Kertbeny: "Homosexual," "Heterosexual," May 6, 1868

Inventing the Homosexual and Heterosexual Categories

by Jonathan Ned Katz

In a letter, in German, to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs on May 6, 1868, an early sex-law reformer, the writer Karl Maria Kerbeny, is first know to have privately used four new terms he had coined: "Monosexual; Homosexual; Heterosexual; und Heterogenit" -- the debut of the homosexual and heterosexual categories, and two now forogtten terms.

Though Kertbeny's letter did not define his foursome, his other writings indicate that "Monosexual" referred to masturbation, practiced by both sexes. "Heterogenit" referred to erotic acts of human beings with animals. "Homosexual" referred to erotic acts performed by men with men and women with women. And "Heterosexual" referred to erotic acts of men and women with each other, as did another of his new terms, "Normalsexualitat," normal sexuality.

Heterosexuality and normal sexuality he defined as the innate form of sexual satisfaction of the majority of the population. That emphasis on numbers as the foundation of the normal marked a break with an older, qualitative, procreative standard of sexual propriety.

But Kertbeny's heterosexual and his normal sexual are, by no means, normative. Both the heterosexual and normal sexual were characterized by their "unfettered capacity for degeneracy."

The sex "drive" of normal sexuals was said to be stronger than that of masturbators, bestialists, or homosexuals, and this explaineds normal sexuals' laxity, license, and "unfetteredness."

Kertbeny's heterosexual men and women participated with each other

in so-called natural [procreative] as well as unnatural [nonprocreative] coitus. They were also capable of giving themselves over to same-sex excesses. Additionally, normally-sexed individuals were no less likely to engage in self-defilement [masturbation] if there was insufficient opportunity to satisfy their sex drive. And they were equally likely to assault male but especially female minors . . . ; to indulge in incest; to engage in bestiality . . . ; and even to behave depravedly with corpses if their moral self-control does not control their lust. And it is only amongst the normally-sexed that the special breed of so-called "bleeders" occurs, those who, thirsting for blood, can only satisfy their passion by wounding and torturing.

Considering psychiatrists' later cooptation of the term heterosexual to affirm the superiority of different-sex eroticism, Kertbeny's coinage of heterosexual in the service of homosexual emancipation is one of sex history's grand ironies.

Kertbeny's four terminology coinages raise the question: why did some of his terms gain widespread, international acceptance, and why were some forgotten?

Kertbeny's heterosexual and homosexual terms categorized people and their acts based on the erotic character of those acts, and the biological sex of the person with whom they were interacting. This was a major historical shift of paradigms away from the earlier procreative/non-procreative standard.