The Gay Gaze: A Timeline Documenting the Transition from “Behavior Is Identity” to “Identity Is Not Behavior” in American Culture, 1748–2025
The Closet Series — Behan
1748
The word masculinity enters the English language, initially as a grammatical term. It describes a category of nouns. It will take another century before it describes a category of men.
1868
Karl-Maria Kertbeny, a German-Hungarian journalist and physician, coins the words heterosexual and homosexual in a private letter to activist Karl Ulrichs. He is arguing against Prussia’s sodomy laws. He needs a category to defend. So he invents one. In doing so, he invents its opposite.
1892
The word heterosexual makes its first appearance in an American medical journal, in an article by Dr. James G. Kiernan. Heterosexuality is classified as a form of perversion — an excessive and misdirected appetite toward the opposite sex. The category arrives in America as a diagnosis, not a norm.
1901
Dorland’s Medical Dictionary defines heterosexuality as an “abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex.”
1934
Heterosexuality enters common American usage as a positive identity — the norm against which deviance is measured. From this point forward, behavior and identity are the same thing. You are what you do. The category is total or it is nothing.
1947
Los Angeles produces Vice Versa, the earliest known lesbian publication in the United States. It is typed and hand-distributed. It does not use the mail. It cannot.
1948
Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, and Clyde Martin publish Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Kinsey’s scale runs from 0 to 6. Zero is exclusively heterosexual. Six is exclusively homosexual. The research finds that most men do not live at the poles. Significant percentages of men report same-sex experiences but identify as heterosexual. The behavior and the identity do not match.
1950
Harry Hay founds the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles — the first sustained gay rights organization in the United States.
1952
Dale Jennings, arrested in Los Angeles on a charge of sexual solicitation, becomes the first known gay man to contest the charge publicly rather than plead guilty to avoid exposure. The jury deadlocks. The judge dismisses the case.
1953
ONE Inc. begins publishing ONE Magazine in Los Angeles — the first nationally distributed homosexual publication in the United States.
1955
Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon found the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco — the first lesbian organization in the United States.
1958
The U.S. Supreme Court rules in One Inc. v. Olesen that the federal government cannot suppress a gay publication on grounds of obscenity. It is the first Supreme Court ruling in favor of gay rights. That same year, the first recorded gay riot in American history takes place at Cooper Do-nuts in downtown Los Angeles, when patrons fight back against routine LAPD harassment.
1967
On New Year’s Eve, undercover LAPD officers raid the Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake neighborhood, beating patrons and arresting sixteen people. On February 11, approximately 200 people march in protest — one of the first organized public demonstrations for gay rights in American history.
1969
On June 28, patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York City resist a police raid. The uprising lasts several days. The gay community seizes behavior — resistance, visibility, presence — and makes it identity. Pride marches follow the next year in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago.
1973
The American Psychiatric Association removes homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Same-sex attraction is no longer a pathology. The binary holds.
1978
Fritz Klein publishes The Bisexual Option, proposing a seven-variable grid that measures attraction, behavior, fantasy, emotional preference, social preference, self-identification, and lifestyle — separately, across time.
1981
On June 5, the Centers for Disease Control reports five cases of a rare pneumonia among young gay men in Los Angeles. On July 3, twenty-six cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma are reported among gay men in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The disease will be called GRID — Gay-Related Immune Deficiency — before it is renamed AIDS. Behavior is immediately coded as the cause, the vector, and the identity of the epidemic. To have it is to be identified by what you did.
1986
The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Bowers v. Hardwick that states may criminalize sodomy between consenting adults of the same sex. The state’s position is explicit: the behavior defines the person, and the person may be criminalized for it. The closet receives federal endorsement.
1996
Congress passes the Defense of Marriage Act, signed by President Clinton. Marriage is federally defined as a union between one man and one woman. Identity, at the level of the state, requires the correct behavior to qualify.
2003
On June 26, the U.S. Supreme Court rules 6-3 in Lawrence v. Texas, striking down the remaining sodomy laws in fourteen states. For the first time in American history, the law formally declares that behavior is not identity. The majority opinion holds that the state cannot demean anyone’s existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. The transition is official. The country has crossed from “behavior is identity” to “identity is not behavior.”
That same year, Jeffrey Escoffier publishes Gay-for-Pay: Straight Men and the Making of Gay Pornography — the first formal academic study of straight-identified men performing in gay adult film. The law has just separated behavior from identity. Academia is already documenting men who have been living that separation all along.
2010
Researchers Reback and Larkins formally define and study heterosexual-identified men who have sex with men — H-MSM. The finding is clinical: these men are not closeted gay men. They retain their heterosexual identity across time and across contexts. The discordance between identity and behavior is sustained. It does not resolve.
2015
On June 26, the U.S. Supreme Court rules 5-4 in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry in all fifty states. Identity is granted full legal standing independent of what the dominant culture has historically required behavior to prove. Lawrence and Obergefell are both decided on June 26, twelve years apart.
2022
On June 7, Nick Fitt, then head of production at Falcon Studios, announces he will no longer hire gay-for-pay performers. The backlash is immediate. Falcon Studios publicly denounces the position as discriminatory. Fitt exits the company. The industry has made its ruling: straight men in gay adult film are not a contradiction. They are a market.
2024–2025
Peer-reviewed research estimates that heterosexual-identified men who have sex with men comprise approximately 0.5 to 3.5 percent of heterosexual men, and between 1.26 and 5.4 percent of all men who have sex with men. A separate estimate places H-MSM at approximately 8 percent of sexually active cisgender males in North America. Contemporary sexuality researchers now define orientation by three components — identity, attraction, and behavior — and understand these as potentially independent of one another.
2025
The Braidwood Management case reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, challenging the ACA requirement that insurers cover PrEP — the medication that reduces HIV transmission by approximately 99 percent — without cost-sharing. The original lawsuit is described by advocates as an attack initiated by conservative plaintiffs who sought to ensure that gay men could not access PrEP, on the grounds that the medication encourages and facilitates homosexual behavior. On June 27, the Court rules 6-3 to uphold the coverage requirement. The Trump administration simultaneously moves to defund CDC HIV and hepatitis prevention programs. The argument against PrEP is the argument against the behavior. The argument against the behavior is the argument against the identity. The logic is 1934. The year is 2025.
Sources
Kertbeny, Karl-Maria. Private letter to Karl Ulrichs, May 6, 1868.
Kiernan, James G. “Responsibility in Sexual Perversion.” Chicago Medical Recorder, 1892.
Dorland’s American Illustrated Medical Dictionary. 1901.
Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. W.B. Saunders, 1948.
Klein, Fritz. The Bisexual Option. Arbor House, 1978.
Centers for Disease Control. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, June 5, 1981.
Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986).
Defense of Marriage Act, Pub. L. 104-199 (1996).
Escoffier, Jeffrey. “Gay-for-Pay: Straight Men and the Making of Gay Pornography.” Qualitative Sociology, 2003.
Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).
Reback, Cathy J., and Steven Larkins. “Maintaining a Heterosexual Identity: Sexual Meanings Among a Sample of Heterosexually Identified Men Who Have Sex With Men.” Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2010.
Blank, Hanne. Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality. Beacon Press, 2012.
Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015).
Scheadler, Travis R., et al. “Identity Development, Attraction, and Behavior of Heterosexual-Identified Men Who Have Sex with Men: A Scoping Review.” Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 2024–2025.
Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, U.S. Supreme Court, decided June 27, 2025.
The Timeline is Always Present.
