“A Finer Differentiation”

Historians have documented the medical community's promotion, beginning in the late nineteenth century, of a concept of homosexuality as pathological and abnormal, and have suggested how damaging the internalization of this concept could be to people with homoerotic feelings or in homosexual relations. ¹ At the same time, at least one scholar has warned against attributing too much power to ideology by assuming “that people uncritically internalized the new medical models” as they arose (Chauncey 1989, 87). In this essay, I examine early twentieth-century U.S. medical literature on homosexuality, particularly lesbianism, and argue that it would be wrong not only to assign medical ideology a determinative role in shaping the lives and identities of homosexuals, but also to characterize that ideology as monolithic. ²