/lit/ - Literature

>"Aids isn't real! What about power?"
>Proceeds to bathhouse.
>Dies of aids.
Why does anyone take him seriously?

I often hear that you can't call anyone gay prior to the 20th ce because homosexuality didn't exist; it's just a social construct that was formed in the last century.

It seems like that argument stems from Foucault's book on sexuality:
>The idea that sexuality, including homosexuality, is a social construction is associated more with The History of Sexuality than with any other work.

But he never actually makes any claim that is remotely like that in the book. The only mention of sexuality as a construct is in this passage:

>Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge gradually tries to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power.

Where does this idea come from then? Why is it associated with Foucault so heavily and why is it abused?

Are there any serious critics of postmodernism? Most of the people who bash it don't even understand it and just use it as a label for ideas they don't like.