passed 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 THELIBERTINES, 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 fromGreek 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 topédé and became a slang word—used first as a homophobic slur, then adopted by the pédés as their preferred word for themselves. The abbreviationPDlooks 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 inLesbian 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 DICTIONNAIRE HISTORIQUE DU LEXIQUE DE L’HOMOSEXUALITÉ by Nicholas Lo Vecchio ELiPhi, 515 pages, 55€ November–December 2025 25 Nicholas Lo Vecchio, 2024. Photo: François Silvestre de Sacy.
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