“Blank, a writer and historian who has written extensively about sexuality and culture, looks at the ways in which social trends and the rise of psychiatry conspired to create this new category in the late 19th and early 20th century.”

There were other important changes that happened earlier. In the 1600s the medieval “polymorphicaly perverse” sexuality was still assumed. In 1671 Milton published his poem Paradise Regained, and in this poem Satan comes to tempt Jesus on the cross, and Satan offers Jesus beautiful women, but also handsome young men. Milton was not trying to make some radical statement about sexuality, it was simply assumed that all men were potentially bisexual, including Jesus. It was thought to be highly sinful for a man to sleep with a handsome young man, but the assumption of modern heterosexuality is different: not that a man thinks it is sinful to sleep with a handsome young man, but that a man has no interest in sleeping with a handsome young man. If you define modern heterosexuality in this way (that there are some men who have no interest in sleeping with handsome young men), then modern heterosexuality emerges in the mid-1700s. Up till that point assumptions such as Milton’s (that men can be tempted with men) were common in literature, but after the mid-1700s the assumption emerges that most men are not interested in men, and that those men who are interested in men represent a distinct group (the sodomites).

However, Hanne Blank’s point is a good one. Even though we might argue about the exact date, it is certainly clear that the assumptions of modern sexuality did not exist 300 years ago, and they are an invention of the modern era.