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The defined categories of heterosexual and homosexual orientation were an invention of the late nineteenth century.
The notion of the "homosexual" per se is comparatively recent, an invention of the nineteenth century; the word was coined by a Hungarian doctor named Karl Maria Kertbeny, in 1869.
But the classification was not a neutral one; homosexuality was not just a phenomenon, it was a pathology. This view of homosexuality - congenital but pathological - laid the groundwork for homosexuality's subsequent psychiatrization.
By American culture had declared war on homosexuality as if it were an epedemic.
The equation of homosexuality with sickness, and heterosexuality with health, persists in popular culture.
Until 1974, when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its catalogue of mental illness, psychiatry played a long and dishonorable role in providing a basis for discrimination against gays and lesbians. (en) |
