Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Homosexuality

Homosexuality, defined variously as same-sex love, desire, and/or sexual activity, has been, in one form or another, a universal phenomenon. In the United States, male homosexuality, like all same-sex attraction and behavior, has often challenged entrenched gender systems that define and maintain masculinity. Although the term homosexual referred to both sexes when it was coined in the nineteenth century, male homosexuality has been a more prominent concern in American society. This is due to the larger public role that men have played, and to the resulting concern with definitions of, and conformity to, a masculine ideal. For these reasons—in addition to moral opposition to sexual acts between same-sex partners—homosexuality has been among the most controversial and divisive issues in the United States.

Homosexuality has been classified as a sin, a crime, and an illness, with changes in the dominant view reflecting both the general secularization of life in the United States and the power of legal and medical institutions in the twentieth century. The history of homosexuality in the United States might be divided into two broad eras: Before about 1900, when there was a wide range of categories for sexual behavior and identity (with a gradual narrowing of options over time); and the period after 1900, which has been dominated by the homosexual/heterosexual duality and the mid-twentieth-century emergence of political movements and organizations asserting a gay identity.

Before 1900

In most indigenous American cultures, some individuals dressed and acted as the opposite sex or engaged in same-sex acts and relationships. But the Europeans who colonized North America arrived with sexual codes. Having already made the Judeo-Christian sin of sodomy a capital crime in the New World, they considered the indigenous peoples that they encountered inferior (and Native American men wanting in masculinity) in part because of the more fluid gender roles and sexual behaviors that existed among native peoples. Some sodomy laws were liberalized in the eighteenth century, but antisodomy laws still remained in force in many U.S. states at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

As the United States took shape in the nineteenth century, the emerging middle class developed separate public and private spheres—with public roles for males and private roles for females. In practice this division contributed to homosocial behavior and created an environment conducive to and supportive of intense same-sex friendships, with varying degrees of sexual activity in these “romantic friendships” (such as those associated with poet Walt Whitman). Scholars debate whether such relationships, as well as same-sex acts in singlesex communities (such as those on the nineteenth-century frontier) should be viewed in terms of later concepts of sexuality, since the idea of homosexuals and heterosexuals as types of people was not yet common.

The Twentieth Century

Recent scholarship suggests that the modern concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality were “invented” in Western society in the late nineteenth century. Each was conceived in relation to the other, and both, as identities, were considered products of specific historical conditions rather than biologically or physically constant. The emerging sciences of psychology and sexology created the sexual “invert” (also called “variant,” “deviant,” and “Uranian”), meaning one whose biological sex did not correspond to his or her gender behavior and, possibly, to a person sexually attracted to the same sex. At best, the invert represented immature development, and at worst a threat to society and a need for therapy or more drastic treatment (e.g., institutionalization, castration and, later, shock therapy). Thus, the types of romantic friendships that had often been freely expressed during the previous century, were now stigmatized as abnormal, and many who were involved in such friendships felt the need to appear and live according to heterosexual norms.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution