Sexual orientation refers to which gender we’re drawn to and develop romantic feelings for. The word “homosexual” comes from the Greek root “homo,” meaning “the same,” rather than the Latin “homo,” meaning “man.” It refers to both gay men and lesbians. In general, “gay” (often referring specifically to “male homosexual”) and “lesbian” are more commonly used than “homosexual,” much as is the case in Chinese. In 1988, someone borrowed the term “tongzhi” (comrade) to translate “lesbian and gay,” and from then on “tongzhi” gradually became a near-synonym for “homosexual,” marking a milestone in the founding of the Chinese-speaking world’s “tongzhi” movement (Liu Dalin, Lu Longguang, 2005).

Looking closely, we find that “homosexual” and “heterosexual” are not especially old words — they were coined by Karl Maria Benkert in 1869 (see wiki). “Gay,” on the other hand, evolved more gradually: in the late 19th century, expressions like “the gay nineties” and “gay Paree” were associated with happiness and glamour; in 1895, after Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality became public, the word “gay” took on a sexual connotation for the first time; in the 1920s, gay people began using the word among themselves, since, compared to “homosexual,” it carried less negative baggage; by the 1960s and 70s, the word had become widespread as a term for the gay community.

English slang is full of terms related to homosexuality — “queer,” “dyke,” “fag,” and so on. There’s even a dedicated online dictionary of “gay slang” (A Brief Dictionary of Queer Slang and Culture), which is worth a read if you’re curious.

Let’s return to the origins of the word “homosexual.” In Plato’s Symposium (Συμπόσιου), there’s a striking passage:

… the original human nature was not like the present … The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number ; there was man, woman, and the union of the two,… which had once a real existence, but is now lost, … “Androgynous” …

Here, Aristophanes (189c–193e) argues that humans originally came in three sexes — male (descended from the sun), female (descended from the earth), and androgynous (descended from the moon). The Symposium is regarded as the first work in the Western tradition to discuss homosexuality, because right after this passage, Aristophanes goes on to describe these original humans as round, with four hands and four feet, two identical faces on a single head, four ears, and two sets of genitals — until Zeus split them in two, and ever since, each half has gone looking for its other half.

It’s not hard to see how this account is saturated with homoerotic suggestion, and how different it is from our current categories of gender. The word “sex” derives from the Latin “secare,” meaning “to cut” or “to divide,” which has led some to argue that the division of humanity into two sexes represents some kind of ultimate truth for our species. I’d argue that this rigid, binary view of classification is exactly what fueled the rampant essentialism of the late 19th century when it came to homosexuality — rooted in scientism and a mechanistic reductionism. Intersex and androgynous figures have appeared throughout history in countless forms; to take just one example closer to home, the Ishinpō (医心方) records a passage on androgynous people. It claims that the ancient Chinese believed some women’s clitorises grew larger with the full moon, and that during the full moon such a woman had to have intercourse with a woman or she would die; during the new moon, she had to have intercourse with a man or face the same fate (R.H. van Gulik, 1990). Intersex figures appear widely across literature, conveniently satisfying readers’ appetite for the exotic.

The concept of the “intersex” gave rise to a whole series of “inventions” at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. With two wars and rapid economic change, people’s psychology began to fracture. Many insisted that the First World War was responsible for the collapse of young people’s sexual morals — which isn’t quite right, since there was already plenty of sexual upheaval before the war. As Ian Hacking put it, “a kind of person comes into being at the same time as the kind itself is invented. In some cases, our classifications and our own kinds emerge hand in hand, reinforcing one another” (Angus McLaren, 2007). What we can say with confidence is that, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, people could no longer be satisfied with just two genders, and a number of new terms — “homosexual” among them — were born alongside concepts like masochism and sadism.

In that era, homosexuality was defined and explained in extraordinarily mistaken ways. Most sexologists at the time believed it stemmed from depravity and self-indulgence, and went looking for absurd physiological “proof” to back this up — A. Tardieu, for instance, told readers that “active” homosexuals had unusually thin, dog-like penises, while “passive” homosexuals had funnel-shaped anuses. Later scholars gradually came to understand that homosexuality, if it was a “disorder” at all, resided in the nervous system rather than the body… Given the dark history the word “homosexual” grew up alongside, it’s no wonder it never won much favor among gay people themselves.