Arguably there is no other thinker who has had as profound an effect on the theory and practice of the history of sexuality as Michel Foucault. And yet, Foucault had comparatively little to say, in his major works, on the subject of homosexuality.

The famous passage in volume 1 of his History of Sexuality places the pivotal time period when the homosexual identity emerged as the mid-nineteenth century. A radical shift in discourse saw perverse sexuality move from the strictures of law and morality to the ministrations of science and medicine. Foucault positioned the homosexual as an outcome of the discursive shift, a creation of psychiatry and he presents Carl Westphal’s paper of 1870 as the birth certificate of the homosexual.

When Foucault wrote the passage in History of Sexuality, it was intended to be the first introductory volume in a multi-volume set that would include a volume dedicated to the “Perversions”. This was the 1970s, a time when the detailed history was yet to be fully articulated. In that context, this passage is startlingly prescient. The shift from Church mediated moral discourses and the forensic legalistic exclusion of the sodomite in the earlier part of the nineteenth century to the psychiatric treatment of the homosexual in the late nineteenth century has mostly been confirmed by scholarship.

Foucault died in 1984. His thinking in the 1980s became more focused on the creative processes of self-invention that he observed in contemporary gay culture. Perhaps if he had been aware of Ulrichs and the men who called themselves urnings, he would have been similarly impressed with their creative reworking of their own technology of self. It is conceivable that had he then written a more rigorously researched volume on the “Perversions,” he would have examined the emerging scholarship to build a more complex picture.