Volume 27, Number 19 · December 4, 1980
Rescuing Homosexual History
By Keith Thomas
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century
by John Boswell
The University of Chicago Press, 424 pp., $27.50
It is not uncommon for readers to get angry with a book before they have reached the end of the first chapter. It is less usual for them to become irritated before they have even finished reading the title. John Boswell's subtitle to his absorbing and scholarly book will certainly annoy those who still feel that the printed use of the slang term 'gay' to mean homosexual should be resisted. Mr. Boswell dislikes the word 'homosexual.' It is, he points out, a neologism which was coined only in the late nineteenth century and was introduced to England (by J.A. Symonds and Havelock Ellis) in the 1890s. It has, he thinks, four major defects: it has disagreeable pathological overtones; it falsely suggests that homosexuals are more preoccupied with sexuality than are other people; it is seldom applied to women; and it is imprecise (for how many homosexual acts are needed to make a person a 'homosexual'?).
Review, 3795 words
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