Date: Fri, 3 Apr 92 15:46:45 EST
From: Dirk McCall <dm47@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu>
Message-Id: <9204032046.AA14563@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu>
To: qn@Athena.MIT.EDU
Subject: Origins of the term "Homosexual"


While I know I'm digressing from the discussion on Silence of the Lambs, a
statement was made that the term "homosexual" was coined by psychologists, and
was an instrument of oppression, I'd like to address this misconception. The
term was first coined, not by members of the medical community, but by the
forefathers of the modern gay rights movement in Germany in the mid-late 1800's.
Karoly Maria Kertbeny first invented (and used) the term in a letter to fellow
homosexual rights pioneer Karl Heinrich Ulrich in 1868. The first public use
of the term or category was in 1869 in two pamphlets which Kertbeny published
anonymously in Berlin. The pamphlets were part of Kertbenys efforts to stop
the extension of Prussian anti-sodomy laws to the rest of Germany which due to
French influence did not have sodomy laws on the books. The term was not 
popularized until the early 1900s when the Eulenburg affair was covered 
extensively by the German press. While there is no doubt that homosexual came
to be the prefered term of the medical community in the US and Western Europe,
and that we were oppressed by them while they used this term, it was not
coined by those seeking to stigmatize gays, bisexuals, and lesbians, but 
instead by the early movement itself.

dirk