Journeyman comments on When does heritable low fitness need to be explained? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Gay historian Rictor Norton vehemently disagrees with the notion that gay identities are recent. Here is his basic position:
He takes a position against social constructionism:
To see more, check out these excerpts from The Myth of the Modern Homosexual.
So there were slurs to refer to people who engaged in socially objectionable sexual behaviors. It doesn't mean that these people were obligate homosexuals and considered themselves as such.
That's Foucault's theory, but Rictor Norton's book I linked to convincingly debunks Foucault as ideological and ahistorical. Quoting an excerpt, here are historical cases of unmarried men going for each other instead of marriage and children:
These guys sound like they are exclusive, obligate homosexuals.
As for identity, just because the historical labels for queer people were negative, it does not mean that those terms were just externally-imposed slurs, and that homosexual identities did not exist:
Rictor Norton is a widely published queer historian, his research goes back centuries, and seems very solid. I think we should go with his account and toss Foucault's social constructionism.
Makes sense. However all these examples are from Christian Western societies, I wonder about non-Western or pre-Christian societies.