For the rest of humanity: Ever since the publication of Foucault's _History of Sexuality_, if not before, it has been a staple of gay/lesbian history and studies of sexuality in general that the social categories and identities of heterosexuality and homosexuality are modern in origin. Despite some minor differences of opinion about the precise historical point at which one could identify their first appearance, there is little question in the literature that a fundamental break in how sexual acts were understood took place in the modern epoch. Foucault himself wrote about the transition from a religious discourse, in which gay sex was one of many sins a person could commit, not all that different from gluttony or sloth, to a medical and psychological discourse, in which a gay sex act defined an entire person: "the sodomite has been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species." (The one significant dissenter from this view was the late Yale historian, John Boswell, author of the classic _Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality_.)
The question of why this development took place, what mechanisms of power brought these species of sexual beings into existence, is a much more complex matter, and the literature is generally silent on it. For my own part, I think that the answer lies in the observation that there are pretty clear and unmistakable historical parallels between the development of such sexual categories and the development of racial categories: the modern era also creates racial categories, once again definitive of a person's very being, out of what had been minority religions. In the Spanish Inquisition, for example, a Jew became known not by a profession of religious faith, but as part of a racial category defined by the bloodlines of the mother; at the start of New World slavery, the basis for the enslavement of people of African origin quickly shifted from their 'heathen' religious status to a racial category defined by the bloodlines of the mother. What this suggests to me is that there something about the modern state's mechanisms of power which require the establishment of a singular and homogeneous social norm, as well as the demarcation of that norm from various deviations from it. These mechanisms reach their logical conclusion and extreme form in the totalitarian state, which takes the dynamic of state power to its extreme form. I would also root those mechanisms of power in the ways in which the modern state organizes and "colonizes" the temporal and spatial foundations of the nations it rules, in the ways in which constitutes that power.
Now, there clearly is an absurdity to these social categories in that they purport to define the very being of an entire class of people by virtue of a single set of characteristics; there is also a falsity to them in the sense that the establishment of norms and deviations attempts to 'fix', to 'center', to 'unify' in extraordinarily limited, homogeneous social categories and identities, a wide variety of different, heterogeneous and contradictory social practices, and to make that one social category and identity definitive of all other social being we have. But as Skip Gates once noted with reference to his great difficulty in getting a cab in Boston, just because race is a trope, doesn't mean it ain't real, that it doesn't produce lived experiences for people of color. Inner city youth don't fear tropes, they fear 'real' bullets from 'real' guns that 'really' kill. One can not, therefore, simply declare these social categories and identities absurd and false, and thereby step outside of them. Rather, we must embrace the deviant identities, for this is the only way to resist the negative social meaning given to it (thus, 'black is beautiful,' 'gay is good,' etc.), but only in a provisional way which simultaneously and paradoxically rejects the right of the overall system of normalizing to define our being, reducing it to some imposed homogeneous identity and social category. For to declare, in this society at this time, "I am not gay" is to say "I am straight," and to declare "I am not a person of color" is to say "I am white." Whether or not a historical moment will appear in the future in which discourses of sexuality are no longer meaningful determiners of our being, that is clearly not the case now.
There is a general principle here: it is not possible to resist relations of power from their 'outside,' should such a space even exist. Just as a nationalist movement in a colonized African nation would find itself forced to embrace the language of the colonizer, as the only language that all of the different ethnic groups had in common, as the only national language, so too is it impossible to us to resist the language of the power of sexuality without first embracing it.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --