beled as a homosexual. Culturally, this type of behavior had no definite wrong or abnormal connotation strapped to it. As Neil Miller describes, “In the 1870s, a concept of homosexual identity--or of gay and lesbian community--was barely articulated” (Miller xvii). In America, the idea of homosexual love was beyond societal understanding. Prior to the introduction of homosexuality people were free to care about each other on levels without the constraints of any insecurity base on a the possibility of getting a label.While the concept of homosexuality did not exist in the United States, changes were happening in Europe with the issue. Right around the 1870’s affectionate relationships between males acquired a label. “It was the sexologists… who were to define same-sex love, to give it a name. The term homosexuality was actually used for the first time in 1869 by Karl Maria Kertbeny, a German-Hungarian campaigner for the abolition of Prussia’s laws that criminalized sexual relations between men. Homosexuality was not the only term that the late nineteenth century found to describe sexual relations between persons of the same sex. The term inversion was even more widely used. And in 1870, the German physician Karl Westphal invented the phrase “contrary sexual feeling,” in detailing the history of a young lesbian. These expressions all had a clinical tinge to them. Then there were the more sympathetic, but no less problematic, terms- the “third sex” and the “intermediate sex” (Miller 13). These terms and phrases had not yet come across the Atlantic to penetrate the English language in American society except for sexual inversion on a moderate level outside of the clinical sphere. In 1892, however, homosexuality appeared. Prior, the concept of homosexuality was not yet present in the United States. George Chauncey, who has made a thorough study of the medical liter...
