Egalitarian: From Homophile to Helicophile in Post-World War II America

The presidency of gender in the Anglo-American taxonomy of sexualities historically has been haunted by the irruption of "other" parameters of medicalization, censure, and caesura, not in the least absolute and relative measures of age. Where today's clinical psychologists feel the need to age-specify adult homosexuality in such Hirschfeldian terms as androphilia, however, the felt need is indeed still essentially clinical. That cosmopolitan expressions such as homosexual, LGB, or queer rarely require such specifications relies on a protracted and today, arguably, complete disarticulation of sex/gender and age/maturity as parameters of sexual orientation, accreditation, and mobilization. Notably disconnected discursive frames gave voice to this Anglophone crystallization of "the normal homosexual" (circa 1950-1980): criminological, psychiatric, psychophysiological, and psychodynamic typologies of "sexual deviation" (variably tending to correlate, align, or subsume same-sex and age-disparate intimacies); territorializing apologias of gay, but also of "Greek," "pederast," and "man-boy," socialities; anthropological-historical exotification of "age-stratified homosexualities"; and mostly European, proto-queer critiques of all "bourgeois" sexual classification.