In the 1860's, Karl Maria
Kertbeny coined "homosexual" in preference to "pederast,"
the derogatory term for men who had sex with each other that was in
common use in the Germany of his time. According to Kertbeny, many
homosexuals are more masculine than ordinary men and are often superior
to run of the mill heterosexuals who tend,
in his opinion, toward rape and mayhem because they are oversexed.
Kertbeny hoped that his new word and his definition of it would help to
eliminate Paragraph 175, Germany's
oppressive anti-pederasty law, but the strategy didn't work.
Instead, Richard von Krafft-Ebing
and other doctors adopted it as a diagnosis for mental pathology.
