Editor’s note: I cover AI briefly in every issue. This time, I write about how I used AI for research and fact verification. If AI isn’t your thing, skip it.
Karl Maria Kertbeny was a 19th-century Hungarian journalist with a legal argument and a vocabulary problem.
On May 6, 1868, he sat down and scratched out a private letter arguing against a Prussian sodomy law. Somewhere in the middle of the page, almost as an aside, he wrote a word that hadn’t existed in any language before that moment.
Homosexual.
Not in English, French, Latin, or Greek.
This month, tens of millions of people in the West celebrate Pride. New York City’s parade fills the streets at the end of June. The flags, the marches, the identity language, all of it carries an assumption: that the way we think about sexuality now is just how humanity has always thought about it.
It isn’t. And the history is stranger and more interesting…
