Deriving from the Greek prefix “pan” (all) and root “sexual,” the term pansexual has filtered through many different realms over its history to take on the meaning it has today. Here’s a brief overview of pansexual representation and its origins.

Psychology

At first, in the early 20th century, psychoanalysts used the term “pan-sexualism” to characterize a form of sexual deviancy. It first appeared in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1914, in which a critic of Sigmund Freud used it to criticize the way Freud traced every thought or behavior back to some sexual impulse.

Academia

Throughout the 1920s and ‘30s, the term pansexual had still not come into use as a type of sexual orientation. However, reports from the time period existed of people in Harlem and the South Side of Chicago who engaged in amorous activity and relationships across boundaries and labels. Only in the 1940s, when Alfred Kinsey conducted his famous experiments revealing the continuum of sexualities, did sexual orientation even become a topic of cultural conversation. Kinsey laid the groundwork for terms like “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality”, which later paved the way for the identification and naming of other sexualities both between and outside those boundaries on the scale, including pansexuality.

Even after this, however, any sexual orientation other than heterosexuality was still consider a mental disorder, and pansexuality was still considered a disparaging term.

Religion

In 1952, Pope Pius delivered a speech in which he proclaimed that so-called pansexual psychotherapy methods were contrary to Christian values.

Society

Finally, in the 1970s, the term pansexual began to see the glimmers of societal use it has today, as an established and accepted term for a legitimate sexual orientation outside the binary. In 1974, a New York Times article discussed pansexual representation as the immanent outcropping of the seeming widespread emergence of bisexuality on the heels of the prior year’s emergence of homosexuality on the social stages and pages. If you are looking for pansexual representation, visit this website.

Whether that article was prescient or not, the ‘80s saw pansexuality beginning to spread, particularly through San Francisco play parties, and then throughout BDSM culture there and elsewhere. In the 1990s, the movement toward coming out of more gender-nonconforming people outside the binary only helped elevate the conversation around nonconforming sexualities outside the binary, including pansexuality.

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