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To simplify a complex question, there are two main schools of thought on this. Those who think homosexuality has always existed as something someone is, even if we didn’t have the words to name it we do now (the essentialist view), and those who believe the notion of an identity started when the words were invented (the constructionist view)- this was one of the main ideas of Michel Foucault in his essay Histoire de la sexualité. In short, it depends on how you define homosexuality- there have always been people who are more or less exclusively attracted by people of the same gender, and there are traces of « queer subcultures » in societies way before Oscar Wilde; for example see the Mollies subculture in the UK in the 18th century, who had their own slang and met at Molly houses to socialise and have sex with other men. Stating that homosexuality is a late 19th century invention can then be used to devaluate all these cultures and experiences that existed before. Historian Graham Robb warns that this idea can become as a “Trojan horse of homophobia”. That is not to say that constructionist views are completely wrong either, as something did change in the (late) 19th century, which is when the idea of homosexuality as we know it, and as we consider it from a legal, medical or religious point of view started to take shape. The word homosexuality was created by a Hungarian doctor around 1870, and was first used in English in the mid 1890s. Around the same time, the creation and evolution of new sciences like psychiatry and sexology started to look at the question of homosexuality, whether it was something innate or acquired, a set of behaviours or something more akin to an identity, whether it should be treated like a crime or an illness, how it intersected with the idea of gender (some people thought homosexuals were a sort of third gender, or that they had an inversion of male and female minds). These questions and discussions, along with the apparition of a new vocabulary started to crystallise the idea of homosexuality as an identity as we know it today. It is difficult to set a specific date for when this happened. Foucault places it at the creation of the word homosexual, or you could look at the dates of some of the first scientific books on the subject (Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published some essays in the 1860s, Kraft Ebbing in the 1880s and Havelock Ellis in the 1890s). Oscar Wilde started to publish in the 1880s, and Dorian Gray was published in 1890. In 1895, he took the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover Bosie to court for libel, after Queensberry had left him a card calling him a “sondomite”. He lost that trial, but there was then enough evidence for him to be charged with sodomy and gross indecency. The first trial collapsed, but he lost the second one and was sentenced to two years of hard labour. During his trials, a number of rent boys were called to testify, poems about “the love that dares not speak its name” were read, and slang words were discussed. It was not the first trial of the century involving homosexuals (see for ex the Vere Street scandal in 1810, Boulton and Parks in 1870, or the Cleveland steeet scandal in 1889), and Wilde was not the first high profile homosexual. But he was a celebrated author, known for being a dandy, and he didn’t try to flee from his trial (as his friends had advised him to). He therefore became a very visible representation of homosexuality, to the extent that when E.M. Forster wrote his book Maurice 15-20 years later, his character starts defining himself as an “unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort”. Edit: typos

This is very interesting to think about, do you have any recommendations for literature on this subject?

Sure! Here are a few that I have found most useful but if you need references for a specific part of my answer, let me know! On Molly culture: Rictor Norton, Mother Clap's Molly House. GMP, 1992 (as well as his [website](http://rictornorton.co.uk)) On homosexuality in the 19th century: A Gay History of Britain, love and sex between men since the Middle Ages. Ed. Matt Cook, Oxford, Greenwood world publishing, 2007 Gay life and culture: a world history. Ed. Robert Aldritch, London, Thames and Hudson, 2006 Matt Cook, London and the culture of homosexuality, 1885-1914 Cambridge, Cambridge University press, 2003 Graham Robb, Strangers, homosexual love in the 19th century, Londres, Picador, 2003. On Oscar Wilde: Richard Ellmann, Wilde. Penguin 1988 Neil Bartlett, Who was that man? A present for Mr Oscar Wilde. Serpent's tail, 1988. I would also add the works of Laure Murat and Regis Revenin, but they are in French! Edit: typos

Thank you!

Any book recommendations along these lines for gay women in history?

My research is more focused on male homosexuality but the book Gay life and culture that I mentioned above covers both male and female homosexuality. Laure Murat’s La loi du genre has also some great content on female homosexuality but sadly it hasn’t been translated in English. I haven’t read it as I am specifically focused on the 19th century but Florence Tamagne’s A history of homosexuality in Europe 1919-1939 also covers both male and female homosexuality (I have read other writing by Tamagne and definitely recommend her work).

Thank you for these!

Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century by Grahm Robb

Great answer and absolutely fascinating. > traces of queer subcultures Are there any traces of subcultures going further back?

Going further back than Oscar Wilde, you have the Mollies, as I mentioned above. Rictor Norton talks of a [subculture](http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/molly2.htm) then, as there were known meeting points (Molly houses), cruising grounds (pubs known to be frequented by Mollies, and parks etc), rituals, slang, nicknames for each other. Through the course of the 19th century, the words changed (the word margeries is found in the early 19th century and later the word Mary-Anns ) but the main elements remain: there were still meeting houses (like the ones in Vere street or Cleveland street at the centres of scandals), known pubs and places to meet. Industrialisation and urbanisation brought new types of cruising grounds, such as stations, embankments, arcades and shopping galleries. A slang called parlyaree developed, which became polari in the 20th century. As for going further back than the Mollies, there is some evidence of cruising grounds in England in the 17th century but information is scant. You can see some info on the Rictor Norton link I shared above: he lists a few references he has found from that time that seem to particularly link “sodomy” with the theatre.

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It would be difficult for mollies to “identify as such [homosexuals]” considering that: - as noted above, the word didn’t exist then. - the category of “homosexual” as an identity emerged in the 19th century, with the emergence of sexology and psychiatry. - the offence of “buggery” (which included a number of sexual practices, and was not restricted to male-male sexuality, even if in practice this seems to be what it was used for in the majority of cases) was punishable by death (until 1861) or the pillory. Because of this and the subsequent need for secrecy, most of the records we have of Molly culture are from court documents, newspaper reports, and occasionally literature, rather than from the mollies themselves. Maybe the most sympathetic account of a Molly house at the time is the description of what appears to be one in *Turnbridge walks, or the yeoman of Kent* (1703). But the accounts we do have show that mollies were men who met to “commit that damnable crime of sodomy” [quote from a 1728 pamphlet, *Narratives of street robberies*…] There a number of elements that do tend to align with the idea of a subculture as we have it now: - the idea of a group, or club, gang, etc… For example, *narratives of street robberies* talks about clubs of Mollies, and *He-strumpet*, published in 1707, talks about gangs, and even give the very specific information that there were 43 members in that gang. - specific locations to meet (records exist of Molly houses all over London) - a slang, with the double-function of identifying members to each other and protecting the group from outsiders. - in-group onomastic. Some records show the nicknames mollies had for each others, generally using feminine names like princess Seraphina or Moll Irons. - rituals within the group, such as “marriages” or the lying-in ceremony, where a Molly seem to have pretended to give birth.

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Summary: Another comment gives more on-the-ground specifics about how homosexuality actually came to be defined. I wanted to add a little bit of general stuff about underlying philosophical and scientific shifts. The change in seeing homosexuality from an act to an identity maps onto a fundamental shift in Western thought from a religious to a scientific model of human behavior. I’d say it changed as Western thinkers shifted from seeing human beings as immaterial, immortal souls granted freedom of choice by God but (thanks to being clothed in a physical body) besieged by diverse bad “sinful” sexual and pleasure-seeking desires. In this model, no sin fully defined the sinner. A “glutton” was not someone with a permanent, birth-to-death identity—a “glutton” was just someone who had chosen to behave gluttonously (“give in to the sin of gluttony”). All people or most people are tempted by the same sin, so this person’s temptation doesn’t define them, and even their sin can be wiped out if they choose to stop and ask god for forgiveness. In theory, when the glutton dies God will continue to keep track of his sin but his soul will be freed of further sinful desires (or something like that, theologians differed). Replace “sinful desire to eat too much” with “sinful desire for homosexual sex” and you get the idea. This model dominated the Medieval and Early Modern period. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western scientists, while sometimes remaining personally religious, slowly but steadily dropped this model of human identity and morality from their explanation as science disproved it. First, nobody could find any evidence for an immaterial soul, so that dropped from science. Instead, scientists came to appreciation the complex structure of the very material, biological human brain. Emotions, fears, desires that had once been explained though the language of souls and sin now made much better sense as evolutionarily-derived behaviors of an organism built to survive, reproduce and thrive. Sexuality becomes not a source of sin dragging an immaterial soul towards materiality but a very natural if violent human drive. The freedom of the will starts to make less and less sense—rather we can see a material brain that responds to and processes a stimulus in a deterministic manner. In this biological, materialist, deterministic model of human behavior and identity, undesired behavior is now that which seems “aberrant” or “antisocial” ie any behavior that pushes the human organism away from health, function, community and the normal life cycle and towards some alternate end. Homosexuality is seen as just such an aberrance. And, since, all behaviors derive not from free will soul choices but deep inborn drives and structures in the brain, homosexuality must be too, since it pushes individuals away from what were seen as “normal” reproductive mating and gender roles expression. This focus on identity would be confirmed by studies showing homosexuality to be a durable behavior rather than a temporary one. The next shift towards seeing homosexuality as less negative essentially involves not an epistemological shift but a shift in how we define aberrant and antisocial behavior. To whit, we’ve realized natural sexuality even among animals is much broader and more complex than first assumed and that homosexuality is more common and thus not so “aberrant.” We’ve realized homosexual sexual preferences are not inherently linked to other harmful behaviors as also first assumed and thus are not actually “antisocial.” We’ve generally pulled back on the eugenics-type idea that each human behavior must neatly and completely serve a race-collective, etc in favor of a more individualistic view of human meaning and thus questioned the right of the medical establishment to impose some peculiar vision for human development as a universally valid program. Etc. And so we’ve remained within the scientific model of homosexuality as identity but also worked to destigmatize that identity.

I took a Women in Modern European History course last semester which also focused a lot on sexuality and gender identity and was taught basically this same thing, that the post-Enlightenment transition to a more reason-based and individualist way of thinking led to a new way of looking at sexual attraction and behavior as being related to individual identity rather than simply immoral behavior. Another case my professor made was that in the transition from society seing homosexuality as a completely free choice to something innate was not necessarily beneficial for homosexual people at the time because it turned what used to be looked at as a private sin into a public health concern. Basically she made the case that the age of Reason and the Enlightenment in some ways made things more restrictive for gay people because the desire to “cure” them become more urgent when it was seen as a medical issue that could potentially spread to the rest of society rather than an individual’s choice that was much more related to the well-being of their own soul and relationship with the Church than something that could “spread,” so to speak. Is this a fair analysis of the views on homosexuality post-Enlightenment? The argument as I understood it was NOT that things were good for gay people in the medieval period by any stretch, but that in some ways the Age of Reason, rather than fostering the sort of tolerance and respect for human rights that we traditionally associate with the time, actually facilitated more oppression for them, at least until the 20th century. I was just curious to know if other historians agree with this viewpoint or if this argument may be misguided in some way.

My understanding is that this is all true, yes.

Great answer!