ABSTRACT
Many historians of homosexuality have advanced a remarkable claim: no homosexualsor heterosexuals, for that matter-existed before the late 19th century. Drawing variously on the theoretical insights of French post-structuralists (especially Michel Foucault) and Anglo-American sociologists of deviance and symbolic interactionism (especially Erving Goffman), these historians have argued that such identities are socially constructed, culturally variable, and historically specific. While people in all societies have engaged in behavior that modern observers might classify as homosexual or heterosexual, they argue, such behavior usually did not have the same meaning for its practitioners or implications for their identities that it does in the contemporary West. In particular, the idea that homosexual behavior is engaged in only by “the homosexual,” a distinct kind of human being for whom “homosexuality” is a characteristic, defining an involuntary condition of some indeterminant psychological or physiological origin, is a relatively new and unusual historical development. While other historians have argued that sexual identities are essential or transhistorical, even most of them agree that such identities have taken markedly different forms in different societies.
