Terms used to describe homosexuality have gone through many changes since the emergence of the first terms in the mid-19th century. In English, some terms in widespread use have been sodomite, Sapphic, Uranian or Urning, homophile, lesbian, gay, and queer. Some of these words are specific to women, some to men, and some can be used of either. Gay people may also be identified under the umbrella term LGBT.
Homosexual was coined in German in 1868.Feray, Jean-Claude, and Manfred Herzer. 1990. « Homosexual Studies and Politics in the 19th Century »: Journal of Homosexuality 19 (1): 23‑48. p.29. Academia continues to coin related terms, including androphilia and gynephilia which designate only the object of attraction, thus divorcing the terms from sexual orientation entirely.
Numerous slang terms exist for homosexuals or homosexuality. Some communities have cants, a rich jargon used among a subgroup almost like a secret language, such as Polari in the UK, and others.
Prescribed usage
The term homosexual can be used as an adjective to describe the sexual attractions and behaviors of people attracted to the same sex. Author and gay pioneer Quentin Crisp said that the term should be "homosexualist", adding that no one says "I am a sexual". Some gay people argue that the use of homosexual as a noun is offensive, arguing that they are people first and their homosexuality is merely an attribute of their humanity. Even if they do not consider the term offensive, some people in same-gender relationships may object to being described as homosexual because they identify as bisexual+, or another orientation such as (rarely) "unstraight".
Some style guides recommend that the terms homosexual and homosexuality be avoided altogether, lest their use cause confusion or arouse controversy. In particular, the description of individuals as homosexual may be offensive, partially because of the negative clinical association of the word stemming from its use in describing same-gender attraction as a pathological state before homosexuality was removed from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental disorders in 1973.GLAAD GLAAD Media Reference Guide - Terms To Avoid The Associated Press and The New York Times style guides restrict usage of the terms.GLAAD GLAAD Media Reference Guide - AP & New York Times Style
Same-gender oriented people seldom apply such terms to themselves, and public officials and agencies often avoid them. For instance, the Safe Schools Coalition of Washington's Glossary for School Employees advises that gay is the "preferred synonym for homosexual", and goes on to suggest avoiding the term homosexual as it is "clinical, distancing, and archaic".
However, the terms homosexual and homosexuality are sometimes deemed appropriate in referring to behavior (although same-gender is the preferred adjective). Using homosexuality or homosexual to refer to behavior may be inaccurate but does not carry the same potentially offensive connotations that using homosexual to describe a person does. When referring to people, homosexual might be considered derogatory and the terms gay and lesbian are preferred. Some have argued that homosexual places emphasis on sexuality over humanity, and is to be avoided when describing a person. Gay man or lesbian are the preferred nouns for referring to people, which stress cultural and social matters over sex.
The New Oxford American Dictionary says that gay is the preferred term.
People with a same-gender sexual orientation generally prefer the terms gay, lesbian, or bisexual. The most common terms are gay (both men and women) and lesbian (women only). Other terms include same gender loving and same-sex-oriented.
Among some sectors of gay sub-culture, same-gender sexual behavior is sometimes viewed as solely for physical pleasure instead of romantic attraction. Men on the down-low (or DL) may engage in covert sexual activity with other men while pursuing sexual and romantic relationships with women.
History
The choice of terms regarding sexual orientation may imply a certain political outlook, and different terms have been preferred at different times and in different places.
Early history Historian and philosopher Michel Foucault argued that homosexual and heterosexual identities did not emerge until the 19th century. Prior to that time, he said, the terms described practices and not identity. Foucault cited Karl Westphal's famous 1870 article Contrary Sexual Feeling as the "date of birth" of the categorization of sexual orientation.Foucault, 1976 Some scholars, however, have argued that there are significant continuities between past and present conceptualizations of sexuality, with various terms having been used for homosexuality. The author has made adapted and expanded portions of this book available online as A Critique of Social Constructionism and Postmodern Queer Theory .
In his Symposium, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato described (through the character of the profane comedian Aristophanes) three sexual orientations – heterosexuality, male homosexuality, and female homosexuality – and provided explanations for their existence using an invented creation myth.Classical Myth on glbtq.com
Tribadism
Although this term refers to a specific sex act between women today, in the past it was commonly used to describe female-female sexual love in general, and women who had sex with women were called Tribads or Tribades. As author Rictor Norton explains:
The tribas, lesbian, from Greek , to rub (i.e. rubbing the pudenda together, or clitoris upon pubic bone, etc.), appears in Greek and Latin satires from the late first century. The tribade was the most common (vulgar) lesbian in European texts for many centuries. 'Tribade' occurs in English texts from at least as early as 1601 to at least as late as the mid-nineteenth century before it became self-consciously old-fashioned—it was in current use for nearly three centuries.
Fricatrice, a synonym for tribade that also refers to rubbing but has a Latin rather than a Greek root, appeared in English as early as 1605 (in Ben Jonson's Volpone). Its usage suggests that it was more colloquial and more pejorative than tribade. Variants include the Latinized confricatrice and English rubster.
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 even though the real meaning is of unreproductive sex.Albert Barnes' Notes on the BibleVincent's Word Studies The term is derived from the Biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Christian churches have referred to the (crime of the Sodomites) for centuries. The modern association with homosexuality can be found as early as AD 96 in the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus. In the early 5th century, Jerome, a priest, historian, and theologian used the forms Sodoman, in Sodomis, Sodomorum, Sodomæ, Sodomitæ.Hallam 1993 The modern German word and the Norwegian also refer to bestiality. Sodomy in historical biblical reference may not pertain to the acts of homosexuality, but the acts of bestiality and female and male castration for the purpose of sexual slavery.
Lesbianism
Lesbian writer Emma Donoghue found that the term lesbian (with its modern meaning) has been in use in the English language from at least the 18th century. The 1732 epic poem by William King, The Toast, uses "lesbian loves" and "tribadism" interchangeably: "she loved Women in the same Manner as Men love them; she was a Tribad".
Sapphism
Named after the female Greek poet Sappho who lived on Lesbos Island and wrote love poems to women, this term has been in use since at least the 18th century, with the connotation of lesbian. In 1773, a London magazine described sex between women as "Sapphic passion". The adjective form Sapphic is sometimes used nowadays as an inclusive umbrella term that expresses the sexuality and romantic attraction of queer women, including bisexuals, nonbinary, and trans people However, this is not accepted by all women who identify as lesbian.
Pederasty
Today, pederasty refers to male attraction towards adolescent boys,Based on the OED definition: "A man who has or desires sexual relations with a boy." or the cultural institutions that support such relations, as in ancient Greece. However, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the word 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. This relationship is socially frowned upon in modern cultures while legally defined by the age of consent.
Homosexual
The word homosexual translates literally as "of the same sex", being a hybrid of the Greek prefix meaning 'same' (as distinguished from the Latin root meaning 'human') and the Latin root meaning 'sex'.
The first known public appearance of the term homosexual in print is found in an 1869 German pamphlet ("Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code and Its Maintenance as Paragraph 152 of the Draft of a Penal Code for the North German Confederation"). The pamphlet was written by Karl-Maria Kertbeny, but published anonymously. It advocated the repeal of Prussia's sodomy laws.Bullough et al. ed. (1996) Kertbeny had previously used the word in a private letter written in 1868 to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Kertbeny used (in English, 'homosexuality') in place of Ulrichs' ; ('male homosexualists') instead of , and ('female homosexualists') instead of .
The term was coined and originally used primarily by German psychiatrists and psychologists. Havelock Ellis in his 1901 Studies in the Psychology of Sex wrote about the evolving terminology in the area, which ended up settling on homosexuality. In the preface to the first edition (1900), Ellis calls it sexual inversion, and volume 2 of the book is titled "Sexual Inversion". In the preface to the third edition (1927) Ellis referred to it as "the study of homosexuality". On the first page of chapter 1, he discusses the terminology, naming Ulrichs' use of () from 1862, which later morphed into or Uranian (or Dionian or Dioning as the female counterpart) and using (as the name of the condition. Ellis reported that the first accepted scientific term was contrary sexual feeling (), coined by Westphal in 1869 and used by Krafft-Ebing and others. This term was never used outside Germany, and soon went out of favor even there. The term homosexuality was invented by Kertbeny in the same year (1869) but attracted no attention for some time, later achieving prominence. It was easily translatable into many languages, including by Hirschfeld in his 1914 book Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, one of the top authorities in the field. Ellis continued to use both the terms sexual inversion and homosexuality in the 3rd edition, with slightly different meanings.
The first known use of homosexual in English is in Charles Gilbert Chaddock's 1892 translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's , a study on sexual practices.David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, Routledge, 1990, page 15 The term was popularized by the 1906 Harden–Eulenburg Affair.
The word homosexual itself had different connotations 100 years ago than today. Although some early writers used the adjective homosexual to refer to any single-gender context (such as an all-girls school), today the term implies a sexual aspect. The term homosocial is now used to describe single-sex contexts that are not of a romantic or sexual nature.Merl Storr, Latex and Lingerie (2003) pp. 39–40
The colloquial abbreviation homo for homosexual is a coinage of the interbellum period, first recorded as a noun in 1929, and as an adjective in 1933.OED, "homo, n.2 and a." Today, it is often considered a derogatory epithet.Wolinsky and Sherrill (eds.), Gays and the military: Joseph Steffan versus the United States, Princeton University Press, 1993, , pp. 49–55.
Homophile