The First Years of Heterosexuality (1892–1900). Katz regards this as “one of sex history’s grand ironies”: Kertbeny’s coinages were intended to advance the cause of homosexual emancipation. In a private conversation in 1868, the German sodomy-law reformer Karl Maria Kertbeny first coined the words “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality,” which Katz describes as “the debut of the modern lingo.” Kertbeny first used the word “homosexual” in public a year later in an effort to reform sodomy laws, and he first used the word “heterosexual” in public in 1880 in a defense of homosexuality. While there were some state sodomy laws in place, they proscribed particular acts in which anyone could conceivably engage. The primacy of gender gave rise to the “invert,” a mostly medical classification of gender and sexual deviance. The heterosexual did not have a linguistic existence in the early Victorian era, which was characterized instead by gender-based standards of “true womanhood” and “true manhood.” The defining feature was the realization of a lust-free “true love” within the constraints of procreative marriage. Let’s first begin with a brief review of Katz’s seven periods, after which I’ll offer my own ideas on how his framework might be extended to the present day.īefore Heterosexuality in the Early Victorian Era (1820–1860). While Katz focuses on language (the word “heterosexuality” as a rhetorical device), I will hone in on cultural and political pivots around which heterosexuality has continued to be articulated. Instead, I hope to inspire a renewal of his ideas by considering how heterosexuality has been reinvented since 1982. While attempting to fill in some of the blanks makes for an arousing thought experiment, what I propose here is nothing as systematic and thorough as Katz’s work. How, then, has heterosexual history unfolded from 1982 to the present? The argument that heterosexuality is historical means that it has had almost three decades to evolve since Katz’s endpoint. While his contribution is a thing of beauty, it needs to be ongoing. In his 162-year time frame, 1820–1982, Katz divides sexual history into seven periods. Said differently and borrowing Halperin’s distinction: “sexuality” has a history, even if sex itself-which Halperin describes as a “natural fact, grounded in the functioning of the body”-does not. While others had offered revisionist histories, Katz refocused the narrative from a homo- to a heterosexual one, challenging the assumption that heterosexuality is, in his own words, “unchanging, universal, essential: ahistorical.” In its place he offered an intriguing alternate hypothesis, namely, that heterosexuality is a fairly recent, historically located, and always adapting fabrication. Or Adrienne Rich’s classic formulations of “lesbian existence” and the “lesbian continuum.” David Halperin discovered an antiquity populated by molles (effeminate men) and tribades (masculine women), and George Chauncey’s early 20th-century gay New York City was a world that had a place for “trade,” “husbands,” “wolves,” “fairies,” “third-sexers,” and “punks.” And don’t forget Monique Wittig’s quip that “lesbians are not women.”
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Recall Michel Foucault’s famous declaration that the homosexual as a “species” was “born” in 1870. The beauty of Katz’s approach was its inversion, so to speak, of popular constructionist arguments about homosexuality. HISTORIAN JONATHAN NED KATZ first published his essay “The Invention of Heterosexuality” in 1990, which he later expanded into an award-winning 1995 book of the same title.