put some records on while I pour

When we look into the history of asexuality, the first mention of it can be traced back all the way to the 1860’s. In 1869 a Hungarian doctor named Karl-Maria Kertbeny anonymously created pamphlets, against a sodomy law in Germany. In these pamphlets he mentioned three different sexual orientations: heterosexual, homosexual and monosexual. This was also the first known public appearance of the term homosexual. These days monosexuality means feeling romantic or sexual attraction to only one sex/gender. But when doctor Karl-Maria Kertbeny wrote about ‘monosexual’ he referred to people who only masturbate. (“sexual satisfaction only with themselves“)

Other 19th century mentions from Nothing Radical:

Richard von Krafft-Ebing writes about asexuality in his 1886 work Psychopathia Sexualis (Psychopathy of Sex). In it, he uses the term anesthesia sexual to refer to people with an “absence of sexual feeling.” [---] This is likely one of the first examples of the pathologization of asexual people which continues to this day.

German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld [---] also published the pamphlet Sappho und Sokrates in 1896, which recognizes people without any sexual desire under the label “anesthesia sexual”—the same term used by Krafft-Ebing. In this work, Hirschfeld also develops a quantitative scale for describing human sexuality which rates the intensity of same-sex and opposite-sex attraction on separate axes, each from 1 to 10 [---] the first I was able to find which explicitly accounts for asexuality.

German sexologist Emma Trosse not only gave us a definition of asexuality, but was openly asexual herself. Trosse was the first woman to publish a scientific work on homosexuality in women and advocated for legal protections for sexual minorities. In her 1897 work Ein Weib? Psychologisch-biographische: Studie über eine Konträrsexuelle (A woman? Psychological-biographical study of a contrary-sexual), she gives us a definition of asexuality under the label Sinnlichkeitslosigkeit (asensuality) and says in a footnote, “Author has the courage to admit to this category.”