Constructing the Heterosexual, Homosexual, Bisexual System, by Jonathan Ned Katz

This feature explores the human production of the terms and concepts "heterosexual," "homosexual," and "bisexual," which are presented here as evidence of the construction of a historically specific social order or regime. This is the social-historical institution or system that divides people, identities, desires, acts, relationships, and groups into heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual with profound subjective, objective, psychological, social consequences. The chronology includes scholarly works dating to the 1980s, when historians began to develop what is now called "critical heterosexual history," analysis that interrogates the historically specific discourses and institutions that comprise the hetero, homo, bi system. First published on OutHistory in 2014. Last edit: April 15, 2021.

1940, November 7: U.S. Selective Service Medical Circular No. 1: "deviations"

According to Allan Bérubé in Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II :

The first directive to grow out of [homosexual Harry Stack] Sullivan's initial plan for psychiatric screening [of inductees and volunteers in the U.S. military] was issued on November 7, 1940, to more than 30,00 volunteeer physicians at local draft boards. . . . Circular No. 1 explained in lay terms five psychiatric "categories of handicap" -- expanded to eight in later revisions -- and concluded with a list of miscellaneous "deviations" examing physicians should watch for. Homosexuality was not mentioned in this first screening circular.

Heterosexuality was, apparently, not yet the dominant norm from which deviators deviated. But see entry for 1941, May 19.

Notes
Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (NY: Free Press/Macmillian, 1990), page 11-12, note 9 on page 291: Selective Service System Medical Circular No. 1, November 7, 1940. See also [Harry Stack sullivan], "Selective Service Psychiatry," Psychiatry 4 (August 1941): 440-43; Albert Deutsch, "Military Psychiatry: World War II: 1941-1943," in One Hundnred Years of American Psychiatry (NY: Columbia University Press, 1944), pages 419-22; Selective Service in Wartime, Second Report of the Director of Selective Service 1941-1942 (Washington, DC: USGPO), 1943), page 31.