Of all your provocations this is one of the more thought inducing brain twisters you’ve thrown our way.. I don’t have Halperin’s new book yet but have a proximity of where he goes if it’s at all like his earlier work, like “100 years of Homosexuality ‘ . There, even a few years ago, David Halprin (2002 ) gave only passing mention to Kertbeny’s new distinction, failing to make note as you have, of it’s immense significance to his social constructivist view in a society’s thought and perception. It is significant especially at that time in Europe since it was an age of science and qualification; as always happens in formal or informal nomenclature, nothing has any functional existence without being named, and schematized as in the relationship to” heterosexuality”(which was also amasingly new)!

In this case, ‘homosexuality” or even heterosexuality simply had no name nor was their an equivalent concept prior to Mr Kentbeny. Their was literally no conceptual paradigm separating sexual proclivities in people. This is not I think, unlike Copernican ‘heliocentrism“ or Newtonian” gravity” which gave science and everyday thought about the world a whole new and radical shift in how we conceived things and did things , which had no prior functional existence, such as is inventing and predicting events. These two are significant as is sexual differentiation. However, there are almost similarly formative concepts like Mark’s use of the word “metrosexual “ or those 13 different descriptors for frozen water e.g. ice, frost etc . . . which the Eskimos use in in describing variations. Because of their environment they have use for that many distinctions. As Witgenstien demonstrated with ordinary language this process is how words gain meaning in our social structure and how meaning comes to be for us.

My fear now is that American homosexuals are attempting passionately to confound heterosexuality and homosexuality in the current acrobatics of marriage ”rights.”
For the moment I will let others get sick around that assimilationist proposal. Although I can’t help but pointing out the literal idiocy of finding identity since Kentbeny and true rights, as he proposed and this mind bending, identity corrupting exercise. Believe it or not these boobs seem intent on reversing what authenticity we’ve found since our coming to be in 1869.
What people will do for respectability!

Wahhabism, the reactionary strain of Islam had origins in the mid 18th Century and terrorized even the majority of peaceful Muslims, tearing down their temples and giving a rigid aspect to the religion, had minimal specific sexual concerns. It was only when leaders of the movement had visited the West that they gave wholesale condemnation to every aspect of Western way of life.
The same extremists would probably not engage in consuming condemned Western products etc., but others would in secrecy. My soccer friends drank and went out with Western women here; but when they went home to ,e. g. , Liberia, they would resume good behavior.

The interesting point to be made as it relates to Kentbenys’ distinction, is that there was, to my knowledge not even a distinction for homosexuals/heterosexuals, as there was not in the West prior to Kentbeny. While there may be now, due to translation, to my knowledge , they just had words like “zamil” to designate a gender distinction much like our “sexual inversion” which was only remotely associated with female -like behavior for instance liking cats, in the West.
Without the words there is not the reality of a distinction of types of people, even if the(now) related behavior had occurred for hundreds of years.

Certainly the unprovoked violence directed from the West didn’t win the U.S, any friends.or adherents to our lifestyle.

I’m not a fan of anti-prop 8 hysteria but a lot of “politically active Moslem patriots” are just small minded bigots too. It’s a human trait. Some Muslim countries are going through a fascisto phase right now – in much the same way European and Asian countries did 80 years ago. They reminisce about a pure pre-modern culture that never existed but are quite happy to watch the latest Hollywood techno-porn blockbuster.

Johns Fortune and Bird (now best known as the two talking heads on the Rory Bremner programme) wrote a book “A Melon for Ecstasy” in the early 1970s. The inhabitants of a small village wonder why every tree has had a hole drilled into it at the same height and angle. Turns out it’s a tree rapist. Splinters are a serious danger.

Melons are much more accommodating