Part of the Str8 No Chaser series, this post traces how sexual categories like “gay,” “bisexual,” and “straight” were invented, policed, and internalized. This post includes adult themes and language about identity, desire, and erotic labor. Reader discretion advised.
I was asked if I was gay when I was nine—before I even knew what “gay” meant, what sex was or how to have it. It wasn’t a question. It was an interrogation.
In this second installment of the Str8 No Chaser Substack series, we dig into one of the most overlooked truths about modern sexuality: our most commonly used identity labels are recent inventions. For most of human history, sexuality was viewed as an act, not an identity.
And yet, in the last 160 years, words like 'homosexual,' 'heterosexual,' and 'bisexual' have become fixtures in how we define ourselves and police each other. Where did these labels come from? And what purpose do they serve today?
Same-Sex Behavior Is Ancient.
People have always had same-sex encounters. From Mesopotamia to China, from precolonial Africa to Latin America, same-sex relationships and partnerships existed, often without any identity label attached. In Ancient Greece and Rome, male-male intimacy was idealized in many contexts. Same-sex behavior is even common among nonhuman animals, more than even scientists initially acknowledged.
Several emperors, rulers and royals had same-sex relationships. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was primarily attracted to men and boys. Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher best known for his seminal Meditations, exchanged love letters with his instructor Marcus Cornelius Fronto. But sexual roles were often tied to power and status.
The emperor or dominant partner could engage in same-sex acts and still be considered masculine or ‘normal.’ The passive or submissive partner (often a boy, servant, or slave) might be shamed or feminized, but not labeled by a word like 'gay.'
To say nothing of situational sexual behavior within homosocial spaces (military units, fraternities, clergy communities, sports, single-sex educational institutions, etc.) or male sex workers paid to have sex with men, dating back to early human civilization.
In many ways, they were less constrained than we are. There was no need to define orientation, primarily because there was no concept of it. And yet, within those same societies, hierarchy and misogyny still shaped whose behavior was deemed acceptable. Not to mention sex with minors. As the saying goes, “the people in position of power create the perceptions.”
Case in point: between the 15th and 19th centuries, colonialism and the Victorian era significantly reshaped global politics, economies, and cultures, introducing patriarchal structures that diminished the influence of women; suppressed gender and sexual fluidity; and scrutinized personal conduct.
By the 1860s, there was heightened urgency to explain same-sex behavior through a biological lens to mitigate the intense societal scrutiny, religious condemnations and legal persecution faced by homosexual individuals.
The Invention of Sexual Orientation
The terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual" were first coined on May 6, 1868, in a letter written by Austrian-born Hungarian psychologist, Karl Maria Kertbeny, to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer, jurist, and journalist.
In 1892, “bisexual” was utilized to describe someone who engaged in sexual activity with both male and female partners. Present-day, “bisexual” describes “a person who experiences emotional, romantic and/or sexual attractions to, or engages in romantic or sexual relationships with, more than one sex or gender.”
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, sexologists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld tried to legitimize same-sex desire by framing it as inborn but often through medicalized, pathologizing lenses. Concurrently, Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud theorized that humans are born with a bisexual, polymorphously perverse libido and regarded this early bisexuality not as a normal variant but as a primitive stage of infantile sexuality.
Even heterosexuality was originally framed not as “normal” but as a morbid passion for the opposite sex (which I’ll cover in-depth in a future post).
Origins of the term “sexual orientation” are less documented. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cites 1931 as its earliest evidence of the term "sexual orientation” in the writings of James Pendleton Lichtenberger, an American minister turned sociologist and academic. You read that correctly: minister! To that end, our views of sexual orientation were largely shaped by science, religion, culture, and power.
For fewer than 100 years, we’ve branded our respective sexualities and labeled, mislabeled, and persecuted people for how they sexually identified or behaved! For doing sexual acts performed throughout all of human civilization – and before. And despite the reality that few of us have studied or read much about sexual behavior and the origins of sexual orientation.
Today
In today’s sociopolitical climate, identity labels are both lifelines and weapons. For many, they provide community and clarity. But for others, especially those exploring same-sex intimacy outside of conventional identities, labels can be limiting, suffocating, and often irrelevant.
What began as sexual behavior became sexual orientation (however clumsily) and referenced to today as “sexual identity!” But what do these terms mean? How do they differ? And why are Gen Z more likely to reject these rigid labels? More on this in the next installment of Str8 No Chaser.
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