctor James G. Kiernan adopted the term ‘heterosexual’ in its earliest-known occurrence in the English language, in a medical journal in 1892, he used it to describe the ‘sexual perversion’ of having sex for recreational rather than procreative reasons via ‘abnormal methods of gratification’, which referred to ensuring pleasure while avoiding reproduction. The association of heterosexuality with abnormal (i. e. non-procreative) craving for the opposite sex continued well into the 1920s, when an appetite for non-procreative different-sex sexuality started to be seen as the norm.
The biological model conceptualized people who engaged in deviant sexual practices as fundamentally different from others. This was an important conceptual innovation, which can be illustrated with the notion of the homosexual. Of course, same-sex practices have always occurred throughout history, and specific acts such as sodomy have been at times tolerated and at other times (most intensely in the 18th century) persecuted. However, any person — depending on their morality — was thought to be capable of such sinful practices. As Foucault famously pointed out, it was only much later, from the 19th century, that the idea started to emerge that people who engage in ‘sodomy’ are a separate type of person, with a specific identity and inclinations resulting from abnormal biological instincts which lead them to commit such acts: ‘homosexuals’. As he put it,
The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual
was now a species.
While some historians trace the beginnings of this change back to the late Middle Ages and point out that from the 17th and 18th centuries onwards a homosexual subculture, with specific meeting places, started to form in large European cities, it is certain that with the 19th-century conceptualization of the sodomite as a particular type of person, the modern homosexual was born.
A Hungarian journalist born in Vienna, Karl-Maria Kertbeny, is generally credited with coining the term ‘homosexual’, first in a letter to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German early advocate for the rights of sexual minorities, in 1868, then publicly in an anonymous pamphlet of 1869 campaigning against Prussian sodomy legislation. Kertbeny contrasted the homosexual initially with the ‘monosexualist’ (someone who masturbates), the ‘heterogenit’ (someone who has sex with animals), and the ‘heterosexual’ or ‘normalsexual’ (a man who has a sexual preference for women). On the latter category, Kertbeny held the view that the high sex drive of ‘heterosexuals’ or ‘normalsexuals’,
which he claimed was stronger than that of homosexuals or bestialists, gave them an appetite for engaging in depraved excesses including incest, assaulting ‘male but especially female minors’, and ‘behaving depravedly with corpses’. Given the later shift in meaning to denote the biological naturalness and moral superiority of heterosexuality, the invention of the category of the heterosexual in the context of Kertbeny’s promotion of gay rights is ‘one of sex history’s grand ironies’, as the historian Jonathan Ned Katz has pointed out.
The term ‘homosexuality’ was popularized in Germany by Krafft-Ebing and in the UK by Ellis. Charles Gilbert Chaddock, translator of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, is thus credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with having introduced the word ‘homosexuality’ into the English language in 1892, a year after a medical publication had introduced the same term into French. ‘Lesbianism’ first appeared in 1870, initially competing with the concepts of ‘tribadism’ or ‘sapphism’. The term ‘homosexual’ also had early competitors. The German pioneering campaigner for sexual rights Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, for example, founded in 1862 the cult of ‘Uranism’, a term borrowed from Plato’s Symposium in which ‘Uranian’ or ‘heavenly’ love of men for boys, attributed to the god Uranus, is praised. Against the backdrop of the romanticist rediscovery of ancient Greece in Germany and Victorian England, other Uranian societies promoting male love and friendship sprang up in both countries, including in Oxford and Cambridge. Other terminological contenders were ‘homosexualist’; ‘paederast’ (though referring to sex with boys, it came to be used also to refer to sex between men); ‘contrary sexual feeling’; ‘inverted sexual proclivity’; ‘sexual inversion’; ‘intermediate sex’; ‘third sex’; and ‘urnings’ (again, from ‘Uranian love’).
The concept of ‘sexual inversion’ was particularly popular in the 19th century. It expressed the widespread belief of the time that people with same-sex desires suffered from some kind of gender
disorder and were really women in men’s bodies, or vice versa (though the concept also covered a wider range of deviant gender behaviours such as men dressing up in women’s clothes), or even a third sex. Same-sex desire was widely interpreted through the lens of gender, but disagreements raged over what the exact link between sexual identity and gender was. Whereas those defending the sexual inversion model argued that male homosexuals were ‘feminized’, others held up the Greek paederastic model to argue that they were, on the contrary, especially masculine. The first movement for the rights of sexual minorities in the world emerged in Germany around the end of the 19th century, following the criminalization of homosexuality at a national scale that had resulted from German unification. By 1902, divisions within the movement emerged over precisely this question, with Magnus Hirschfeld defending the third-sex model, whereas Benedict Friedlander argued that homosexuality was ‘the highest, most perfect evolutionary stage of gender differentiation’, and that the ‘inverted type’ of male homosexual represented hypervirility, and possessed superior capacities for leadership and heroism than did heterosexual men.
In both competing models, homosexual men and women were considered to be biologically separate types of individuals from heterosexuals, with specific personality traits, clothes, and bodies, and it was claimed that they were particularly prevalent in large urban centres (which, in the context of the social disruptions resulting from accelerating urbanization processes, were held to be particularly fertile breeding grounds for perversion, compared to the simple, ‘natural’ life in the countryside).
The biological model of sexuality saw homosexuals not as sinners or criminals, but as abnormal individuals who were in need of a cure. Although some sexologists, including Ellis, saw homosexuality as inborn but not a disease, much of sexual science has been preoccupied with problematizing and investigating these ‘marginal’ sexualities, and with thinking about how to ‘correct’
the perceived pathologies through therapy, and chemical and surgical interventions, including castration. Homosexuality was officially classified as a mental illness in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual until 1973, and by the World Health Organization until 1992. Similar psychiatric labels were abolished in the UK in 1994, in the Russian Federation in 1999, and by the Chinese Society of Psychiatry in 2001, after gay rights groups as well as dissenting psychiatrists argued that homophobia rather than homosexuality was the problem.
The use of psychiatry and sexology to correct and cure deviant sexuality has been widely documented. For example, psychoanalysts such as the American Sandor Rado argued from the 1940s that deviancy from heterosexuality could be ‘unlearned’. By the 1950s and 1960s, aversion therapy was increasingly used to ‘cure’ sexual deviants such as cross-dressers, fetishists, transsexuals, homosexuals, and lesbians in countries including the Soviet Union, the UK, the US, Canada, and South Africa. Gay men were more frequently targeted than lesbians since therapeutic treatment would often be part of criminal sentences, which only rarely involved lesbian relationships. The US sexologists Masters and Johnson ran a programme from 1968 to 1977 to convert homosexuals to heterosexuality, with a claimed success rate of 71.6% over six years of treatment. Aversion therapy involved projecting images of ‘inappropriate sexual objects’, including current lovers, to the ‘patient’, who was then injected with chemicals such as apomorphine to cause nausea and vomiting, or subjected to electric shock treatments which would commonly be administered two or more times daily over a period of several weeks.
Although sexologists themselves often promoted tolerance for those who fell outside of the ‘normalcy’ of heterosexual relationships, their ideas were also used to organize and intensify the emerging disciplining of sexuality. As the sociologist Jeffrey Weeks puts it:
[T]he paradox was that the early sexologists, who by and large were also conscious sex reformers, were simultaneously powerful agents in the organisation, and potential control, of the sexual behaviours they sought to describe.
Indeed, many of the pioneers of sexual science were active social reformers who saw sexual reform and the transformation of the social order as connected. This was true, for example, of figures such as Auguste Forel, Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Iwan Bloch who were actively involved in political campaigns that ranged from the rights of sexual minorities to pacifism and votes for women. Against the backdrop of such wider social struggles, they participated in contemporary and highly politicized public debates on sex reform, sex education, and discriminatory legislation. Many early sexologists saw homosexuals in particular as ‘harmless’, especially since, as Auguste Forel remarked, ‘they would not reproduce anyway’, and authors such as Krafft-Ebing and Hirschfeld spoke out publicly against anti-sodomy legislation.