ABSTRACT
For many people in Britain in the 1960s and 1950s the first words on this list would imply men of a specific sexual orientation: homosexuals. The clarity of that implication fades as the list develops. The signifying link between social type and sexual behaviour is broken within the process of historical change. This break is assisted by our method of conceptualizing homosexual identity. The popularly received and reproduced theory (or version of it) claims that the homosexual as a separate classifiable category-an identity-only came into being when the language of late nineteenth-century science and law conceived such a classification: the virgin birth of the homosexual. Thus whereas one may speak intelligibly of the homosexual as the specific sexual type associated with the profession of interior decorator, a similar association for ladies’ tailors cannot be made since homosexuals could not be said to exist in the Renaissance as a positive definable category.
