Homosexuality

Homosexuality is a sexual orientation characterized by durable romantic, sexual, or both forms of attraction directed at people of the same sex or gender. The American Psychological Association treats it, alongside heterosexuality and bisexuality, as one of the normal variants of human sexual orientation rather than a chosen behavior or a disorder (APA). In everyday and clinical usage the term functions as an umbrella covering both gay men and lesbians, though the community-preferred, plain-language labels are "gay" (commonly used for men, and sometimes as a general term for anyone attracted to the same gender) and "lesbian" (specifically women attracted to women) (HRC).

Major style and advocacy guides now advise against "homosexual" as a noun or adjective for people outside clinical or historical contexts. GLAAD's media reference guide notes that the word's origin as a 19th-century psychiatric label has made it a vehicle for implying that same-sex attraction is a disorder — a claim the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association formally rejected in the 1970s — and recommends "gay," "lesbian," or "queer" instead (GLAAD).

Institutions also separate orientation from behavior and from self-identification. The APA's working definition encompasses "a person's sense of identity based on those attractions, related behaviors, and membership in a community," and it observes that "people can be celibate and still know their sexual orientation" — meaning behavior is not a precondition for orientation, and some people experience same-sex attraction without adopting any corresponding label (APA). The same framework distinguishes homosexuality, an orientation toward one gender, from bisexuality, which involves attraction to more than one gender.

History

Kertbeny's coinage was not an isolated act of naming: in an 1868 letter to fellow campaigner Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the Austro-Hungarian journalist privately introduced the terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual," part of an argument against Prussia's anti-sodomy statutes (Wikipedia). The terms reached wide clinical circulation only after psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing adopted them as a paired diagnostic vocabulary in his 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis (Wikipedia).

For most of the following century the term carried the weight of that clinical origin: the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) classified homosexuality as a mental disorder. Its Board of Trustees voted in December 1973 to declassify it; opponents forced a referendum among the full APA membership, which upheld the Board's decision by a 58% majority in 1974, formally ending homosexuality's status as a psychiatric diagnosis (Wikipedia). Community organizing accelerated in the same era, most visibly after the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City, which is widely regarded as a catalyzing event for the modern gay rights movement (Wikipedia).

Demographics & research

Gallup's ongoing U.S. tracking poll found that 9.3% of American adults identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or otherwise non-heterosexual in 2024, up from 3.5% when Gallup first measured the figure in 2012; among that group, 21% identified specifically as gay and 15% as lesbian (Gallup). Public acceptance has moved in step: Pew Research Center found that 72% of U.S. adults said homosexuality should be accepted by society in its 2019 survey, up from 49% in 2007 (Pew Research Center). Acceptance is far from uniform worldwide — the same Pew study found fewer than one in ten adults endorsed acceptance in several countries, including Nigeria (1%) and Indonesia (3%), against majorities above 80% in Spain and Germany, a gap Pew links closely to national wealth (Pew Research Center).

Terminology & related identities

"Homosexuality" is monosexual — directed at one gender — placing it opposite heterosexuality and alongside it under the broader monosexual/plurisexual distinction used to group orientation terms. Lesbian specifically denotes women attracted to women; achillean (or "MLM," men-loving-men) is a newer umbrella covering men and men-aligned people attracted to men regardless of how they otherwise identify, with sapphic as its counterpart for women and women-aligned people. The split-attraction model distinguishes sexual from romantic orientation: homoromanticism names romantic attraction to the same gender independent of sexual attraction, which some homosexual people experience differently in degree or kind. Homoflexibility describes a predominantly but not exclusively homosexual pattern of attraction, paralleling heteroflexibility on the other side of the spectrum. "Gay" is also used informally as an umbrella for the wider LGBTQ community, a broader usage GLAAD's style guide distinguishes from its narrower, more precise sense as a synonym for homosexual (GLAAD).

Common misconceptions

GLAAD's reference guide rejects "sexual preference" as a description of homosexuality, noting that the phrase is typically used to wrongly imply that attraction to the same sex is a matter of choice rather than an enduring orientation, and recommends "sexual orientation" instead (GLAAD). Relatedly, the American Psychological Association reports that decades of research — including its own 2007 review of 83 published studies — found no credible evidence that so-called conversion or "reparative" therapies can change a person's sexual orientation, and documented that such efforts carry meaningful risk of depression, anxiety, and other psychological harm (APA).