The Third Gender in twentieth century America

The Third Gender in twentieth century America
by Randolph Trumbach                                               Baruch College, City University of New York

George Chauncey's brilliant and often persuasive study of male homosexual relations in early twentieth-century New York was published two years ago on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall riot that inaugurated the recent gay liberation movement. The world that he describes was the product of a major shift in western sexual behavior that had begun two hundred years before, around 1700. And his book is in dialogue with the scholars who over the past twenty-five years have tried to analyze that shift. The nature of the problem to be discussed can be indicated by asking whether homosexuality and heterosexuality are biological categories that divide the world into a majority and a minority that can be found in all times and places. To such a question most western people today would reply yes. And while they would probably wonder why a minority should be homosexual, they would simply accept without question that most people are heterosexual. Since the 1970s, however, the work of some historians and sociologists has radically challenged these presumptions. Mary McIntosh in a classic article in 1968 began the discussion by proposing that homosexuality in modern society was a deviant role into which some men were socialized beginning around 1700. Nine years later in 1977 Jeffrey Weeks and myself, under McIntosh's influence but independently of each other, rephrased McIntosh's proposal. Weeks maintained that the modern homosexual role emerged in the late nineteenth century when the concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality were invented.(1)
My tactic was to compare what I thought to be the traditional western pattern of homosexual behavior with the two patterns that could be found elsewhere. In Europe since the twelfth century adult effeminate men exclusively attracted to each other had met in urban subcultures that protected them from the hostility of the majority. Elsewhere in the world adult men had licit sexual relations with both males and females, provided that they remained dominant by having relations either with adolescent males or with a minority of adult males who had been transformed into women. One of these two patterns could be seen in each of the world's major cultural areas. Domination was achieved by differences in age in east Asia, Melanesia, the Islamic world, and the ancient Mediterranean. A minority of males were socialized …