That's why I used homosexual and gay, to try to differentiate between a sexual inclination and the culture that has developed. There is a group I didn't bring into it, bisexuals.
While perhaps the label made a difference for some bisexuals there is a group of solidly homosexual men. My ex-boyfriend tried to have sex with a girl in high school and he related that he couldn't get it up at all. My own experience was to have one encounter with a girl and simply not being as "turned on" by women. It might have gone either way for me before the label of homosexual was invented, though I suspect I would have lived a life of unsatisfied desire and fear. Like Michael Wigglesworth, that fire and brimstone preacher from Puritan New England, who revealed in coded diary entries that he was attracted to men and struggled with it all his life.
But atonment was rarely allowed unless a person was powerful. The penalty was death in most Western countries. It certainly was in most of the American colonies.
Re: Queer history 101
While perhaps the label made a difference for some bisexuals there is a group of solidly homosexual men. My ex-boyfriend tried to have sex with a girl in high school and he related that he couldn't get it up at all. My own experience was to have one encounter with a girl and simply not being as "turned on" by women. It might have gone either way for me before the label of homosexual was invented, though I suspect I would have lived a life of unsatisfied desire and fear. Like Michael Wigglesworth, that fire and brimstone preacher from Puritan New England, who revealed in coded diary entries that he was attracted to men and struggled with it all his life.
But atonment was rarely allowed unless a person was powerful. The penalty was death in most Western countries. It certainly was in most of the American colonies.