[A]t least since the late nineteenth century when the primary role in categorising sexual behaviour and naming what is normal and what is perverse passed, in most industrial societies, from the religious to the medical and scientific professions, we have lived with the notion of distinct categories of people labelled homosexual and heterosexual. (The category homosexual was coined by the Viennese writer Karol Benkert in 1869, heterosexual emerging somewhat later.) Since that time, new discourses have tried to establish the male homosexual as a distinct type of person - as opposed to same-sex attraction or same-sex acts being seen as a potential in everyone. As Peter Tatchell [Its Just a Phase: Why Homosexuality is Doomed, in Simpson (ed.), Anti-Gay, London: Cassell. 1996] puts it, prior to that time there were only homosexual acts, not homosexual people [For] the medieval Catholic Church homosexuality was not the special sin of a unique class of people but a dangerous temptation to which any mortal might succumb. This doctrine implicitly conceded the attractiveness of same-sex desire, and unwittingly acknowledged its pervasive, universal potential
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About Richard Dunphy, Sexual Politics
Richard Dunphy, Sexual Politics.