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or some other combination of participants. A “sodomite” was not a kind of person but a person who committed a particular type of sin. In the same way that a usurer committed the act of moneylending or a murderer committed the act of killing, a sodomite committed the act of sodomy. It was not an identity label but a rap sheet.
    Part of the Catholic understanding of “sodomy” was an awareness that sexual sin was something that could happen to anyone. Simply feeling desire put one at risk. Sexual misbehavior was not a marker of some sort of constitutional difference but merely evidence of temptation unsuccessfully resisted.
    This sensibility is a large part of why, prior to the nineteenth century, Western culture did not include the concept that all people were split into two sexual camps. It is also why there does not seem to have been much sense, prior to the eighteenth century, of people thinking in terms of a hierarchy of sexual “types.” The tendency instead was to think in terms of people who, openly or covertly, occasionally or habitually, engaged in a variety of sexual acts. Some of those acts were more sinful than others. The only sex act that was not considered sinful in the eyes of the Catholic Church was potentially procreativepenis-in-vagina intercourse performed within the context of a valid marriage, and even that had to be performed in particular ways and limited to specific times.
    Much has changed. We are now so used to thinking of sexuality in terms of orientations and identities, “deviant” versus “normal,” that it hardly occurs to us that there might be workable alternatives to our customary ways of thinking. But history shows that there are actually many such alternatives. The desire for sexual activity has been thought about, as in classic Catholic dogma, as a manifestation of the unruly appetites of the earthly body, possibly goaded on by forces of evil. But the desire for sexual activity has also been imagined simply as a biological function, like eating or elimination, a common concept in both Classical thought and in the neoclassical thought of the intellectual eighteenth century.
    Our modern habit of interpreting sexual desire as a manifestation of our identities, part and parcel of our individual human selves, is merely one more option. But since the nineteenth century, this has been the option our culture has chosen more than any other. As French philosopher Michel Foucault famously put it in his
History of Sexuality,
a particular sexual type became “a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology. . . . It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature.” This is the view upon which the existence of “heterosexual” depends.
    This was not an overnight shift but a process. Although it had its roots in earlier changes in philosophy and science and law, the nineteenth century became the era in which the decisive shift occurred. By the end of the nineteenth century, Western culture had learned to view sexual desire and activity not as a unified field on its own, but as a collection of specific and distinctive desires and activities, each of which had a role to play in helping to define a specific and distinctive subtype of human being. Many different desires and acts were given official names in this period, making the momentous shift from merely
being
to
being known.
As these desires and acts were defined and characterized and written down in the right authoritative ways by the right authoritative people, they were used to help create anotherset of known entities: sexual types. Of these, the most powerful and important, and certainly the most enduring and culture-altering, were “homosexual” and “heterosexual.”
    Because the terms have become ubiquitous, we forget that “homosexual” and “heterosexual”