Homosexuality

• 1. Introduction

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  Homosexuality has shaped human societies, laws, bodies of art, and medical classifications for as long as written records exist. An 1868 letter from Austrian-born novelist Karl-Maria Kertbeny to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs may have introduced the word "homosexual" into print for the first time, and Kertbeny was writing not to celebrate a new identity but to argue against a Prussian anti-sodomy law. That single act of naming would set in motion a century and a half of reclassification, reclamation, and legal struggle. What does science actually say about why sexual orientation develops? How did societies across six continents and several millennia treat same-sex desire? And how did a word coined in a private letter become the center of one of the defining civil rights movements of the modern world? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Word and Its Weight

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  Kertbeny coined the term "homosexual" from a Greek root, homos, meaning "same," paired with a Latin suffix. The Greek homos has no relation to the Latin homo meaning "man," a point worth noting because the conflation of the two has caused persistent confusion. In 1886, the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing brought the word into mainstream medical discourse in his book Psychopathia Sexualis, and the simultaneous introduction of "heterosexual" gave Western culture a binary that shaped everything that followed. Krafft-Ebing's book reached both laymen and doctors, and the two terms rapidly displaced older vocabulary.

  The word lesbian traces a different path. It derives from Lesbos, the Greek island where the poet Sappho wrote about her emotional and romantic relationships with women. Later Greeks counted Sappho among the nine canonical lyric poets, and the adjectives Sapphic and Lesbian were applied to female homosexuality from the 19th century onward. The word gay traveled yet another route: originally embraced by homosexual men and women as an affirmative term associated with liberation, it entered pejorative use among younger people in the early 2000s, a reversal that illustrates how rapidly language around sexuality can shift.

  Many modern style guides in the United States advise against using "homosexual" as a noun, partly because of its clinical history and partly because the word emphasizes sexual behavior rather than romantic feeling. The initialism LGBT, combining the first letters of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, emerged as a more inclusive alternative. Some pejorative terms such as "queer" began to be reclaimed as positive words beginning in the 1990s, appearing in academic fields like queer theory and in popular television.

• 3. Deep History

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  The oldest possible record of a same-sex couple comes from ancient Egypt. The pair Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum, who lived around 2400 BCE, are depicted in a nose-kissing position, described by scholars as the most intimate pose in Egyptian art, and are portrayed surrounded by what appear to be their heirs. Historians and anthropologists caution, however, against reading modern concepts of sexual orientation onto ancient relationships, because the same acts may have carried entirely different meanings in different cultural contexts.

  In China, same-sex love has been recorded since approximately 600 BCE, and was known by a range of poetic euphemisms including "the passions of the cut peach." Writings from the Liu Song dynasty by Wang Shunu claimed that homosexuality was as common as heterosexuality in the late 3rd century. The novel Dream of the Red Chamber, widely regarded as a classic of Chinese literature, contains depictions of same-sex affection that strike modern readers as familiar. Opposition to homosexuality in China is traced by scholars to the medieval Tang dynasty (618-907), linked to the rising influence of Christian and Islamic values, with a more complete shift arriving during the Westernization of the late Qing dynasty.

  In ancient Greece, pederasty, an erotic though often restrained relationship between a free adult male and a free adolescent, was valued for what were described as its pedagogic benefits. Plato in his Symposium has the figure of Phaedrus praise the institution, while in his later work Laws an Athenian stranger proposes banning sexual relationships between men entirely. Aristotle took a different view in his Nicomachean Ethics, stating that homosexuality in men comes about by nature for some and by habituation for others, and that no one for whom nature is the cause could be described as lacking self-control.

  In Ancient Rome, sexuality was organized around roles rather than the sex of one's partner. Romans viewed the passive role as incompatible with the warrior ethos expected of free men. The emperor Hadrian (117-138) was renowned for his relationship with Antinous, a young man of low birth. It was the Christian emperor Theodosius I who, on the 6th of August 390, decreed that passive males be burned at the stake. Yet even after that law, taxes on establishments providing boys for homosexual sex continued to be collected until the end of the reign of Anastasius I in 518.

• 4. Criminalization and Defense

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  In Florence and Venice during the Renaissance, same-sex relationships were practiced by a considerable portion of the male population, yet the Officers of the Night court simultaneously prosecuted, fined, and imprisoned many of the same men. From the second half of the 13th century, death was the standard punishment for male homosexuality across most of Europe. The relationships of socially prominent figures, including King James I and the Duke of Buckingham, drew public commentary in anonymously authored street pamphlets of the era.

  The first sustained written defense of homosexuality in English, Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplified by Thomas Cannon, appeared in 1749 but was suppressed almost immediately. It included the line: "Unnatural Desire is a Contradiction in Terms; downright Nonsense. Desire is an amatory Impulse of the inmost human Parts." Around 1785, Jeremy Bentham wrote another defense, which remained unpublished until 1978. Executions for sodomy continued in England until 1835, with James Pratt and John Smith being the last Englishmen hanged on that charge.

  Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the same man who received Kertbeny's letter, became in 1867 the first self-proclaimed homosexual person to speak out publicly in defense of homosexuality, pleading at the Congress of German Jurists in Munich for a resolution urging the repeal of anti-homosexual laws. Between 1864 and 1880 he published a series of 12 tracts, collectively titled Research on the Riddle of Man-Manly Love. Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion, published in 1896, challenged theories that homosexuality was abnormal and insisted on its widespread presence and its association with intellectual and artistic achievement. That book contributed to the rise of Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which campaigned from 1897 to 1933 against anti-sodomy laws in Germany.

• 5. Science and the Medical Record

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  In 1952, when the American Psychiatric Association published its first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, homosexuality was listed as a disorder. Research funded by the National Institute of Mental Health almost immediately began subjecting that classification to critical scrutiny, and accumulated findings consistently failed to produce any empirical basis for treating homosexuality as a disorder. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the DSM, stating that it "implies no impairment in judgment, stability, reliability, or general social or vocational capabilities." The American Psychological Association adopted the same position in 1975, urging mental health professionals to take the lead in removing the stigma of mental illness associated with homosexual orientations.

  The World Health Organization's ICD-9 (1977) still listed homosexuality as a mental illness. It was removed from the ICD-10, endorsed by the Forty-third World Health Assembly on the 17th of May 1990. The Chinese Society of Psychiatry removed homosexuality from its Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders in 2001, after five years of study.

  Scientists today favor biological causes of sexual orientation, with considerably more evidence for nonsocial, biological factors than social ones, particularly for males. The prenatal hormonal theory proposes that variations in exposure to androgens and estrogens during critical periods of early brain development shape sexual orientation. Twin studies and molecular genetics indicate that genes likely play some role as well. The maternal immune hypothesis offers one specific mechanism: when a woman carries a male fetus, her immune system is exposed to male-specific antigens linked to the Y chromosome, and with each successive male pregnancy the immune response may strengthen, potentially affecting the developing fetal brain. This process has been proposed to underlie the fraternal birth order effect, the observation that the likelihood of a man being homosexual increases with the number of older biological brothers he has.

  Major mental health organizations overwhelmingly reject conversion therapy as ineffective, scientifically unsupported, and potentially harmful. No major mental health professional organization has sanctioned efforts to change sexual orientation, and bodies including the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and the Australian Psychological Society have adopted policy statements cautioning the public about such treatments.

• 6. Law, Rights, and Ongoing Struggles

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  Decriminalization arrived at different speeds in different countries. Poland decriminalized homosexual acts in 1932, Denmark in 1933, Sweden in 1944, and England and Wales in 1967. In Canada, then-Minister of Justice Pierre Trudeau argued for reform with the declaration that "The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation," and Parliament amended the Criminal Code in 1969 to remove criminal penalties for anal sex between consenting adults in private. In 1995, the Supreme Court of Canada held that sexual orientation is a protected characteristic under the equality clause of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and in 2005 Parliament enacted the Civil Marriage Act, legalizing same-sex marriage across the country. Canada was ranked first in the Gay Travel Index in 2018 and first in Asher and Lyric's LGBTQ+ Danger Index in a 2021 update.

  In the United States, the Supreme Court ruled in 1986 in Bowers v. Hardwick that a state could criminalize sodomy. In 2003 it overturned that decision in Lawrence v. Texas. Same-sex marriage expanded from one state in 2004 to all 50 states in 2015. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, signed in October 2009, made hate crime based on sexual orientation a federal crime. In 2018 India's Supreme Court overturned its 2013 ruling and legalized homosexual activity, reversing a position taken just five years earlier.

  At the other end of the legal spectrum, ten countries or jurisdictions, all predominantly Islamic and governed under sharia law, have imposed the death penalty for homosexuality. These include Afghanistan, Iran, Brunei, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, and several regions in Nigeria and Jubaland. In much of the Middle East, governments either criminalize homosexuality or deny its existence. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking at Columbia University in 2007, asserted that there were no gay people in Iran.

  Of the 26 countries that participate militarily in NATO, more than 20 permit openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual people to serve. Israel is the only country in the Middle East region that allows openly LGB people to serve in the military. The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention helpline for gay youth, was established following the 1998 airing on HBO of the Academy Award-winning short film Trevor, a reminder that legal progress and social acceptance do not always advance at the same pace.