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Cultures define and regulate sexual desire differently, and
homosexuality is the modern, Western way of thinking about
sex between men. During the middle ages, an act of sodomy
was considered a grave sin that could tempt any man, but by
the early 1700s, the medieval conception was in
decline. Subcultures of effeminate sodomites emerged
in London, Paris and
Amsterdam in the 18th Century, and
authorities began to think of sodomites as fundamentally
different from other men. An act of sodomy, once
considered a vice that could befall any man, was now
considered a sign of a dangerously deviant constitution.
150 years later, doctors
labeled these men homosexuals, and imagined that they were
congenitally diseased. The psychiatrists' sickness
model dominated Western opinions about homosexuals
throughout most of the 20th Century, but thanks to gay
activism that began in the 1950s, homosexuals themselves
began to aggressively assert that homo is as normal as
hetero. In 1973, gay liberationists won a decisive
victory when they effectively forced the American
Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its
official list of mental diseases. Since then, a new
era has emerged in gay history as gays and lesbians assert
their right to define many different ways to be gay.
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