Breathe
By Name
Károly Mária Kertbeny (Austro-Hungarian, 1824-1882) writes a letter to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (Germany, 1825-1895) on May 6, 1868, to complement Ulrichs' categorization and naming of sexual practices. In this letter, Kertbeny coins terms to describe the different sexual acts: monosexual (masturbation or autoeroticism), homosexual (between same gender), heterosexual (between different genders) and heterogenit(between humans and animals or zoophilia). He deepens in the categorization, not only of sexual acts, but also of desire and excesses, identifying for example the bleeders, who satisfy their passion by wounding or torturing. From his new vocabulary we are left with the words heterosexual and homosexual. In ancient times it was not necessary to specify the differences in sexual practices because they were not condemned, nor were they surprising or outside the norm.
In 1946 for the first time the word homosexual is introduced in the Bible as a translation of arsenokoitai (ἀρσενοκοῖται, a Greek word created in the New Testament that comes from arsen: man, koite: bed). There is a biblical debate derived from translations because many words have lost their original context and meaning, so the interpretation of religious texts becomes extremely important, since they guide the reading of these ancient stories, without certainty of the initial meaning. Any translation is a betrayal of the text, hence the Italian expression traduttore-traditore (translator-traitor), because there are not always equivalent words in the languages and the translator ends up interpreting from his knowledge, prejudices and understanding of the world, betraying the base text. The linguistic, moral, ethical, religious, spiritual analysis of sexuality should remain just that, an abstract analysis, preferably neutral, without crossing the barrier of science or human rights.
