The Gay Invention

Homosexuality Is a Linguistic as Well as a Moral Error

by R. V. Young
Touchstone Magazine

For thousands of years, until the late 1800s, our ancestors were completely oblivious to the existence of a fundamentally distinct class of human beings. Indeed, during the long period of Greco-Roman antiquity and more than a millennium and a half of Christian civilization, man did not even have a name for this class.

Or so asserts an almost universal assumption fixed in the language almost everyone uses: that "heterosexuals" and "homosexuals" are two permanently and innately different kinds of human being, and that "sexual orientation" constitutes a difference comparable to the difference between male and female. Widespread acceptance of "homosexuality" and associated terms thus biases discussion of the subject before an argument is even formulated.

Terms Lacking

What might be called the philological evidence calls this notion into question. If it were true, someone would long ago have given this class a name. That no one did until very recently suggests that the notion is not true.

In the first footnote of the first chapter of Greek Homosexuality, which is generally regarded as the definitive treatment of its subject, Oxford classical scholar K. J. Dover points out that the ancient Greek language "has no nouns corresponding to the English nouns 'a homosexual' and 'a heterosexual'." Such an observation would seem to call for more notice than is accorded by a single short footnote, but even the apparent concession is misleading, insofar as it suggests that the absence of these terms is a peculiarity of Greek.

In fact, Latin also lacks these terms and the same is true of Old and Middle English. Among modern European languages the word that corresponds to the English "homosexual" is generally a variant on the same word: in Spanish homosexual and in Dutch homoseksueel, for example. German also offers gleichgeschlechtlich, which is simply a combination of two Germanic roots, gleich and Geschlecht, that correspond to the Greek ( homo = same) and Latin ( sexus = sex) of the English word.

This English word is itself a very recent coinage. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, both "homosexual" and "homosexuality" first appeared in English in 1892, along with "heterosexual" and "heterosexuality," in an English translation of Richard von Kraft-Ebing's Psychopathologia Sexualis (1886) and turn up again five years later in Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex.

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R. V. Young is Professor of English at North Carolina State University. His most recent book is Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Boydell & Brewer), and he is currently at work on a book on Shakespeare and on a translation and critical edition of the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius’s De Constantia. He and his wife, who are parishioners at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Raleigh, have five grown children and eight grandchildren.