This article re-evaluates the emphasis on the ‘homo/hetero
binary’, which appears in many discussions of sexuality since the late
19th century, by exploring several key European sexological texts and their
classifications of sexual desire between men. It suggests that these writers offered
not so much a nascent binary between ‘homosexual’ and
‘heterosexual’ individuals, but a complex and contradictory set
of sexual ontologies that encoded liminality as well as notions of innate sexual
perversion. A strand of sexual fluidity lived on through the 20th century, forming a
counternarrative to the notion that individuals could be assigned to either a
heterosexual or a homosexual subject position. Such a rereading of important
sexological writings offers us one way to complicate current assumptions about the
birth and subsequent influence of ‘the homosexual’ and the
prevalence of the ‘homo/hetero binary’. This impels us to more
closely investigate the spaces lying between and around the poles of this binary.
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