Research into an awareness of same-sex desire in history often fixes on the use of specific vocabulary or the clear understanding of certain definable categories of behavior. But in this article, Puff looks more deeply at oblique ways in which social knowedge of same-sex desire is made evident. The case of Greta von Möskirch demonstrates that her contemporaries were clearly aware of the possibility that female-presenting individuals might desire other female-presenting individuals, but also that they had a variety of frameworks for "explaining" that phenomenon. Those frameworks included several variations on "born that way" as well as the possibility that it was personal choice (though framed as sin). The way these several possibilities are brought together in a single analysis points out the hazard of taking any one historic "explanation" as reflecting the beliefs and understandings of the times. And just because a particular historic culture didn't have a vocabulary term that corresponded to a particular "explanation" (e.g., no term that narrowly meant "a woman with a lifelong predisposition to desire women, present as a personality trait rather than a physical condition") doesn't mean that the concept wasn't possible.
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