The Capitalistic Origins of LesBiGay Identity

Historically, capitalism created the socioeconomic conditions that fostered possibilities for a same-sex personal and collective identity. By divesting the agrarian household of economic self-sufficiency, moving single laborers to urban industrial centers, and separating sexual pleasure from procreation, capitalism enabled American men and women to focus their erotic and emotional attentions upon members of their own sex. As gay historian John D'Emilio explains:

Only when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of as parts of an interdependent family unit, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity--an identity based on the ability to remain outside the heterosexual family and to construct a personal life based on attraction to one's sex.⁸⁷

By the end of the nineteenth century in America, discrete urbanized groups of men and women, self-identified as homosexual, viewed their same-sex orientation as a trait that distinguished them from the heterosexual majority, and sought each other out for sexual and emotional relationships. Moreover, the early twentieth century witnessed the genesis of LesBiGay communities in large cities such as New York and Chicago, where same-sex bars and bathhouses, private clubs, literary circles, and settlement houses provided the first gathering spots for LesBiGay social circles.⁸⁸