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| Homosexual content. |
I have been researching a lot about gay history as well as
reading historical fiction and biographies. I found myself making a list of gay
words that were new to me. Some of them I wasn’t sure of their meaning or of
their historical context. Just about all of them were terms to describe men who
have sex with men (MSM). In fact, “
MSM” is itself a new term that is used as a
medical and social research designation.
It was created in the 1990s by epidemiologists in order to study the
spread of disease among men who have sex with men, regardless of identity.
While the words “
gay” and “
queer” are old, their explicit
meaning of men who have sex with men is a fairly recent understanding by the
general public. The term “
homosexual” in fact can be pinpointed to a date.
According to Salon.com: (
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/22/the_invention_of_the_heterosexual/),
“
Heterosexual” was actually coined in a letter at the same time as the word
“
homosexual” [in 1869] by an Austro-Hungarian journalist named
Károly Mária
Kertbeny. He created these words as part of his response to a piece of Prussian
legislation that made same-sex erotic behavior illegal, even in cases where the
identical act performed by a man and a woman would be considered legal. And he
was one of a couple of people who did a lot of writing, campaigning, and
pamphleteering to try to change legal opinion on that matter. He coined the
words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” in a really very clever bid to try to
equalize same-sex and different-sex. His intent was to suggest that there are
these two categories in which human beings could be sexual, that they were not
part of a hierarchy, and that they were just two different flavors of the same
thing.
“Gay” has been around quite a bit longer and leading a quiet
double life. For most of the last 400 years, many people believe
"gay" simply meant lighthearted or cheerful until homosexuals
redefined it. The truth is, the word has had a long secondary connotation of
sexual licentiousness. As early as 1637 the Oxford
English Dictionary gives one meaning as "addicted to social pleasures
and dissipations. Often euphemistically: Of loose and immoral life" —
whence, presumably, the term "gay blade." In the 1800s the term was
used to refer to female prostitutes, and to "gay it" meant "to
copulate." By 1935 the word "geycat" meant a homosexual boy. By 1955
"gay" had acquired its present meaning.
“Queer” entered the English language back in the 16th
century and generally meant strange, unusual, or out of alignment. The term
started to gain a connotation of sexual deviance by the late 19th century. For most of the 20th century,
"queer" was frequently used as a derogatory term for effeminate, gay
males. The LGBT community began to reclaim the term in the 1990s. One of the
first usages was the ACT-UP spinoff, Queer Nation.
The following is not a definitive list of terms, and I don’t
claim that the definitions are all correct or perfect. The majority of the
words on my list come from books I have read as well as from various online
content and an occasional film or play I’ve seen. Most of the definitions and
histories I mention come from Wikipedia. Nevertheless, it is a very fascinating
group of words and history.
Old terms mostly from
ancient and archaic literature:
Catamite: A
catamite was a boy who was the intimate companion of a young man in ancient
Rome, usually in a pederastic
friendship. The word derives from the proper noun Catamitus, the Latinized form
of Ganymede, the beautiful Trojan youth abducted by Zeus to be his companion
and cupbearer. The word appears widely but not necessarily frequently in the
Latin literature of antiquity, from Plautus to Ausonius. It is sometimes a
synonym for puer delicatus,
"delicate boy".
Ganymede: In
Greek mythology, Ganymede is a divine hero whose homeland was Troy. Homer
describes Ganymede as the most beautiful of mortals. In the best-known myth,
Zeus assumes the form of an eagle and abducts Ganymede in order to serve as cupbearer
in Olympus. Some interpretations of the myth treat it as an allegory of the
human soul aspiring to immortality. It also served as a model for the Greek
social custom of paiderastía, the
socially acceptable, erotic relationship between a man and a youth. The Latin
form of the name was Catamitus, from
which the English word "catamite" derives.
Mollys, mollies: In
18th century England, a "molly" referred to an effeminate, usually
homosexual male. A molly house in 18th-century English was a tavern or private
room where homosexual and cross-dressing men could congregate and meet possible
sexual partners. Molly houses were one precursor to some types of gay bars. The
most famous molly house was Mother Clap's, open for two years from 1724-1726 in
the Holborn area of London.
Patrons of Molly houses who dressed in women's clothing were
called "Mollies". They would take on a female persona, have a female
name, and affect feminine mannerisms and speech. Marriage ceremonies between a
Mollie and his male lover were enacted to symbolize their partnership and
commitment, and the role-play at times incorporated a ritualized giving birth.
Pederast, Pederasty:
Today, pederasty refers to male attraction towards adolescent boys or the
cultural institutions that support such relations, as in ancient Greece.
However, in the 18th and 19th centuries the term usually referred to male
homosexuality in general. A pederast was also the active partner in anal sex,
whether with a male or a female partner. It should not be confused with
“pedophilia,” a psychiatric disorder in which there is a sexual preference for
prepubescent children.
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| Plato |
Platonist: Plato praised the benefits of same-sex
relationships in his early writings but in his late works he proposed its
prohibition. In the Symposium
(182B-D), Plato equates acceptance of homosexuality with democracy, and its
suppression with despotism, saying that homosexuality "is shameful to
barbarians because of their despotic governments, just as philosophy and athletics
are, since it is apparently not in best interests of such rulers to have great
ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or physical unions,
all of which love is particularly apt to produce".
Sodomite, Sodomist,
Sodomy: Though sodomy has been used to refer to a range of homosexual and
heterosexual "unnatural acts," the term sodomite usually refers to a
homosexual male. The term is derived from the Biblical tale of Sodom and
Gomorrah. There is no word in biblical Greek or Hebrew for “sodomy.” Nor is
there an equivalent word for “homosexual.” A Sodomite was simply an inhabitant
of Sodom, just as a Moabite was an inhabitant of Moab. The modern association
with homosexuality can be found in the writings of the Jewish historian
Josephus in CE 96.
Scientific Terms from
the late 19th century and early 20th century.
This
was the period that psychology emerged as a separate scientific discipline.
Prior to this time it was regarded as a branch of philosophy. Doctors,
scientists and researchers were creating new vocabulary to describe the human
condition. This was the same period that the terms homosexual and heterosexual
were coined.
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| Magnus Hirschfeld |
Androphile,
Ephebophile, Gerontrophile: German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld divided homosexual
men into four groups: “pedophiles,”
who are most attracted to prepubescent youth; “ephebophiles,” who are most attracted to youths from puberty up to
the early twenties; “androphiles,”
who are most attracted to persons between the early twenties and fifty; and “gerontophiles,” who are most attracted
to older men, up to senile old age. According to Karen Franklin, Hirschfeld
considered ephebophilia "common and nonpathological, with ephebophiles and
androphiles each making up about 45% of the homosexual population."
Contrasexual: Carl
Jung, the founder analytical psychology, defined “contraxexual” as the portion
of a person's psyche that has characteristics of the opposite gender.
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| Edward Carpenter |
Homogenic, Intermediate Sex: Edward Carpenter,
English philosopher, anthologist, and early gay activist, suggested these terms
around the turn of the 20th century.
Homophile: German
astrologist, author and psychoanalyst Karl-Günther Heimsoth coined the term “homophile”
in his 1924 doctoral dissertation "Hetero-
und Homophilie." Homophile was an attempt to avoid the clinical
implications of sexual pathology found with the word homosexual, emphasizing
love (-phile) instead. The term was in common use in the 1950s and 1960s by
homosexual organizations and publications; the groups of this period are now
known collectively as the homophile movement. The term homophile began to
disappear with the emergence of the Gay Liberation movements of the late 1960s
and early 1970s although some of the homophile groups still survive.
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| Havelock Ellis |
Sexual Inversion,
Invert, Intersexual: “Sexual
Inversion” (1897) by British physician and psychologist Havelock Ellis and John
Addington Symonds was the first English medical textbook on homosexuality. The
work challenged theories that homosexuality was abnormal, as well as
stereotypes, and insisted on the ubiquity of homosexuality and its association
with intellectual and artistic achievement.
Sexual inversion was
believed to be an inborn reversal of gender traits: male inverts were, to a
greater or lesser degree, inclined to traditionally female pursuits and dress
and vice versa. The sexologist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing described
female sexual inversion as "the masculine soul, heaving in the female
bosom." Initially confined to medical texts, the concept of sexual
inversion was given wide currency by Radclyffe Hall's 1928 lesbian novel “The Well of Loneliness,” which was
written in part to popularize the sexologists' views. Published with a foreword
by Havelock Ellis, it consistently used the term "invert" to refer to
its protagonist, who bore a strong resemblance to one of Krafft-Ebing's case
studies.
The term “intersexuality” was used around 1900 as a synonym
for "inversion." Later it was adopted by the medical community and applied
to human beings whose biological sex cannot be classified as clearly male or
female.
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| Edward Prime-Stevenson |
Similisexual: In
1908 Edward Prime-Stevenson published the first American defense of
homosexuality under the pseudonym Xavier Mayne. It was called “The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism
as a Problem in Social Life.” Similisexual is the full-Latin analogous of
homosexual.
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| Karl Heinrich Ulrichs |
Uranian, urning: Uranian
is believed to be an English adaptation of the German word Urning, which was
first published by activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1864–65 in Forschungen über das Räthsel der
mannmännlichen Liebe ("Research into the Riddle of Man-Male
Love"). It referred to a person of a third sex — originally, someone with
"a female psyche in a male body" who is sexually attracted to men. The
term "Uranian" was quickly adopted by English-language advocates of
homosexual emancipation in the Victorian era, such as Edward Carpenter and John
Addington Symonds, who used it to describe a comradely love that would bring
about true democracy, uniting the "estranged ranks of society" and
breaking down class and gender barriers.
Bonus trivia: In 1867, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs became the
first self-proclaimed homosexual person to speak out publicly in defense of
homosexuality when he pleaded at the Congress of German Jurists in Munich for a
resolution urging the repeal of anti-homosexual laws.
Effeminate or Coded
Terms:
These words do not necessarily indicate that the man is gay or
homosexual. They do bring into question his masculinity, machismo, and
virility. A similar modern term today would be “metrosexual.” In most cultures,
effeminacy was traditionally considered, if not a vice, at least a weakness,
indicative of other negative character traits and more recently often involving
a negative insinuation of homosexual tendencies or sexual passivity, even
though the individual possibly could be heterosexual or bisexual.
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| Oscar Wilde |
Aesthetic: An aesthetic
is one who subscribes to the philosophy of dealing with the nature of art,
beauty, and taste, with the creation and appreciation of beauty. German and
British thinkers emphasized beauty as the key component of art and of the
aesthetic experience and saw art as necessarily aiming at absolute beauty. For
Oscar Wilde, the contemplation of beauty for beauty's sake was not only the
foundation for much of his literary career; but he was quoted as saying,
"Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the
science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It
is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life."
Dandy, dandyism:
A dandy (also known as a beau or gallant) is a man who places particular
importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely hobbies,
pursued with the appearance of nonchalance in a cult of Self. Historically,
especially in late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain, a dandy who was
self-made often strove to imitate an aristocratic lifestyle despite coming from
a middle-class background. In 18th century slang, a
"dandy" was differentiated from a "fop" in that the dandy's
dress was more refined and sober than the fop's. At the end of the 19th
century, American dandies were called dudes.
Dude: From the
1870s to the 1960s, dude primarily meant a person who dressed in an extremely
fashion-forward manner (a dandy) or a citified person who was visiting a rural
location but stuck out (a city slicker). In the early 1960s, dude became
prominent in surfer culture as a synonym of "guy" or "fella."
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| Fop |
Fop: Fop became a
pejorative term for a foolish man overly concerned with his appearance and
clothes in 17th century England. Some of the very many similar alternative
terms are "coxcomb", “fribble”, "popinjay" (meaning
"parrot"), “fashion-monger”, and "ninny." "Macaroni" was another term of the 18th century more specifically
concerned with fashion. The fop was a stock character in English literature and
especially comic drama, as well as satirical prints. A modern-day fop may also be a reference to a
foolish person who is overly concerned about his clothing and incapable of
engaging in intellectual conversations, activities, or thoughts.
Libertine: A
libertine is one devoid of most moral restraints that are seen as unnecessary
or undesirable, especially one who ignores or even spurns accepted morals and
forms of behavior sanctified by the larger society. Libertines place value on
physical pleasures, meaning those experienced through the senses. As a
philosophy, libertinism gained newfound adherents in the 17th, 18th, and 19th
centuries, particularly in France and Great Britain. Notable among these were
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, and the Marquis de Sade.
Anthropological Terms:
The following are just a few of the terms I’ve come across in literature, plays
and movies.
Berdache, Two-Spirit:
Before the late twentieth century, the term “berdache” was widely used by
anthropologists as a generic term to indicate "two-spirit"
individuals. However, this term has become considered increasingly outdated and
considered offensive. (Based on the French “bardache”
implying a male prostitute or catamite, the word originates in Arabic meaning
"captive, captured.") “Two-Spirit,” gained widespread popularity in
1990 during the third annual, intertribal Native American/First Nations gay and
lesbian conference in Winnipeg. “Two-Spirit” is a term chosen to distinctly
express Native/First Nations gender identity and gender variance in addition to
replacing the otherwise imposed terms of “berdache” and “gay.”
Hijras: In South
Asia, “hijras” or “chhakka” in Kannada, “khusra” in Punjabi, and “kojja” in
Telugu are physiological males who have feminine gender identity, wear women's
clothing and display other feminine, gender roles. “Hijras” have a long-recorded
history in the Indian subcontinent from antiquity, as suggested by the Kama
Sutra period, onwards. The word “kothi” (or “koti”) is common across India,
similar to the “Kathoey” of Thailand, although “kothis” are often distinguished
from “hijras.” “Kothis” are regarded as feminine men or boys who take a
feminine role in sex with men but do not live in the kind of intentional
communities that “hijras” usually live in. Additionally, not all ‘kothis” have
undergone initiation rites or the body modification steps to become a “hijra.”
Kathoey: “Kathoey”
is a Thai term that refers to a transgender person or an effeminate gay male in
Thailand. While a significant number of Thais perceive “kathoeys” as belonging
to a third gender, including many “’kathoeys” themselves, others see them as
either a kind of man or a kind of woman. The word “kathoey” is thought to be of
Khmer origin. It is most often rendered as “ladyboy” in English conversation
with Thais, and this latter expression has become popular across Southeast
Asia. They are generally accepted by society. Thailand has never had legal
prohibitions against homosexuality or homosexual behavior.
Shudo, Nanshoku: The
Japanese term “nanshoku” (男色, which can also be read as “danshoku”)
is the Japanese reading of the same characters in Chinese, which literally mean
"male colors." The character 色 (color) still has the
meaning of sexual pleasure in China and Japan. This term was widely used to refer
to some kind of male–male sex in a pre-modern era of Japan. The term “shudō” (衆道)
(abbreviated from “wakashudō,” the "way of adolescent boys") is also
used, especially in older works. Homosexuality in Japan, variously known as “shudo”
or “nanshoku” has been documented for over one thousand years and was an
integral part of Buddhist monastic life and the samurai tradition. This
same-sex love culture gave rise to strong traditions of painting and literature
documenting and celebrating such relationships.
Biblical terms:
This is just a brief review of a couple of terms used in the
Bible and Torah. There are whole books, long essays, and lots a scholarly research
written on the subject. Nevertheless, here are just a few interesting facts.
“There is no term that
means homosexual orientation in the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts
of the Bible. The authors of the Bible
did not understand sexual orientation and thus did not write about it. Thus,
when you see one of these words in an English translation of the Bible, it is
important to dig deeper and find what the original Hebrew or Greek text really
means.”
Rev. Clay Witt founding pastor of
HRMCC writes the following:
"The first use of the term "homosexuals" in an English Bible did not
come until 1946, with the publication of the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament.
Sodom did not become an unambiguous symbol of same-sex
sexual relations until the second century C.E. It then applied to the
exploitation of a youth or young man by an older male. Although there are some
English translations that use the word "sodomite," no Hebrew or Greek
word formed on the name “Sodom” ever appears in the biblical manuscripts on
which those versions are based. In every instance in the King James Version where the term “sodomite” is used, the reference
is to male prostitutes associated with places of worship." "It is
important to notice that our Old Testament texts attack the male prostitutes
not because they engage in sexual relationships with other males; they, like
the female prostitutes, are attacked because they serve alien gods."
Two of the key words in the Bible that modern day
translators use for homosexual are “malakoi”
and “arsenokoitai”.
- “Malakoi” has been used to describe effeminate or passive,
homosexual males. Other translators
believe that a better usage of the word is for soft clothing, substandard
ethics, or weak morals, depending on context and that it has nothing to do with
homosexuality.
- “Arsenokoitai” has challenged scholars for centuries and
has been variously rendered as “abusers of themselves with mankind,” “sodomites,”
or “men who practice homosexuality.” Later
Christian literature used the word to mean variously “prostitution,” “incest”
or “rape” without any single, clear meaning. Many suggest that the more likely
definition is that it is what temple or shrine prostitution and male prostitutes
were called.
That is a lot of verbiage for men who love men
and like to have sex with them.
