Throughout history, one can chart how language has been used to stigmatize and persecute same-sex relations. The now famous phrase “the love that dare not speak its name” illustrate a history of criminalization and medicalization of homosexuality that has left an indelible imprint on the language of the law.
By Graeme Reid for Human Rights Watch
“What is ‘the love that dare not speak its name’?” asked Charles Gill, prosecutor in the trial of Oscar Wilde in London in 1895. It is a question that remains relevant today: laws from around the world that target lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people are often sweeping in application and vague in definition. Throughout history, one can chart how language has been used to stigmatize and persecute same-sex relations.
Wilde was initially arrested on charges of both “sodomy” and “gross indecency,” and was prosecuted for the latter. The now famous phrase – “the love that dare not speak its name” – was penned by his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, in a poem published in 1894, a year before Wilde’s arrest. Two decades earlier, in 1870, German psychiatrist Carl Westphal wrote the first medical account of “contrary sexual feeling,” which French philosopher Michel Foucault cites as the origin of “homosexuality” as a medical category.
The examples of Wilde and Westphal illustrate a history of criminalization and medicalization of homosexuality that has left an indelible imprint on the language of the law, and there is a biblical reference in the crime of “sodomy” to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. To delve into the history of homosexuality in the Western world one needs to surround oneself with police records, medical files and religious edicts. These are the self-appointed “voices of institutional authority” that have historically sought to define, regulate, and control same-sex sexuality.
In claiming a right to speak for themselves, LGBT people have sought to redefine their identities on their own terms. For these reasons language is a particularly important – and sensitive – topic within the LGBT movement. LGBT people have organized around the very identities that have been used to oppress them through medical diagnosis, legislation and social opprobrium. Terminology is thus an inevitable part of this struggle against pathologization, criminal penalties, and social stigma.
Image: At a March 8, 2015 demonstration in central Moscow, an activist is detained as soon as she unfurled a rainbow flag. © 2015 Evgeny Belyakov/Human Rights Watch
Source: Human Rights Watch
Original article: Outlawed: Legal Discrimination against Gays and Lesbians
