More insight into the history of those who created the concept of homosexuality that equates a desire for men with being half-male and half-female

IN 1838, A 20-YEAR-OLD Hungarian killed himself and left a suicide note for Karl Benkert, a 14-year-old bookseller's apprentice in Budapest whom he had befriended. In it he explained that he had been cleaned out by a blackmailer who was now threatening to expose his homosexuality, and that he couldn't face either the shame or the potential legal trouble that would follow. Benkert, who eventually became a writer, moved to Vienna, and changed his name to Karoly Maria Kertbeny, later said that the tragedy left him with "an instinctive drive to take issue with every injustice." And in 1869, a particularly resonant injustice occurred: A penal code proposed for Prussia included an anti-sodomy law much like the one that had given his friend's extortionist his leverage. Kertbeny published a pamphlet in protest, writing that the state's attempt to control consensual sex between men was a violation of the fundamental rights of man. Nature, he argued, had divided the human race into four sexual types: "monosexuals," who masturbated, "heterogenits," who had sex with animals, "heterosexuals," who coupled with the opposite sex, and "homosexuals," who preferred people of the same sex. Kertbeny couldn't have known that of all his literary output, these latter two words would be his only lasting legacy. But while homosexual conduct had occurred throughout history, the idea that it reflected fundamental differences between people, that gay people were a sexual subspecies, was a new one.

Kertbeny wasn't alone in creating a sexual taxonomy. Another anti-sodomy-law opponent, lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, proposed that homosexual men, or "Uranians," as he called them (and he openly considered himself a Uranian, while Kertbeny was coy about his preferences), were actually a third sex, their attraction to other men a manifestation of the female soul residing in their male bodies. Whatever the theoretical differences between Ulrichs and Kertbeny, they agreed on one crucial point: that sexual behavior was the expression of an identity into which we were born, a natural variation of the human. In keeping with the post-Enlightenment notion that we are morally culpable only for what we are free to choose, homosexuals were not to be condemned or restricted by the state. Indeed, this was Kertbeny and Ulrichs' purpose: Sexual orientation, as we have come to call this biological essence, was invented in order to secure freedom for gay people.