This is a thread I've thought about starting ever since reading John Boswell's "Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century)".
There's really no such category as a "homosexual", a noun, before the mid-to-late nineteeth century. There are only men performing sodomy, a generally criminal offense, but with most sodomy laws rarely enforced. Sodomy was any non-procreative sex no matter whom the object of desire. Oral and anal sex were sodomy - whether performed by or to men or women - because these acts could not contribute to the creation of children. I suspect that masterbation was also considered sinful because it was merely pleasure for pleasure's sake and could not be directly linked to the procreative act.
Found this sentence on an online journal:
Here's a paragraph from a different souces, a paper discussing the origin, or invention, of the term "homosexual":
"The word Homosexualität was coined by the German-Hungarian Károly Mária Kertbeny (born Karl Maria Benkert; 182482). It is a compound of Greek homo, same, and Medieval Latin sexualis, sexual, and was coined along the lines of the late eighteenth-century French botanical terms unisexuel and bisexuel. There are no grounds for rejecting it as a bastard term, any more than innumerable Greek/Latin hybrids such as petroleum and automobile and television. It occurs first in a letter to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs dated 6 May 1868, and then in two pamphlets published in 1869 in Leipzig arguing for reform of Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code penalizing sexual relations between men."
Before the mid-to-late nineteenth century, there was no "homosexual", there was no noun name for a sexual class - which slowly led to the political class that we have today. There was "sodomia". There was "sodomite". There was "buggery".
(more to follow -- hopefully I can explore changing sodomy laws and various attitudes towards sodomy during the Middle Ages, and beyond, in later posts --- In a semi-humorous thread I wrote a couple weeks ago, Jamestown Settlement, founded 1607, America's "First Homosexual Community"?, Nick4444 linked me to an unusual site: Sodomy and the pirate tradition ... - Google Book Search)
There's really no such category as a "homosexual", a noun, before the mid-to-late nineteeth century. There are only men performing sodomy, a generally criminal offense, but with most sodomy laws rarely enforced. Sodomy was any non-procreative sex no matter whom the object of desire. Oral and anal sex were sodomy - whether performed by or to men or women - because these acts could not contribute to the creation of children. I suspect that masterbation was also considered sinful because it was merely pleasure for pleasure's sake and could not be directly linked to the procreative act.
Found this sentence on an online journal:
The Renaissance and the homosexual are both nineteenth-century inventions.The term homosexual was first used in 1892, and, as Michel Foucault, David Halperin, and others have argued, it was during this period that
the term came to be understood as a personage or species in which nothing that was part of his being was unaffected by his sexuality."
the term came to be understood as a personage or species in which nothing that was part of his being was unaffected by his sexuality."
Here's a paragraph from a different souces, a paper discussing the origin, or invention, of the term "homosexual":
"The word Homosexualität was coined by the German-Hungarian Károly Mária Kertbeny (born Karl Maria Benkert; 182482). It is a compound of Greek homo, same, and Medieval Latin sexualis, sexual, and was coined along the lines of the late eighteenth-century French botanical terms unisexuel and bisexuel. There are no grounds for rejecting it as a bastard term, any more than innumerable Greek/Latin hybrids such as petroleum and automobile and television. It occurs first in a letter to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs dated 6 May 1868, and then in two pamphlets published in 1869 in Leipzig arguing for reform of Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code penalizing sexual relations between men."
Before the mid-to-late nineteenth century, there was no "homosexual", there was no noun name for a sexual class - which slowly led to the political class that we have today. There was "sodomia". There was "sodomite". There was "buggery".
(more to follow -- hopefully I can explore changing sodomy laws and various attitudes towards sodomy during the Middle Ages, and beyond, in later posts --- In a semi-humorous thread I wrote a couple weeks ago, Jamestown Settlement, founded 1607, America's "First Homosexual Community"?, Nick4444 linked me to an unusual site: Sodomy and the pirate tradition ... - Google Book Search)