Constructing the Heterosexual, Homosexual, Bisexual System, by Jonathan Ned Katz

This feature explores the human production of the terms and concepts "heterosexual," "homosexual," and "bisexual," which are presented here as evidence of the construction of a historically specific social order or regime. This is the social-historical institution or system that divides people, identities, desires, acts, relationships, and groups into heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual with profound subjective, objective, psychological, social consequences. The chronology includes scholarly works dating to the 1980s, when historians began to develop what is now called "critical heterosexual history," analysis that interrogates the historically specific discourses and institutions that comprise the hetero, homo, bi system. First published on OutHistory in 2014. Last edit: April 15, 2021.

1941, May 19: U.S. Army Surgeon General's Office: "homosexual proclivities"

Jonathan Ned Katz notes that this first reference to "homosexual proclivities" as one of the "deviations" that disqualified men from serving in the U.S. Army, also constitutes the first federal, state sponsored institutionalization of the secondary term of the heterosexual-homosexual binary.

According to Allan Bérubé in Coming Out Under Fire:

After the Army Surgeon General's Office had issued its own screening circular to induction station examiners and Selective Service revised Circular No. 1 to bring the two [earlier] directives into line, both screening directives for the first time included "homosexual proclivities" in their lists of disqualifying "deviations."

Bérubé adds:

The Army circular also listed "many homosexual persons" among those to be rejected because of "psychopathic personality disorders," whereas the Selective Service circular instructed draft board doctors to refer all suspected homosexual cases to the regional Medical Advisory Board psychiatrists for closer examination.[1]

Katz explains: without explicitly mentioning heterosexuality, apparently, the U.S. Selective Service installed that unnamed sexual ideal as that from which unfit men deviated.

This was not only a new discursitve construction but a bureacratic ruling that actively threatend homosexual men and caused numbers of them to be rejected or dismissed from the U.S. military. It also, for the first time, installed an unnamed heterosexuality as the official, federal state norm.

Notes
1 Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (NY: Free Press/Macmillian, 1990), page 12, note 11 on pages 291-92, citing "Neuropathic Examination of Applicaants for Voluntary Enlistment and Selectees for Induction," Circular Letter No. 19, War Department, March 12, 1941, reprinted in War Medicine 1 (May 1941): 418-25; Selective Service Medical Circular No. 1 (revised May 19, 1941).

Bérubé's notes add:

On the addition of the homosexual sections see Patrick S. Madigan, "Military Psychiatry," Psychiatry 4 (May 1941): 228-29; and Report of Meeting of the Psychiatric Advisory Committee, National Headquarters, Selective Service System, February 25, 1941, Folder: "Selective Service System," C. A. Dykstra, Director, Box 23, Overholser Papers.