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H o w to Do th e H is to ry o f H o m o s e x u a lity
H o w to D o th e H is to ry o f H o m o s e x u a lity

D a vid M . H a lp e rin

The University of Chicago Press : : Chicago and London

David M . Halperin is W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor in the Department
o f English Language and Literature at the University o f Michigan and Hon­
orary Professor in the School o f Sociology at the University o f N ew South
Wales. He is the author o f a number of books including One Hundred
Years o f Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love and Saint Fou­
cault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. He is also the cofounder and coeditor
o f G LQ : A Journal o f Lesbian and Gay Studies.

The University o f Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University o f Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2002 by David M . Halperin
All rights reserved. Published 2002
Printed in the United States of America

1 1 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN: 0 -2 2 6 -3 14 4 7 -2 (cloth)

Library o f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Halperin, David M ., 19 5 2 -
How to do the history of homosexuality / David M . Halperin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0 -22 6 -314 4 7-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Homosexuality, M ale— History. 2. Homosexuality, M ale— Historio­
graphy. 3. Homosexuality, Male— Greece— History. I. Title.
HQ76 .H28 2002
3o 6 .76 '6 2'o 9 — d c2i 2 0 0 2 0 17 3 5 7

©The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements o f

the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence
o f Paper for Printed Library M aterials, ansi Z39.48-1992.
F o r K irk O r m a n d . A n d f o r A n n P e lle g rin i.
 C o n te n ts

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: In Defense of Historicism i

1 Forgetting Foucault 2.4

2 The First Homosexuality? 48
3 Historicizing the Subject of Desire 81
4 How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality 104

Appendix: Questions of Evidence 138

Notes 15 5
Index 199
A c k n o w le d g m e n ts

All of the previously published work contained in this vol­

ume has been revised since its last appearance in print.
Nonetheless, I wish to acknowledge the journals, collec­
tions, editors, and presses for which much of this material
was originally composed and to thank them for their per­
mission to reproduce some of it here.
“ Forgetting Foucault” : R e p re s e n ta tio n s 63 (Summer
1998): 9 3 -12 0 ; reprinted in T h e S le e p o f R e a s o n : E r o t ic
E x p e r ie n c e a n d S e x u a l E t h ic s in A n c ie n t G r e e c e a n d R o m e ,
ed. Martha Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola (Chicago: Univer­
sity of Chicago Press, 2002), 2 1- 5 4 , a°d in S e x u a litie s in
H is t o r y : A R e a d e r , ed. Kim M. Phillips and Barry Reay
(New York: Routledge, 2002), 42-68.
“ The First Homosexuality?” : the B r y n M a w r C la s s ic a l
R e v ie w (http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/), 9 7 .12 .3 (5 De­
cember 1997), G L Q : A J o u r n a l o f L e s b ia n a n d G a y S t u d ­
ies 4, no. 4 (1998): 559-78, and in T h e S le e p o f R e a s o n :
E r o t ic E x p e r ie n c e a n d S e x u a l E t h ic s in A n c ie n t G r e e c e a n d
R om e,ed. Martha Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002), 229-68.
“ Historicizing the Subject of Desire” : in D is c o u r s e s o f
S e x u a lit y : F r o m A r is t o tle to A I D S , ed. Domna C. Stanton
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 2 3 6 -6 1,
and in F o u c a u lt a n d the W ritin g o f H is t o r y , ed. Jan Gold­
stein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 19 -3 4 , 2 .55 -6 '.
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S X

“ How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality” : G L Q : A Jo u rn a l

no. i (2000): 8 7 -1 24.
o f L e s b ia n a n d G a y S tu d ie s 6 ,
“ Questions of Evidence” : in Q u e e r R e p re s e n ta tio n s : R e a d in g L i v e s ,
R e a d in g C u ltu re s, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: New York Univer­

sity Press, 1997). 39-54-

I wish to thank the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and my col­
leagues in the Department of English Language and Literature for pro­
viding me with the ideal environment in which to reconsider my earlier
positions and to rediscover the challenges and pleasures of the history of
sexuality. I owe a special gratitude to Martha Vicinus, Steven Mullaney,
Linda Gregerson, Valerie Traub, Tobin Siebers, and Lincoln Faller. I have
been inspired particularly by my conversations with Valerie Traub. And
I am grateful to the administration of the University of Michigan for its
generosity and support.
For their help, energy, and good will, I wish to thank Tonya Howe and
Matt Johnson. I am especially indebted to Matt Johnson for rehearsing
with me in detail the issues addressed in this book and for entering so
sympathetically into the process of its composition.
For his confidence, his patience, and his persistence, I owe everything
to Doug Mitchell at the University of Chicago Press.
For the author photo, I am happily obligated to Jean-M arc Berlioux.
M y greatest aspiration for this book is that it to live up to the eloquent,
witty, and disturbing image on its cover. For permission to reproduce it, I
gratefully acknowledge Peter Lyssiotis, photomontcur extraordinaire.
A very few of my more specific debts are acknowledged in the head-
notes to individual essays.
The decade in which the contents of this book were produced was an
unexpectedly turbulent one for me. I would like to express my deep appre­
ciation to the friends who helped me get through it: Gayle Boyer, Marie
Curnick, Didier Fribon, Suzanne MacAlistcr, Randy Mackie, Paul M or­
rison, Martha Nussbaum, Stephen Orgel, Kirk Ormand, Nikos Papaster-
giadis, Ann Pellegrini, Michael Warner, Marie Ymonet, and my extended
family in the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois.

D. M. H.
Roc de la Borie
Theminettcs, Lot
July 2001
In tr o d u c tio n : In D e fe n s e o f H is to ric is m

In the spring of 1989, when I finished work on my book

O n e H u n d r e d Y ea rs o f H o m o s e x u a lit y (a collection of es­
says about sex and gender in the ancient Greek world), I
thought I had said everything I had to say about the his­
tory of homosexuality.1 In fact, I thought I had said every­
thing I had to say, period. My earlier work, on the history
of pastoral poetry2 and on Plato’s theory of erotic desire,5
appeared to me at the time to represent little more than a se­
ries of oblique approaches to the subject I had finally found
the voice to speak about directly— namely, the erotic play
of self and other in love and history. Instead of attempting
a major new project of my own, I decided to take advan­
tage of the professional and institutional platform that my
most recent book had given me to create opportunities for
younger or more active scholars to have their say. I set up
a monograph series entitled Ideologies of Desire at Oxford
University Press, established a Greek and Latin translation
series called The New Classical Canon at Routledge, and
co-founded (with Carolyn Dinshaw) G L Q : A J o u r n a l o f
L e s b ia n a n d G a y S tu d ies. But the history of homosexuality,
it turned out, continued to harbor irresistible challenges and
provocations.
The present volume assembles, in revised form, a num­
ber of my writings from the past decade on the history and
theory of sexuality. In particular, it brings together a se-
I N T R O D U C T I O N 2

quence of essays in which I set out to explore certain historiographical

problems raised by the history of homosexuality. Some of those problems
were ones that my earlier work had generated but had not adequately
addressed or that it had merely touched on; others were problems that
had arisen as a result of subsequent developments in the field. In either
case, I found myself returning again and again in the course of the 1990s,
almost despite myself, to related sets of historiographical issues.
I call those issues h is to r io g r a p h ic a l rather than h is to ric a l because they
have to do with questions of evidence, method, strategy, politics, and iden­
tification in the writing of history. The essays collected here cannot claim
to be contributions to the history of homosexuality as such. Rather, they
are attempts to think through specific theoretical issues connected with
writing the history of homosexuality.
That historiographical problematic is what title of my book is intended
to evoke. I mean “ how to do the history of homosexuality” to sound in­
terrogative rather than magisterial. This book does not aspire to be an
instruction manual so much as a series of reflections on the interpretative
quandaries and intellectual pleasures of doing the history of homosexu­
ality. It gathers together the latest fruits of what has been the conceptual
adventure of a lifetime: the attempt to think homosexuality historically.
But I don’t intend entirely to disclaim the didactic implications of my ti­
tle. The essays collected here represent my best efforts to clear up a number
of difficulties and misunderstandings that I believe have impeded progress
in the history of sexuality and have unduly distracted historians. M y aim is
to be helpful, and my major preoccupation is with the accurate decipher­
ment of historical documents. At the same time, the drive behind much
of the writing is, unmistakably, polemical— not in the sense that I wish to
crush or silence all opposing points of view, but in the sense that I want to
refine and to carry forward a series of contested arguments about the his­
toricity of sexuality that my earlier work on ancient Greece had advanced.
In order to make the logical continuities clear, I need to say something
here about how I understand the connections between this book and O ne
H u n d r e d Y ea rs o f H o m o s e x u a lit y .

Everyone who reads an ancient Greek text, and certainly anyone who stud­
ies ancient Greek culture, quickly realizes that the ancient Greeks were
quite weird, by our standards, when it came to sex. And yet, professional
academic training in classical studies typically induces a kind of amne­
sia about the weirdness of the Greeks. The student of classical antiquity
quickly learns to acknowledge, to bracket, and to screen out their erotic
peculiarities, the cultural specificities in their experience of e ro s that fail to
correspond to any category or identity in modern bourgeois society. One
simply acquires the habit of allowing for their differences, granting them
the latitude to be weird, and then one turns one’s attention to other topics
of greater seriousness or philological urgency.
Like most of my scholarly colleagues in the field of classics, I had be­
come accustomed to noticing, without making anything of, the obvious
differences in sexual attitude and behavior between ancient Greek men
and the men in my own social world. And, anyway, I didn’t have a lan­
guage for articulating systematically the discontinuities between ancient
Greek sexual attitudes or practices and my own. Or, at least, I didn’t have
such a language until the m id-1980s when it was provided me by the new
social history and, specifically, by the work of social constructionist his­
torians of homosexuality, notably George Chauncey.4 What I, and many
others, have learned from this work is that it is not the Greeks who were
weird about sex but rather that it is we today, particularly men and women
of the professional classes, who have a culturally and historically unique
organization of sexual and social life and, therefore, have difficulty under­
standing the sex/gender systems of other cultures.
One of the most distinctive features of the current regime under which
we live is the prominence of heterosexuality and homosexuality as central,
organizing categories of thought, behavior, and erotic subjectivity. The rise
to dominance of those categories represents a relatively recent and cultur­
ally specific development, yet it has left little trace in our consciousness of
its novelty. As a result, not only do we have a hard time understanding the
logic at work in other historical cultures’ organizations of sex and gender,
but we have an even harder time understanding our own inability to un­
derstand them. We can’t figure out what it is about our own experiences
of sexuality that are not universal, what it is about sexuality that could be
cultural instead of natural, historical instead of biological. All our research
into otherness, into cultural alterity, presents to us an endlessly perplexing
spectacle of the exotic, which merely reinforces our attachment to our own
categories of thought and experience.
The impetus behind O n e H u n d r e d Y ears o f H o m o s e x u a lit y was to ask
what the consequences might be of taking the Greeks at their word when
they spoke about sex. Suppose that we stopped regarding the Greeks as
weird, exotic, and, well, simply Greek. Suppose instead that we took seri­
ously the possibility that human beings in the past might have had radically
different experiences of erotic subjectivity. What would happen il we took
the Greeks literally, assuming that their expressions of desire were genuine
I N T R O D U C T I O N 4

or were true statements about their own experiences? How would such an
approach to the Greeks alter our understanding of them and of their cul­
ture? But, also, how would it change our understanding of ourselves and
of our culture?
How would we experience our own sexuality differently if we expe­
rienced it as something historical, as well as something instinctual? How
would our sense of what a human being is, of what desire is, of what
history is, of who we are, have to change, once we concluded from our
study of the Greeks that our erotic lives are modern cultural and psychic
productions? It was out of curiosity about where such questions might
take us that I made my first tentative forays into the history of sexuality.

I did not propose to give my inquiries the form of a single, synthetic study.
O n e H u n d r e d Y e a rs o f H o m o s e x u a lit y is a collection of disparate essays;
it does not undertake to offer a systematic coverage of the erotics of male
culture in the ancient Greek world. At the time I was working on those
essays, it seemed like a bad idea to try and produce an overarching, unitary
survey of the topic, and I turned down subsequent invitations to do so.
The very nature of the evidence argued against such an undertaking.
The surviving ancient documents that bear on homoeroticism are very un­
evenly distributed in time, place, and genre. Also, K. J. Dover’s G r e e k
H o m o s e x u a lit y had already provided as systematic a survey of the topic
as the nature of the evidence permitted, and, since its scholarship was
sound, there seemed little need to replicate it.5 Finally, what was required,
it seemed to me, was not a major new study but a simple conceptual ma­
neuver. The aim of my book, accordingly, was to snip the thread that
connected ancient Greek paederasty with modern homosexuality in the
minds of modern historians. Once that maneuver had been completed, it
would be possible to foreground the historical and ideological uniqueness
of homosexuality and heterosexuality as modern concepts as well as mod­
ern experiences, and it would be easier to restore to Greek erotic practices
their alterity— to resituatc them in their original social context and (by
refusing to conflate them with modern notions) to bring into clearer focus
their indigenous meanings.
That is what some of the later essays in my book tried to do, and that
was also the aim of the essays collected in B e fo r e S e x u a lit y , a book I edited
with John J. Winkler and Froma Zcitlin in the same period/’ I thought that
once the conceptual link between paederasty and homosexuality had been
severed, and a corresponding gap introduced between modern sexuality
IN D E F E N S E OF H 1 S T O R I C I S M 5

and ancient erotic experience, then an abundance of new specialist studies

would seize the opportunity to explore diverse aspects of erotic life in an­
tiquity. Instead of another new synthesis, what was needed was just the op­
posite: a plurality of new and highly particular inquiries into specific texts,
materials, topics, and problems, so as to expand our intellectual horizons
and contribute to a reexamination of classical antiquity as a whole.
And there have indeed been some distinguished achievements of that
kind, most notably Maud Gleason’s M a k in g M e n (1995) and Craig Will­
iams’s R o m a n H o m o s e x u a lit y (1999, published in my Oxford series).7 On
the whole, however, classical scholarship on sexual life in ancient Greece in
English during the 1 990s has been characterized by a series of book-length
generalist studies designed to reassert the authority of modern conceptual
categories and to restore the hegemony of “ sexuality” in studies of classical
antiquity.8

My book had a second purpose, at once scholarly and political. It was an

attempt to build a bridge between classical scholarship and the emerging
Held of lesbian and gay studies. Classical scholarship was of course no
stranger to lesbian and gay male interests, hut such interests had tended to
express themselves either privately or covertly. Outside of classics, how­
ever, much progress had already been made in lesbian and gay history,
historiography, sociology, anthropology, and critical theory. But most of
the work in lesbian and gay studies dealt with modern, or at least post-
classical, topics. I wished to bring those two areas of intellectual endeavor
together, to show classicists how recent work in lesbian and gay studies
could be brought to bear on the study of classical antiquity and, conversely,
to show practitioners of lesbian and gay studies how the study of antiquity
might contribute to contemporary thinking about the history and theory
of sexuality.
My larger aim was to help consolidate lesbian and gay studies itself
as an interdisciplinary field of scholarship, a goal I pursued in the suc­
ceeding years by co-editing T h e L e s b ia n a n d C a y S tu d ie s R e a d e r .v That
larger aim explains some of the peculiarities o! the earlier book, such as the
excessive accumulation ol bibliographic citations. I knew that the book’s
topic and argument would easily find detractors among classicists, and I
wished to guard against the book’s easy dismissal by fortifying it with as
much learning as I could muster. But I also wanted to take stock ol the
accumulated work in lesbian and gay studies, and gather it together, so
that my book could function as evidence, in the teeth of skepticism on the
I N T R O D U C T I O N 6

part of outsiders, for the existence of that very field. Simply by listing in
one place all the relevant scholarship in lesbian and gay studies that I had
uncovered, I hoped to document the sheer size of the field, to display its
intellectual breadth and depth, and, by situating my own work in dialogue
with the existing scholarship, to extend and consolidate its gains— to make
it visible, to make it function as an academic field. And I wanted to show
that there was more to gay studies than acts of recovery, stories of “ great
homosexuals in history,” or forms of political affirmation— that the rela­
tion of gay scholarship to gay identity was more subtle and complex than
is often imagined.
But in the process of assembling this material, I made a couple of big
mistakes. First, because a bibliography containing all the works cited in the
entire book would have been enormous, unwieldy, and, I thought, preten­
tious, my bibliography listed only those works cited frequently. Second,
and for similar reasons, the index referred readers not to authors cited
or mentioned but only to those writers whose work I had substantively
discussed.
Let my experience be a lesson to younger academics. Always be sure
to include in the index to your book every single author you cite, however
fleetingly, for that is the first thing that authors who have written on your
topic will look up (T h e C h ic a g o M a n u a l o f S ty le unfortunately prevents me
from using a similar tactic to insure the present book against the vanity of
rivals). Classicists, of course, if they are good for nothing else, are supposed
to be experts at reading footnotes and critical apparatus, but that did not
prevent much heavy weather from being made of my alleged omissions
of work by feminist scholars, work that I had in fact used and cited, and
it led to denunciations of my book by those whose contributions to the
field I had set out particularly to honor.10 The resulting tensions between
different progressive currents in classical scholarship, entirely unnecessary,
have set back the study of sex and gender in antiquity by many years (as
comparison with the greater maturity and sophistication of early modern
studies forcefully dramatizes); only now is it starting to catch up.
I have not tried to atone in this book for my purported sins against
feminism in O n e H u n d r e d Y e a rs o f H o m o s e x u a lit y , but I have done my
best to clarify, especially in the essay entitled “ The First Homosexuality?”
(but also in “ Flow to Do the History of Male Homosexuality” ), my sense
of both how distinct and how interrelated, in theory and practice, are the
histories of lesbianism and of male homosexuality.
IN D E F E N S E OF H 1 S T O R I C I S M 7

was very much a hook of its mo­

O n e H u n d r e d Y ea rs o f H o m o s e x u a lit y
ment in time, and its intellectual style reflects the particular trends in schol­
arly discourse that defined the horizons of critical practice in its day. For
example, it attempted to combine the empirical traditions of British and
German classical scholarship and ancient social history with the structural
traditions of the French sc ie n ce s b u rn a in e s and with international femi­
nist theory. Further, drawing on developments in cultural anthropology,
it aimed to approach the history of sexuality not from the perspective of
the history of ideas or m en ta lites but from a culturalist perspective that did
not make a strict separation between material reality and social significa­
tion but that understood how material conditions give rise to ideological
formations as well as how symbolic systems construct material reality.
The book also tried to bring the New Historicism " to studies of ancient
Greece: to approach social action as text, to produce textual readings of
cultural forms, and to look at social and symbolic practices together—
that is, to treat social practices as part of a signifying system and to treat
meanings as elements in social transactions: in short, to inquire into the
poetics of culture.
Those were the dominant intellectual influences on my work at the
time. I had of course been affected by the work of Michel Foucault, and
I had been belatedly impressed by the second volume of his unfinished
H is t o r y o f S e x u a lity , which dealt with classical Greece. In fact, to the best
of my knowledge, I was the only professional classicist in North America
to give L 'u s a g e d es p la isirs a favorable review.12 That review was incor­
porated in O n e H u n d r e d Y ea rs o f H o m o s e x u a lit y , and so was a certain
amount of Foucault’s conceptual vocabulary, along with some laudatory
references to Foucault himself.n But I had yet to feel the real force of
Foucault’s example.
Nonetheless, when the book came to be reviewed, I found myself rou­
tinely described as a Foucauldian. That was a surprise on two counts. First,
it wasn’t true. Second, it wasn’t a compliment.
It w a s n 't tru e: I can name the most immediate influences on the con­
crete processes of my writing at the time, and while Foucault was a ma­
jor influence, he was not the dominant one. More important to me were
George Chauncey, the New Historicists, and the French structuralists al­
ready mentioned. Foucault did not argue for the social construction of
(homo)sexuality; he was not a social historian; and he was not interested
in playing the sort of truth games with historical evidence that I was still
committed to. My thinking had been formed by gay and Marxist his­
toriographers such as Jeffrey Weeks and Robert Radgug; radical British
and North American sociologists such as Stuart Flail, Mary McIntosh,
I N T R O D U C T I O N 8

Kenneth Plummer, Barry D. Adam, John Gagnon, and William Simon;

feminist and cultural anthropologists such as Carol Delaney, Don Don-
ham, Gilbert Herdt, David Gilmore, Maurice Godelier, Thomas Gregor,
Gayle Rubin, and Sylvia Yanagisako; feminist theorists such as Teresa de
Lauretis, Monique Wittig, and Nancy Miller; and the few classicists who
showed an interest in various combinations of the aforementioned, such
as K. J. Dover, M ark Golden, David Schaps, Susan Cole, Maud Gleason,
and most of all my friend Jack Winkler.
It w a s n 't a c o m p lim e n t : I discovered that “ Foucault” had somehow
come to signify everything that decent, liberal-minded American clas­
sicists liked to define themselves against. “ Foucauldian,” accordingly,
became short-hand for “ gay,” “ male chauvinist,” “ anti-empirical,” “ un-
scholarly,” “ radical,” “ untraditional,” “ opportunistic,” “ power-hungry,”
“ totalitarian,” and, finally, “ un-American.” It would have been impolitic
to come right out and call me those names, of course, so “ Foucauldian”
covered a multitude of sins. In fact, a surprising number of writings in­
voked Foucault to disqualify my work or, even better, cited my work as a
cautionary example of the terrible things that could happen to you if you
allowed yourself to be corrupted by Foucault’s influence.14
As a result, at the start of the 1990s I suddenly got much more in­
terested in Foucault than I had been when I wrote O n e H u n d r e d Y e a rs
o f H o m o s e x u a lit y . I figured that anyone so brilliant who had become so
disreputable must have done something right. And I was moved by an
instinct of self-preservation to inquire into the phobic processes by which
Foucault himself had become so demonized. Those inquiries eventually
took the form of a small book, S a in t F o u c a u lt . ”
The essays collected in this volume are consequently much more mark­
ed by my reading of Foucault than was O n e H u n d r e d Y e a rs o f H o m o ­
s e x u a lit y , even if they are still not themselves particularly Foucauldian.
Two of them, “ Forgetting Foucault” and “ Historicizing the Subject of De­
sire,” are explicit efforts to recover the radical design of Foucault’s own
approach to the history of sexuality, to salvage that approach from var­
ious misapprehensions and misreadings, and to make it newly available
to historians of sexuality as an impetus for innovation and renewal in the
field. M y belief remains that, far from having exhausted the lessons that
Foucault had to teach us, we have yet to come to terms with their startling
implications.
In particular, I have wanted to insist on a couple of theoretical points.
First, that the distinction between sexual acts and sexual identities, falsely
attributed to Foucault, should not be invoked to justify the claim, also
false, that before the cultural constitution of homosexuality and hetero­
IN D E F E N S E OF H I S T O R I C I S M 9

sexuality in the modern period there were no such things as sexual identi­
ties, only sexual acts. Foucault never made that claim, nor did I base O n e
H u n d r e d Y ea rs o f H o m o s e x u a lit y on such a pseudo-Foucauldian distinc­
tion between acts and identities. Not only are critiques of Foucault, of
Foucauldian histories, or of my hook that target such a view mistaken, but
the contrary view that they attempt to install in its place, namely, that the
sexual identities known to us have always existed in some form or other,
is also hasty and ill-judged. If Foucault’s work should teach us anything,
it is to inquire more closely into the subtle connections between sexual
acts and sexual identities in the pre-modern period, to pay more (not less)
attention to the changing social and discursive conditions in which the de­
sires of historical subjects are constructed. That, at least, is the argument
of “ Forgetting Foucault.”
In “ Historicizing the Subject of Desire,” I argue against the recent
tendency to reduce the history of sexuality to the history of classifica­
tions or representations of sexuality. Such a tendency neatly sidesteps the
radical implications of Foucault’s attempt to write the history of sexu­
ality from the perspective of the history of discourses. For by doing so,
Foucault did not mean to reduce sexuality to discourse, to claim that
sexuality was a discourse, or to situate historical change in discourse
rather than in sexuality. One effect of (mis)understanding the history
of sexuality as a history of the discourses of sexuality has been to pre­
serve the notion of sexuality as a timeless and ahistorical dimension of
human experience, while preserving a notion of discourse as a neutral
medium of representation. A second effect has been to draw a decep­
tively simple and very old-fashioned division between representations,
conceived as socially specific and historically variable products of human
culture, and realities (sexual desire, in this case, or human nature), con­
ceived as something static and unchanging. Foucault, I argue, was up
to something much more novel, a radically holistic approach that was
designed to avoid such hoary metaphysical binarisms. His aim was to
foreground the historicity of desire itself and of human beings as subjects
of desire.
If I insist on those points, it is not out of some dogmatic belief in their
rightness but because I think they are still useful and promise to make
the history of sexuality more exciting, more adventurous, more transfor­
mative of our understandings and of ourselves. Contrary to what some
have claimed, 1 do not aspire to found a Foucauldian “ school” of classical
(or post-classical) studies, even if I were in a position to do such a thing.
On the contrary, as the final essay in this volume demonstrates, I think it
is rime to go well beyond Foucault's particular suggestions and gestures
I N T R O D U C T I O N 10

and to devise new and more imaginative ways of realizing the project of
historicizing desire.

Perhaps the overriding purpose of O n e H u n d r e d Y e a rs o f H o m o s e x u a lit y ,

at the time the book was written, was to win the once-vehement debate
between essentialists and constructionists over the constitution of sexual
identity. Against essentialists who claimed that there had been a minor­
ity of homosexuals in all times and places, I argued, along with social
constructionists, not only that homosexuality was socially and culturally
constituted in the modern period but also that the very division between
homosexuality and heterosexuality was the product of recent historical
developments. M y aim was not to champion the cause of a homosexual
minority that might be imagined to have existed in every human society,
for to do that would be merely to pay heterosexuality the backhanded (and
undeserved) compliment of being the normal and natural condition for the
majority of human beings in all times and places. M y purpose in histori­
cizing homosexuality was to d e n a tu r a liz e h e t e r o s e x u a lit y , to deprive it of
its claims to be considered a “ traditional value,” and ultimately to destroy
the self-evidence of the entire system on which the homophobic opposition
between homosexuality and heterosexuality depended.
A year after O n e H u n d r e d Y e a rs o f H o m o s e x u a lit y was originally
published, its argument for the social construction of homosexuality was
the object of a brilliant critique by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the long
introductory chapter to her groundbreaking book, E p is t e m o lo g y o f th e
C l o s e t . 16
Sedgwick objected to social constructionist histories of homo­
sexuality (she singled out Michel Foucault's L a v o lo n t e d e s a v o ir , the first
volume of his H is t o r y o f S e x u a lit y , and O n e H u n d r e d Y e a rs o f H o m o s e x ­
u a lity) that claimed that at the end of the nineteenth century one model of
same-sex sexual relations (“ homosexuality” ) had replaced earlier models
(“ sodomy,” “ inversion” ), models radically different from “ homosexuality
as we understand it today.”
Sedgwick justly criticized Foucault and myself for drawing too sharp a
contrast between earlier sexual categories and a falsely coherent, homoge­
neous, and unitary notion of “ homosexuality as we understand it today,”
thereby treating the contemporary concept of homosexuality as “ a coher­
ent definitional field rather than a space of overlapping, contradictory, and
conflictual definitional forces” (45). And she dramatized that conflict by
showing that Foucault and I actually had in mind quite different “ under­
standings” of “ homosexuality as we understand it today.” Sedgwick went
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