A Pansy by Any Other Name…
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Unspeakable Crime: Sodomite, Bugger, Bardash

The survey begins in the early Middle Ages, when the five languages were just emerging from their ancient Latinate or Germanic roots. It was a time when the Roman Catholic Church controlled moral standards and law, which included a strict taboo on all forms of nonprocreative sex, including anal intercourse. So severe was this prohibition that such acts could scarcely even be spoken of. But since the authorities needed to refer to these acts to enforce the taboo, various words were used. As Lo Vecchio explains it, they were chosen to express the stigma in a way that referred indirectly to the deed in question and may have subsumed multiple sexual acts deemed sinful or illegal.

            The word “sodomite” derives from the Old Testament city of Sodom, which was destroyed by God for its wickedness. As a Latin word, it originally meant simply an inhabitant of Sodom, but around the year 1150 CE, it came to mean someone who has committed the crimen nefandum, the crime which is not to be named. From “sodomite” the abstraction “sodomy” was derived, which was applied to all kinds of bad things, such as heresy and usury, but a “sodomite” was one who engaged in anal intercourse.

            “Sodomite” arrived in England with the Norman Conquest in the 11th century. “Sodomy” has had a thousand-year run and is still in use, though its meaning has narrowed to the familiar sexual one. Its importance lies less in its usage in religious discourse than in its legal application. Despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that threw out sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas, several states retain anti-sodomy laws, even if they are not enforced.

            The word “bugger” has a more enigmatic history. Deriving from the Latin Bulgari (Bulgars) in the 1200s, it became the French word bougre, referring to a heretic, which in turn became the English word “bugger.” Why the Bulgarians were singled out is something of a mystery. They were among the Orthodox Christians of Eastern Europe who were regarded as heretics by the Roman Catholic Church but not necessarily associated with a particular sex act. Lo Vecchio explains that “sodomite” was the term preferred by preachers, while “bugger” was a slangier word that was used by regular people to refer to deviant sexuality, especially anal sex. “Buggery” also found its way into legal usage. Lo Vecchio cites an English law of 1533 (translated here into modern English):

An Act for the punishment of the vice of Buggerie: Inasmuch as there is not yet sufficient and condign punishment appointed and limited by the due course of the laws of this Realm for the detestable and abominable vice of buggery committed with mankind or beast … that the same offence be from henceforth adjudged [a]felony.

Over centuries of use, the word has lost much of its punch. Lo Vecchio notes that French bougre has worn out the meaning of anal intercourse and has become inoffensive, and in English “bugger” is a mild swear word.

            “Bardashes” were foreigners like sodomites and buggers, this time from Italy. Some writers have conjectured that the word was borrowed from Arabic, Persian, or Turkish, but the word is not attested in those languages. Bardassa appears in an Italian dictionary of 1478, defined as the bottom partner in anal intercourse. Italian has grammatical gender, so it could be masculine bardasso or feminine bardassa, but when the feminine form was used, it referred to males.

            The word arrived in England a century later, and Lo Vecchio cites a 1600 translation from Italian into English (again rendered here in modern usage): “But yet that folly of Nero surpassed them all, for he had a desire to bring forth like women; he made a stallion and bardasso boy of himself at one instant; and touching Sporus [a slave boy whom Nero castrated and made his empress]his Ganymede, he entered into this notable folly, that he would needs see him of a male as he was, turned into a woman by the Physicians.” In North America, the word was translated again from French into English, becoming berdache to designate certain members of Native American tribes. The term “two spirit” is now the preferred term, while the use of berdache is controversial among anthropologists.

Libertinism: Tribade, Pederast, Sapphist, Lesbian

The Libertines, opponents of John Calvin’s restrictive view of proper Christian behavior, developed an erotic vocabulary roughly from the 1550s to the 1850s that was free of medieval religiosity and evoked the Glory that was Greece. They added a pulse of sexual energy to the French Revolution, and it is no coincidence that the Marquis de Sade wrote The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage while a prisoner in the Bastille. The Libertine period’s innovative vocabulary often focused on women’s sexuality, with special attention to anatomy.

            These terms include “tribade,” which was naturalized into French from the Latin tribadas, which in turn was borrowed from Greek τριβάς, meaning one who rubs, an attempt to solve that age-old puzzle for men: “What do two women actually do in bed?” The ancient writers left it at that—they rub—but the Humanist scholars and the anatomy professors (all men) wanted the anatomical details, and this generated a huge metalinguistic discourse. The clitoris was imagined to function like a penis, and the conceit was that tribades engaged in clitoral penetration of their partners. “Tribade” spread from French to other languages, as seen in this example in English from 1585: “Even as in times past wer the Tribades, of the number wherof was Sapho the Lesbian which transferred the love wherwith she pursued a 100 women or maidens.”

            “Pederast” also harks back to Classical Greece. The “er-” in the middle of the word is Eros, the god of sexual love, who also lurks in “erotic.” Originally “pederast” referred to the older partner in a Hellenic military pairing of young men with veteran soldiers who initiated them in love and warfare. This was a formal relationship understood by all and approved by the families; when the junior partner matured and became a veteran in his turn, he could take a younger man as his comrade in battle.

            But early modern Europe had no such institution, and ordinary speakers did not make such fine distinctions. “Pederasty” was used as a synonym for sodomy and buggery—plain old anal intercourse. In France, it took another turn. Pédérast was shortened to pédé and became a slang word—used first as a homophobic slur, then adopted by the pédés as their preferred word for themselves. The abbreviation PD looks great on a banner or scrawled on a wall.

            “Sapphist” is another echo of Classical Greece, from the name of the great poet Sappho. Her sexual preferences were debated in antiquity, but her songs of love, which are addressed to women, speak for themselves. Here is Samuel Johnson’s friend Hester Thrale, writing about poor Marie Antoinette, just three months before the storming of the Bastille: “Nature does get strangely out of Fashion sure enough: One hears of Things now, fit for the Pens of Petronius only, or Juvenal to record and satyrize: The Queen of France is at the Head of a Set of Monsters call’d by each other Sapphists, who boast her Example; and deserve to be thrown with the He Demons that haunt each other likewise, into Mount Vesuvius.”

            The closely related term “lesbian” refers to inhabitants of the island of Lesbos, where, according to Lord Byron, “Burning Sappho loved and sung.” The word was also used sometimes to refer to, well, lesbians, but “sapphist” and “tribade” appeared more frequently in the medical journals. It was not until the 20th century that woman-loving women adopted the term, as Jill Johnson announced in Lesbian Nation (1973): “Within just two years the meaning of the word lesbian has changed from private subversive activity to political revolutionary identity.”

Sexology: Uranian, Invert, Homosexual

After the frivolous Libertines came the earnest sexologists. This movement began in the German-speaking areas of Europe in the second half of the 19th century and spread rapidly. Sexology was a genuine science, as much as psychology or sociology of the era, but it was never accepted by academic and medical professionals, which is why universities don’t have sexology departments today.

            The term “Urning” was introduced in the 1850s by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer and journalist. His revolutionary idea was to change the focus from sex acts, such as anal intercourse or frottage, to sexual orientation. Ulrichs recognized four orientations: “Urnings,” men attracted to men; “Dionings,” men attracted to women; “Urningins,” women attracted to women; and “Dioningins,” women attracted to men. Of these, only “Urning” caught on. It became “Uranian” in other languages and was used as a literary term, as seen in this passage from a letter written by Oscar Wilde: “A patriot put in prison for loving his country loves his country, and a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys. To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble—more noble than other forms.”

            The 19th-century term “invert” was derived from the term Conträre Sexualempfindung (contrary sexual feeling) proposed in 1869 by Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal, a German professor of medicine. Westphal’s neologism was more scientific and less poetic than any of the prior terms, but it was a translator’s nightmare. After several tries and much metalinguistic discourse, “inverted sexual instinct” became the usual translation, and persons with such instincts were labeled inverts. This word offered several advantages: It was not religious or mythological, and it applied to both women and men. But “invert” didn’t catch on outside medical journals. And it was too close to “pervert,” another stigmatizing word that was use in by the late 19th century to describe those attracted to their own sex.

            These terms battled it out for general acceptance in the late 19th century, but the term “homosexual” finally won the day. It was not a medical term nor a legal term; it was coined in 1860 as a German word by the Hungarian journalist and gay rights activist Karl Maria Kertbeny. Purists complained that it combined the Latin root sex with the Greek prefix homo, but by the 1890s it had pretty much cleared the field. Havelock Ellis overcame such scruples because the word worked:

It has, philologically, the awkward disadvantage of being a bastard term compounded of Greek and Latin elements, but its significance—sexual attraction to the same sex—is fairly clear and definite, while it is free from any question-begging association of either favorable or unfavorable character. … The term “homosexual” has the further advantage that on account of its classical origin it is easily translatable into many languages. It is now the most widespread general term for the phenomena we are dealing with.

It also provided the template for a large family of related words and phrases—“heterosexual,” “bisexual,” “transsexual,” “asexual,” “intersexual,” as well as “homophobic” and related “phobias.”

Sexual Revolution: Gay, Queer

While learned professionals struggled for words with which to talk about sexuality, ordinary people were using a rich vocabulary. Every language had its own. In English, “queer,” “pansy,” and “faggot” were commonplace. The French used pédé, the Germans Schwul, the Spanish maricón or puto, and the Italians finocchio. But these words were all pejoratives. A term was needed that did not imply crime, sickness, or sinfulness. “Gay” to the rescue! It was an old word, arriving in England from France in the 12th century, and for the next 900 years it had a merry life as a synonym for “jolly.” But in the 1930s, in North America, it started to become a code word for homosexuals, and by 1949 Swasarnt Nerf’s Gayese-English Dictionary declared its dominance: “GAY: Homosexual, queer (adj.). The only word used by homosexuals with reference to themselves, their friends, their haunts, etc.”

            By the 1960s “gay” was known in police reports and the theater world, and by the end of the decade everyone learned the term. Activist Frank Kameny observed: “The change came fast. As late as 1968–69 we were still having meetings of nacho—the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations. By mid and late ’69 we had the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance. I had coined the slogan ‘Gay Is Good’ in 1968, and ‘Gay Pride’ had appeared.”

            Gay has been adopted in French, Spanish, and Italian, but not so much in Germany, where their old word Schwul is preferred. Many lesbians pointed out that they already had a word for themselves, and the pairing “gay and lesbian” was born. When the movement began to acknowledge bisexual and transsexual people (later superseded by “transgender”), it became the GLBT or LGBT, with more letters to come, along with LGBT+.

            “Queer” had been around for many decades as an insult, but starting in the 1990s there was a movement to reclaim the term as one that applied to everyone in the LGBT+ lineup, including those who didn’t identify with any of its letters. Thus lgbtq has been widely adopted. “Queer” is hard to say in French, Italian, Spanish, and German, so it has not enjoyed the same level of international acceptance that “gay” has produced.

            Lo Vecchio’s Dictionnaire ends there, but linguistic evolution does not stop. Since the addition of “queer,” the community has begun to more widely acknowledge intersex and asexual people as members, and one widely used configuration is lgbtqia+. No doubt any term or sequence of letters is a temporary convention that will change along with changing cultural norms and ideas about gender and sexuality.