It seems to be that there were two large steps from colonial America and the complete absence of gay and lesbian identity, to the second half of the 20th century when pretty much everyone knew what a gay person was, and generally had an opinion about it.
The first step was individual awareness. As capitalism drew men and women out of the home and into the marketplace at the end of the 19th century there was a general chaos of activity, allowing those with “abnormal” attractions to fly under the radar and have some mobility and freedom to explore those attractions. In other words, it was the first opportunity for people to be aware of and act upon attraction to those of the same sex.
The second step would be the medicalization of homosexuality, bringing it into the daylight for everyone to see and criticize and say “oh, that’s what’s been going on.” We all know how therapeutic naming our fears can be. Heteronormative society had been fearing the myth of the homosexual and persecuting those accused of buggery for decades, so it must have come as somewhat of a relief to be able to put this heinous monster in a box that could be classified. While it is ironic that it was this trauma and persecution that helped develop gay and lesbian identity by making gay people visible to eachother, I very much agree that this “baptism by fire” is somewhat necessary for new identities to emerge. It doesn’t just happen overnight and it’s never going to be easy.
So far I’ve said nothing new. What I’m interested in is when it became about love. Identity makes sex about love, love for partners as well as love for those in the community you identify with. Edward Carpenter believed that Uranians greatest service in society would be in “solving the problems of affection and of the heart,” and that “Love is at last to take its rightful place as the binding directing force of society.” I am not asserting that all gays and lesbians equate their sexual encounters with love, we are all human afterall. However, the sacrifice they made in their lives for love was indeed greater than had been generally seen before. Literature and film can’t get enough of “love’s sacrifice,” but those scenarios are never realistic and rarely can a large group of people identify with the plight. This was different. Everyone who embraced their gay or lesbian identity in order to be with the people they loved sacrificed standing or safety in society. Thus, to some extent, to identify was to say: love is important to me.
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Kind of a compelling thesis here: identity makes sex into love. In a utopian sense, yes. But I wonder what a "liberated" gay sexual hedonist of the 1970s or a Lesbian sex warrior of the 1980s would have to say about that. These folks had identity, but turned it back into sex, perhaps in reaction to love, or the problem of homolove in heterosociety.
But I understand the larger picture you are drawing here, which is primarily the move from act to identity, and how therefore the new identity incorporates natural human emotions. And part of the Carpernterian project was to establish a context for homolove in a society with precious few models, other than archaic ones. Me thinks this is a project that continues vociferously, and without resolution.
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