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Throughout history those sharing homosexual interests have formed clubs, societies and special locations to share and explore their interest in homosexuality. Since the seventeenth century, homosexuality has been the target of condemnation and discriminatory laws, public policies, social customs, and cultural beliefs.

By making gay men and lesbians the object of scorn, this hostility has kept much homosexual behavior hidden. Religion has been of central importance in shaping this climate. Until the thirteenth century, the Christian tradition was ambiguous in its attitude toward homosexuality. But with the recodification of canon law under the influence of Thomas Aquinas, new attitudes set in.

Homosexual behavior was thereafter excoriated as a heinous sin. The English carried these beliefs to North America, and the power of religion in early America guaranteed that such beliefs would shape colonial attitudes. For seventeenth-century settlers, with a precarious foothold on the edge of an unknown continent, the metaphor of an angry God destroying Sodom and Gomorrah must have been potent.

Gay language of colonial sodomy statutes was drawn from the Bible. Colonial statutes severely punished homosexual activity. To be sure, many other sexual acts, such clube adultery and fornication, were also subject to punishment.

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But officials tended to single out homosexual offenses for especially severe treatment. Thomas Jefferson proposed that death be replaced by castration. Moreover, as time went on, legislatures and courts broadened the statutes to include a wider range of acts, such as oral sex between men and sexual activity between women. And even though the ties between religion and the state had become attenuated, religious language continued to surface.

In the late nineteenth century, medical science added to the negative evaluation of homosexuality. The medical profession grew in influence, and almost without exception, American physicians diagnosed homosexuality as a form of gay. At first, opinion varied as to whether it was acquired or congenital; with the ascendance of Freudianism the acquired model became dominant.

A prolific medical literature, as well as records of gay, suggest that many doctors viewed homosexuality with dread. Remedies included castration, hysterectomy, lobotomy, electroshock, and aversion clube. The medical model gathered still more force in the mid-twentieth century.

The immigration of German and Austrian psychoanalysts during the s and the clube use of psychiatrists by the military during World War II gave the profession more influence. Studies of their application reveal patterns of selective enforcement that singled out male homosexuals.

In Sioux City, Iowa, for instance, in the late s, the district attorney, employing a psychopath law, committed twenty-nine male homosexuals to asylums. Under these laws, homosexuals were often given indeterminate sentences in mental institutions as punishment. By the middle of the century only murder, rape, and kidnapping elicited heavier penalties of any sort than did private consensual sexual activity.

The shifting definitions of homosexuality, from sinful criminal act to diseased condition, have pointed historians toward important theoretical formulations, especially the distinction between homosexual acts, which can be documented across history and culture, and homosexual identities.