Question

Historically, how did people become identified as heterosexual or homosexual? (Note that these specific distinctions were unknown until the latter part of the nineteenth century.)

How have people become categorized based on of society's gender identity expectations?

Speculate as to why these distinctions are so important to Americans. What do they say about American culture?

Answer 1

• In the twentieth century, creatures called heterosexuals emerged from the dark shadows of the nineteenth-century medical world to become common types acknowledged in the bright light of the modern day.
• Heterosexuality began this century defensively, as the publicly unsanctioned private practice of the respectable middle class, and as the publicly put-clown pleasure-affirming practice of urban working-class youths, southern blacks, and Greenwich Village bohemians.
• But by the end of the 1920s, heterosexuality had triumphed as dominant, sanctified culture.' In the first quarter of the twentieth century the heterosexual came out, a public, self-affirming debut the homosexual would duplicate near the century's end.
• The discourse on heterosexuality had a protracted coming out, not completed in American popular culture until the 1920s. Only slowly was heterosexuality established as a stable sign of normal sex.
• Psychologists in the 19th and 20th centuries, most of whom classified homosexuality as a form of mental illness, developed a variety of theories on its origin. The 19th-century psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, whose Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) included, sado-masochism, and “lust-murder” in its list of sexual perversions, saw it as originating in heredity.
• His contemporary Sigmund Freud characterized it as a result of conflicts of psychosexual development, including identification with the parent of the opposite sex. Others have looked at social influences and physiological events in fetal development as possible origins.
• In the late 1860s, Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny coined four terms to describe sexual experiences: heterosexual, homosexual, and two now forgotten terms to describe masturbation and bestiality; namely, monosexual and heterogenit.
• It is likely that many instances of homosexuality result from a combination of inborn or constitutional factors and environmental or social influences.
• The 1901 Dorland’s Medical Dictionary defined heterosexuality as an “abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex.” More than two decades later, in 1923, Merriam Webster’s dictionary similarly defined it as “morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex.”
• It wasn’t until 1934 that heterosexuality was graced with the meaning we’re familiar with today: “manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality.”
• Between the 1890s and the 1960s the terms heterosexual and homosexual moved into American popular culture, constructing in time a sexual solid citizen and a perverted unstable alien, a sensual insider and a lascivious outlaw, a hetero center and a homo margin, a hetero majority and a homo minority.
• The new, strict boundaries made the new gendered, erotic world less polymorphous. The term heterosexual manufactured a new sex-differentiated ideal of the erotically correct, a norm that worked to affirm the superiority of men over women and heterosexuals over homosexuals.
  
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