Definition and meaning of sexual orientation

This essay first examines the current discourse on homosexuality and shows how a "gay identity" has been forged within the doctrines and rituals of the gay liberation movement. This substantiation of the gay person is then linked to "the homosexual," created by medicine in the nineteenth century as one piece in a vast mosaic of sexual "perversions." Finally, it is argued that to depict sexuality as fixed, bifurcated states of sexual orientation, and to ignore the fact that erotic preference is labile and interpenetrated by elements of physicality, emotion, and fantasy, is to impede and even to misdirect research.