Etiologie a evoluční teorie mužské homosexuality

Regarding the fact that gay men leave less offspring than straight men, it is appropriate to raise a question by which means is male homosexuality maintained in a population and what could eventually be its evolutionary role. The aim of this paper is to summarize theories that try to explain male homosexuality within the framework of evolution. Furthermore, it aims to critically evaluate the results of empirical research that support particular theories or give evidence against them. In the first part, the paper provides a review of knowledge about the genetic and immunological origins of male homosexuality which consequently serves as a theoretical base for the main part of the paper that pursues the five most influential evolutionary theories of male homosexuality.

Quantifying Sexual Constitution: Abraham Myerson's Endocrine Study of Male Homosexuality, 1938-1942

Using the new medical science of endocrinology, scientific sex researchers in the 1920s and 1930s began studying sex hormone excretion as a means to search for the biological basis of human sexuality. One of these researchers was Abraham Myerson, a leading psychiatrist and researcher from Boston who conducted a series of innovative endocrine experiments between 1938 and 1942 in an effort to establish a relationship between sex hormone excretion patterns and homosexuality in men. While prevailing cultural models of heteronormativity identified male homosexuality as an abnormal case of biological femininity in men, Myerson’s framework and experimental research transcended this limiting duality of sexual biology. Adopting the theory of bisexuality, he argued that all men possessed a natural variability of masculine and feminine traits in their biological, social, and sexual characteristics, and that the disparity among these traits could be quantified and understood using sex hormones. In reconstructing Myerson’s research methods and data analysis, this paper uncovers how he established a distinctive diagnostic method and classification system for male homosexuality and illuminates how he conceptualized and categorized male sexuality as quantifiable and independent of personality.

A Focus on Male Homosexuality in Psychoanalytic Literature

Homosexuality has long been classified by many authors as a form of psychic immaturity. Today, it is widely accepted that homosexuality is not by definition a pathological development. In this article, I will focus on male homosexuality because I have been working with homosexual men for quite some time. In the first part, we will see that the Freudian and post-Freudian authors examined have largely emphasized the narcissistic failings of male homosexuals. In the Jungian corpus, which also serves as a reference, the homosexual is frequently considered as an individual whose relationship to his inner feminine is the result of a fusional identification with his mother. The abstract concepts of anima/animus have done little to remove homosexuality from the category of identity disorders. In the second part, I assume the possible existence of a homosexual instinct which everyone is confronted with and which would manifest itself in specific conditions. Certainly, no distinction between men and women should be made regarding my hypothesis of a homosexual instinct. However, from a scientific point of view, it has been impossible for me to prove that such an instinct really exists.

Homophobia and Antisemitism in Otto Julius Bierbaum’s Prinz Kuckuck (1907/08)

Starting from existing scholarship on the relationship among masculinity, sexuality, and Jewishness in the German-language cultural sphere, this article analyzes the connection between antisemitism and homophobia in Otto Julius Bierbaum’s fin-de-siècle novel Prinz Kuckuck. By tracing the respective paths of the Jewish protagonist and his male homosexual counterpart, the article elaborates on the specific versions of Jewishness and male homosexuality that Bierbaum’s novel creates. It can be shown that the novel exposes both the Jewish and the homosexual character as deficient and harmful. The novel, however, does not restrict itself to mere parallelization but establishes an intrinsic connection between the Jewish and the male homosexual character by integrating homosexual codes into the Jew’s “parasitic” repertoire. The article concludes by offering an explanation of this connection that draws on Moishe Postone’s critique of modern antisemitism. Antisemitism and homophobia are shown as two complementary and intrinsically connected ways of dealing with two dimensions of the experience of modernity: capitalism and social contingency.

Melancholia Scytharum: the early modern psychiatry of transgender identification

Herodotus’s enigmatic Scythian theleia nousos/morbus femininus and its Hippocratic interpretation interested many early modern authors. Its seeming dimension of transgender identification invited various medico-psychological and psychiatric reflections, culminating in nosologist de Sauvages’ tentative 1731 term, melancholia Scytharum. This article identifies pertinent discussions and what turn out to have been entangled, tentative psychologizations in late-seventeenth through mid-nineteenth-century mental medicine: of ‘effeminacy of manners’ ( mollities animi such as observed in London’s Beaux and mollies) and male homosexuality ( amour antiphysique/grec); of the mental masculinity of some women ( viragines, Amazones); of ubiquitous attributions of impotence to sorcery ( anaphrodisia magica); and lastly, of transfeminine persons encountered throughout the New World and increasingly beyond.

Language as a proxy for cultural change. A contrastive analysis for French and Italian lexicon on male homosexuality

Discrimination against LGBT people represents a significant and long-standing societal problem that occurs in several forms, including lexical discrimination, which consists in frequent usage of discriminatory epithets. Lexical discrimination produces a vicious circle where speakers grow subconsciously accustomed to abusive language and marginalisation becomes institutionalised. A vast literature has tackled lexical discrimination, providing several country-level studies. The cases of France and Italy are described as very different: while the French experience is centred around grassroot mobilisation, Italy features a traditional strategy of silence. This work aims to verify such difference empirically. Using a rich and detailed dataset, we apply time series analysis on the frequencies of usage of the terms that characterise male homosexuality. Our results highlight some similarities and some differences between the French and the Italian case, stressing the importance of lexical resemantisation that occurred in France but not in Italy.