Henry James Forman: Dell's "Love in the Machine Age", September 14, 1930

"to develop normally to heterosexual adulthood"

Another early reference to the hetero/homo duo appears in The New York Times Book Review, in a review of Floyd Dell's Love in the Machine Age, an analysis of affectional relations in the early-20th century. (For earlier references to the two categories, see ????.)

The Times quotes Dell's warning that current, abnormal social conditions cause "Infantilism, prostitution, and homosexuality." Young people, says Dell, should be "permitted to develop normally to heterosexual adulthood."

But, The Times reviewer emphasizes, "such a state already exists, here and now."

And so it did. Heterosexuality and homosexuality, new sexual and gender categories, had been distributed from a narrow, rarified realm of doctor discourse to become a nationally, even internationally cited aspect of modern middle-class life.

Notes

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