Abstract
When the first serious studies of the homosexual past began to appear in English, they bore titles like Hidden from History and Who Was That Man? Even now such studies may describe themselves as “disclosures,” “the secret life,” “the untold story.” The suggestion is that there has been, if not a deliberate suppression, then a less-than-benign neglect of those aspects of history that revealed the presence of same-sex desire and behavior. To unearth and disclose them was regarded as essential to the struggle for gay liberation. By establishing homosexual individuals as a presence from time immemorial, one could make the study of them respectable and thereby bestow respectability on their practices, sexual and cultural, as well. This endeavor was complicated by the increasingly heated debate between the “essentialists,” who regard a homosexual identity to be innate and ahistorical, and the “social constructionists,” followers of Foucault, who insist on the evolution of a modern homosexual identity as the result of changes in the concept of sexuality. Often the fruits of research have been obscured by contentions over whether they supported one camp or the other. Valuable data, which might have gone to challenge traditional attitudes or conventional postures, fell unheard on ears deafened by the grinding of axes.
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