ABSTRACT
The publication by the Kinsey Institute of the book Homosexualities underlines what is likely to become a truism in the next few years: that we can no longer speak of a single homosexual category as if it embraced the wide range of same sex experiences in our society (Bell and Weinberg, 1978). But recognition of this, tardy as it has been, calls into question a much wider project: that of providing a universal theory and consequently a ‘history’ of homosexuality. The distinction originally made by sociologists (and slowly being taken up by historians) between homosexual behaviours, roles and identities, or between homosexual desire and ‘homosexuality’ as a social and psychological category (Hocquenghem, 1978), is one that challenges fundamentally the coherence of the theme and poses major questions for the historian. This paper addresses some of these problems, first, by examining approaches that have helped construct our concepts of homosexuality, second, by tracing the actual evolution of the category of homosexuality, third, by exploring some of the theoretical approaches that have attempted to explain its emergence and, finally, by charting some of the problems that confront the modern researcher studying ‘homosexuality’.
