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Hi. I'm Doctor Alison Laurie. I was the Gender and Women's Studies programme director at Victoria University of Wellington here in New Zealand. Uh, for many years, I'm a writer or a historian and lesbian and gay activist. Today I'm going to be looking at labels and how people who have same sex relations have referred to themselves. Language is very important because until language exists, people can't name themselves or talk about their sexuality. [00:00:30] Uh, but then, on the other hand, that doesn't mean that they aren't doing doing it. Uh, but it's a question of at which stage does this become Verbalised? If we go back through the written records, we find that every society has had some kind of way of talking about same sexuality. Uh, among the Greeks, there are There are terms, Uh, but more generally, it was thought that, uh, certainly among men, [00:01:00] this was something that everybody would be doing. An older man with a younger man, Uh, a way of learning, uh, love between men. Very important. And on the battlefield, those kinds of things. The Greeks writing a lot about this model. And we know that, uh, from the Greeks to the Isle of Lesbos, where the poet Sao lived, that she wrote many of her poems to women, that she had a A university or school for women and that clearly [00:01:30] the poems express love between women. Interestingly, one of the legends about FO is that she eventually leaps to her death for love of a man. So once again, these kinds of ideas from the Greeks don't talk about exclusive same sex relationships. And clearly the Greek men were all expected to marry. Uh, but there is some view that their love for their wives is not as profound as their love for their comrades. Uh, so that's a model coming to us from them. [00:02:00] With some terminology. There's certainly, uh, views about, um, same sex love, uh, from Egypt. Uh, we have pharaohs, uh uh, and also from Rome, where kings did enter into what appear to be some sort of same sex union, perhaps marriage. Uh, so wherever we turn, we can see that there have been instances of same sexual love and relationships and that they have probably [00:02:30] been some sorts of terminology to refer to this. But it's difficult to make an argument that we're finding terminology, which, uh suggests unique special people are doing it, even though we do find terms like lesbian existing, going back many, many centuries and being understood. There isn't necessarily an idea that this was an exclusive sexual orientation, as we understand that in a modern term. And sodomite doesn't [00:03:00] necessarily carry that that view, either, any more than you might say that referring to someone as a burglar, uh, or stamp collector, uh, is everything about their identity or would suggest something that wouldn't change. So it's important, perhaps, to think about that sort of thing. As we move into the 19th century, we see the medicalization of the human body, the rise of the medical profession. They begin to train. [00:03:30] They begin to, uh, take over defining many things about the human state. Prior to then, uh, the understanding of human sexuality had been the province of the church. The church, certainly until the end of the Catholic period, took the view that everybody would be tempted to do any of these sexual sins or, in fact, any sin. Everybody would be tempted to masturbate. Everybody would be tempted to do, uh, sex with their own sex or sex out of wedlock with the other sex [00:04:00] and that people shouldn't do it. You would need to confess it and promise not to do it again. And even as we move into the Protestant period, we don't get much difference. In terms of that, it's all thought to be sin, and people shouldn't be doing it now. Once we pass through the Enlightenment, the church loses its position to make pronouncements about the human conditions. The rise of science, uh, is very important here, because science is that only science [00:04:30] can understand nature. We will, uh, we will and and it's. And if God is part of it, then it's God's intention that we should investigate these things and find out about them ourselves. So the enlightenment is very important. And it is that period from the late 18th century that gives rise to doctors and scientists in the 19th century, pronouncing on the human body. The first thing the doctors do is they they medicalize many aspects. For example, childbirth becomes something that midwives won't be [00:05:00] doing anymore. Doctors will be doing it, uh, things like menopause and, uh, and menstruation become diseases. Uh, they're very concerned about the fact they see that in fact, the whole female body is is a likely site of many diseases because it's so weird to have a uterus. Uh, so they begin to start talking about things like hysteria again, and they become very interested in sexuality and they almost take [00:05:30] Jeffy Weeks says. In many ways they take the views of the church, but they medicalize them. So they say, We've got this normal, uh, sexuality. And then we've got this abnormal sexuality. The first use of the term homosexual, uh, happens in 18 69 when Ben Kurt who? A doctor. Ben Kurt, who was neither a doctor. Nor was that his real name? Uh, he refers to homosexual. He makes the term up, and he refers to this in a pamphlet [00:06:00] where he's arguing for a change in the law and pressure against buggery and acts between men. Um, this term is then taken up and used by a number of people. Subsequently, there have been some earlier terms, uh, in use, but this is the one that becomes popular. And the first use of this term in English is in 18 92. The first use of heterosexual is not till quite a bit later. And in fact, bisexual is to is used for quite a while, uh, as [00:06:30] meaning an attraction to the other sex by meaning two sexes. So the original usage of all these terms is not quite as we as as we may have learned them, uh, later in the 20th century and so on. Um, lesbian stays, in common parlance, always being understood. And that's interesting. It's been used in pornography. Uh, and it continues on as a term, which, which is the oldest term for for sex between [00:07:00] women now the term homosexual in the idea of a unique, uh, sexual identity. Uh uh, Michelle Foca writing about this in the the history of sex, uh, tends to be, quite, uh, strict about this and say that it really only exists from the latter part of the 19th century. We might trace it earlier, and we can't completely rule out that that some people did think of themselves as having a fixed, uh, sexual attraction in earlier [00:07:30] times. We simply don't know enough about that. But certainly by the time we get to her in Berlin, uh, he sets up the Institute of Sexual Science, and he very much sets up Uh uh, the idea of homosexuality inversion as a permanent, biologically determined state. Now he's a medical doctor. He's part of that group of, uh, doctors. Uh uh including people like Lomb Cesia Lomb who was very interested [00:08:00] in inborn criminality, which could be physically demonstrated by characteristics of the head. Uh, all of these kinds of ideas about the human body, uh, that became popular with the Nazis 40 years later, uh, that actually you had biological characteristics which were unchangeable. So we have to see Hirschfeld, uh, although he is an heroic figure and very important in in the terms of in terms of the history of of homosexual politics. But we do have to see his ideas about [00:08:30] fixed biological identity as part of something which is broader than that now. There were other people at that time who absolutely did not agree with him. Adolf Brandt, who started the the community of the special, uh was he and people who belong to that organisation in Germany and and elsewhere because they were members of that organisation and receiving their magazine, uh, in many different countries, their view was that these, uh we are the special. We are specially [00:09:00] uh uh, good masculine men. And we're just like the Greeks. We love masculinity and in fact, really masculine men can actually only love other men because women are so inferior. Who would love them? It's very sexist, but it is a It is an interestingly different kind of viewpoint. And it's mirrored in some respects in the early, uh, women's movement in Germany, which, uh, shows some tendencies in some respects towards lesbian feminism. [00:09:30] Uh, Lillian Federman, uh, cites a woman who stood up at a conference in about 19 05 and said that inverted women had done a great deal for the women's movement And what thanks that they had so clearly these views are are being shared by women. And there were women who were certainly part of, uh, Hirschfeld's movement as well. So we see a We see a whole body of different ideas conflicting in terms of the British, uh, ideas. Uh, Edward [00:10:00] Carpenter, who as a socialist vegetarian and a spokesperson for what he called the intermediate sex, had a number of women who, uh, uh were followers of his and again we get an idea that there are special people. But it was rather fluid because carpenters of the idea that the intermediate sex, which is a fairly large category, can interpret extremely masculine men and extremely feminine women to one another. [00:10:30] So in a way, he's talking about a continuum. These ideas of a continuum are floating around at this time. And of course, they reemerge with Kinsey, uh, in the in the late 19 forties, when he actually looks at the practises of same sexual behaviour among men and women in the United States and finds that this does in fact work on a continuum and that the majority of people are somewhere in the middle and not at extremes. And so that is another [00:11:00] kind of interpretation. So in many respects, we've seen a balance between ideas about, uh, innate inborn sexuality, which is highly fixed and in one direction, with some people being bisexual, and that's then fixed in two directions and so forth. Uh, and that that sort of view and another view, which is that of social construction, which is environment, which says that you know, you might develop, uh, your sexuality in terms of things that happen [00:11:30] in your in your environment and that it might also be able to be changed. The notion of a fixed central identity is important when we talk about the law. Hirschel was annoyed with others at that time at the beginning of the century because he thought that talking about the fact that everybody might be able to do it all men might be going to be able to do it would, uh would certainly influence the authorities in terms of changing the law. And certainly that was a view that we took here, too, during homosexual law reform that actually [00:12:00] to talk about the fact that, uh, yes, everybody might like to do this would be playing into the hands of the fundamentalists who said, Well, if you change the law, it means that you know, these awful men are going to go out and seduce a whole lot of other men and seduce boys and that sort of thing. Clearly, you've got a better legal argument. If you say well, only a small number of people, just a fixed minority, want to do this. So there's no need to have a law against it. But that may not really be, uh, the way that things are because we may have [00:12:30] a more universal, uh, view really of of human sexuality. Gay liberation, coming along in the late 19 sixties and through the 19 seventies and lesbian feminism very emphatically said that, uh, Gay Liberation said, We want to bring out the lesbian and gay man in everybody's head. This is something that everybody should be doing. And lesbian feminism said every woman can be a lesbian. And in fact, uh, in a society where men oppress women to be lesbian as a sign of mental health. And [00:13:00] so lesbian feminism are saying, leave these oppressive marriages come out. You'll be much happier if you find a woman partner. And, uh, a lot of gay liberationist felt that, uh, men stuck in their rigid heterosexual roles were denying themselves an exploration of their sexuality and their emotional beings. So those ideas were very definitely there from the 19 seventies and eighties. And as we move into to now, uh, the second decade of the 21st century, we see a greater universalizing [00:13:30] principle. Many young people are not that interested in in in calling themselves gay or lesbian. They like to call themselves unidentified. Many people don't even necessarily want to call themselves bisexual. Um, we've seen the rise of the term here in a in New Zealand this term resurrected from, uh, the story about hi and Tanaka, uh, by the scholars and [00:14:00] Lee Smith and independently finding this term, which originally has the meaning of intimate friend of the same sex but which is now being much more widely used to refer refer to people who are part of these alternative, uh, communities, rather as our original term camp, which was the term we used here before. Uh, we got the, uh, American terms gay and lesbian in the 19 seventies and began to use those fairly exclusively. Uh, [00:14:30] so we see a movement really toward either not people not labelling themselves or labelling themselves in a more inclusive kind of way. And we're finding now, as we're talking about, uh, the various communities that we want to use constructions like LGBT TQ I which where we might be saying, Well, the communities which are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning [00:15:00] and intersect that we see a much broader church. Uh, when we're talking about who our communities are. So all we can really say about language and about ideas about same sexuality is that they change according to the circumstances of the time. Uh, and it can't exist apart from the societies in which we find ourselves so that as we look forward into the future, we can. All we can say is that it will certainly change and ideas [00:15:30] about same sexuality will change. Uh, but it does appear that in this country we're moving forward into an area where more people are questioning more. People are prepared to consider the fact that they might be attracted to someone of their of the same sex, uh, and that their sexuality isn't, uh, fixed and could change.
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