A Third Sex Around the World
By Amara Das Wilhelm

In 1463, a man was convicted by the Court of Holland for homosexuality (sodomy) and burned at the stake.  A year later, his partner was whipped down the streets of The Hague and had his hair burnt off his head.  In Christian Europe, the execution of homosexual men slowly increased from the fifteenth century until ending in the early 1800s.  Nearly a thousand sodomy trials were conducted in Holland (now the Netherlands) from 1730 to 1811 and between 1730 and 1732 alone, seventy-five “sodomites” were sentenced to death.  Convicted homosexuals were systematically garroted (strangled with a cord) either privately within the cellars of city halls or publicly on scaffolds in front of large audiences.  Deaths by hanging, burning at the stake, breaking on a wheel and drowning in a barrel of water were also some of the recorded methods used.  Determined to exterminate sodomy “from top to bottom,” the Court of Holland conducted one of the harshest campaigns against homosexuality in early modern Europe.

Curiously, however, the harsh penalties against sodomy in Holland and other parts of Europe did little to extinguish the “crime.”  On the contrary, detailed police and court records kept during this period reveal underground inns, taverns, bookshops, alleyways, parks, and other secret meeting places where sodomites persistently gathered.  As authorities investigated and raided one “sodomite network” after another, more would inevitably crop up in their place so that by the end of the nineteenth century, exacerbated European officials doubted if they could ever truly put an end to sodomy and its subculture.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world, explorers from Great Britain discovered a previously unknown tropical paradise in the Pacific South Seas.  Amid emerald islands set in pristine, turquoise waters, British sailors found natives untouched by any other culture or civilization.  The sailors were shocked by the sexual openness of the South Pacific islanders who unabashedly engaged in homosexual and transgender conduct.  In one account from an eighteenth-century voyage to Hawaii, a British seaman related how he was approached not only by the native women but also the men; in another account, Bounty shipmate James Morrison observed that the mahu (male-to-female transgenders) of Tahiti were “like the eunuchs in India.”  He described how they lived and dressed as women, sang and danced along with them and excelled in all their tasks.  Upon hearing that the mahu were hermaphrodites, Bounty commander Captain Bligh asked one of the Polynesian “eunuchs” to remove his loincloth.  Bligh’s report noted that the native’s “yard” [penis] was not absent or deformed but very soft and small, having been customarily tied up against the groin.  He also observed how the native women treated and respected the mahu as one of their own.

Unfortunately, the initial fascination of British explorers with a Polynesian third sex quickly turned into contempt.  In his 1789 observations of Maori tribes in New Zealand, Captain James Cook wrote that the natives were “given to the detestable Vice of Sodomy.”  Early nineteenth-century missionaries from Britain complained that New Cythera (Tahiti) was nothing more than a “filthy Sodom of the South Seas,” fraught with rampant fornication and “often boys with boys.”  Disgusted, they accused the Polynesian children of doing little else than frolic on the mountains together in wickedness.  Determined to purge the islands of such pagan practices, Christian missionaries convinced the Polynesian natives to abandon their traditional lifestyles by the end of the nineteenth century.

The two histories cited above provide interesting examples of how different societies respond and adapt toward gender diversity.  The Netherlands, once one of the most cruel and aggressive countries in its attack on homosexuality, has since become one of the most accepting—in 2001, the Netherlands became the first country in the modern world to legalize homosexual marriage.  Polynesia, on the other hand, originally held no stigma for homosexual or transgender conduct but has since become largely intolerant—most Polynesians now strongly criticize gender-variant behavior, and homosexuality is illegal on many of the islands.  In both examples, the third sex was and still remains present; there were gender-variant people in Polynesia and Holland during the 1700s and there are gender-variant people now.  What changed, however, was the way in which such people came to be viewed and treated.  Intolerance turned into acceptance and acceptance turned into intolerance, but the persistence of a third sex remained constant in both instances.

Perhaps the real question, then, isn’t whether or not a third sex exists throughout the world but why world cultures react so differently to it.  Religious zealotry seems to play a major role.  In the two examples cited above, Dutch society moved from Protestant fundamentalism in the 1700s to mostly secularism in the twentieth century, whereas Polynesia abandoned its traditional island practices and beliefs to adopt Victorian-era Christian mores.  Nearly all of the world’s indigenous cultures, including India’s, accommodated gender diversity to some degree but from the third century A.D. onward, dominant Christian and later Islamic authorities began enforcing strictly dimorphic (male/female) social standards with little room for a third sex.  Nevertheless, there are examples wherein the latter religions have also accommodated gender diversity—the medieval Islamic caliphates, for instance, or modern states currently reassessing their own sex and gender laws that are predominantly Judeo-Christian in background.  On the other hand, atheistic governments such as China demonstrate that gender prejudices are by no means limited to religious societies.  Clearly, other factors are involved including natural fears over human differences (sex and gender phobias); moral and religious attitudes; government systems and leadership; national prosperity or destitution; population and urban growth; advancements in education and science, and so on.  All of these factors can contribute to whether or not any given society celebrates, tolerates, frowns upon, or condemns gender diversity among its populace.

In any case, it is important to understand that gender diversity is primarily biological and therefore all pervasive.  The fact that homosexual, transgender and intersex beings exist in all cultures, countries and species of the world should give us a clue about their biological origin, as should their persistence as a social class in human society despite harsh persecution in many regions.  The third sex is not simply a temporary social phenomena, self-identity or exotic expression limited to India, Hinduism or any particular culture—it exists primarily as a biological category found throughout the natural world.  Because the third sex is often concealed and not readily apparent to the untrained eye it is sometimes known as the “hidden sex.”  This is all the more true in societies that attempt to persecute or cover up third-gender behavior.  Nevertheless, as demonstrated in this chapter, an unbiased inspection into both the animal and human kingdoms will reveal a third sex all around the world and throughout time.

The Animal Kingdom

Just as there are many incredible displays of sex and gender variety among Hindu deities, so also nature displays an amazing array of sex and gender diversity within the animal kingdom.  The simplistic notion of a Noah’s Ark, with one male and one female specimen sustaining all species, is a far cry from scientific reality.  In truth, biological sustenance and reproduction are dependent upon an incredibly complex web of co-dependent factors, including a third sex.  Not only is nature more complex than we imagine, it is more complex than we can imagine!

Microbes and simple life forms are, of course, either asexual or hermaphrodite, meaning they reproduce without separate dimorphic divisions of male and female.  Many plants can reproduce themselves simply by the severance of a root, twig, or other appendage, and nearly all flowering plants are hermaphrodite with sexual organs (flowers) that have both male and female parts. Worms, slugs and many aquatic species are also hermaphrodite—they possess both eggs and sperm that are mutually exchanged.  In the insect world, reproduction occurs mainly through dimorphic male and female methods, yet many of the more developed social species such as bees, ants and termites sustain their colonies through large numbers of asexual or sterile workers.  In such insect colonies, the asexual workers and reproductive queens and drones are all co-dependent upon one another for survival.

Scientific studies of homosexual behavior among fruit flies are quite well known; scientists have observed this behavior in nature and can also induce it in individuals through the manipulation of their genes.  Homosexual behavior has similarly been observed in insects such as moths, butterflies and beetles, and intersexed examples of butterflies and spiders have been found that are sexually divided in half, with one side male and one side female (gynandromorphism).  Among the millions of Monarch Butterflies found mating in central Mexico, 10 percent of the mating pairs are same-sex male couples—with an even higher ratio of 50 percent by the end of the season!

Creatures such as sow bugs, shrimp and oysters completely reverse their sex at some stage in their lives and such transsexuality is a routine occurrence for many species.  Tropical coral fish, for instance, are especially well known for their ability to change sex—more than 50 species of parrotfish, groupers, angelfish and others are all transsexual.  Their reproductive organs can undergo a complete reversal, enabling females with fully functioning ovaries to become males with fully functioning testes and vice versa.  In some families of fish, transsexuality is so common that it’s actually more unusual to find species that do not change sex!

Among amphibians and reptiles, certain species are known to reproduce both sexually and asexually.  Female geckos, salamanders and Whiptail Lizards, for example, are parthenogenetic (able to clone themselves) and can reproduce without help from males.  Biologists have identified over a thousand of such parthenogenetic species worldwide.  Among snakes, both homosexual and bisexual behavior has been observed and studied.  Most animals attract and find partners primarily through pheromone or scent signals and when snakes or other animals are homosexually attracted they are simply following these natural signals.  In some species such as Garter Snakes, certain males will produce the female pheromone, thus adding to the complexity!

In birds and mammals, methods of reproduction are consistently dimorphic but social interaction and behaviors such as courting, mating and nesting become increasingly diverse.  It is among these species, therefore, that the greatest amount of homosexual, bisexual and transgender behavior is found.  Homosexuality among avian species is quite common and has been observed in nearly all bird families including waterfowl, sea birds, penguins, parrots, songbirds, finches, swallows, sparrows, crows, hummingbirds, woodpeckers, game birds, birds of prey, flightless birds and so on.  Birds are similar to humans in the sense that they typically mate and nest in pairs.  Thus, homosexual birds also court each other, pair off, mate and build nests together.  Quite a few also become involved in raising chicks—penguins, swans, flamingos, parrots, songbirds, gulls and others have all been observed taking eggs or finding hatchlings to rear as their own.  Some birds also engage in same-sex group behavior.  In Mallard Ducks, for instance, where homosexuality and bisexuality are quite common, “gay” drakes socialize primarily among themselves and form what biologists refer to as “clubs.”  Other birds are transgender—certain female Hooded Warblers can be found bearing the markings and singing voices of males while in other species, such as Ochre-bellied Flycatchers, certain males will mimic the courting behavior of female birds to attract other males.  Such types of transgender birds (with mixed gender markings and behavior) are commonly observed by ornithologists and referred to as “marginal” males or females.   Intersex conditions are also found among avian species and over forty cases of gynandromorphism, wherein birds have split male and female plumage, have been reported in species such as pheasants, falcons, and finch.  In some types of birds, significant portions of the population never mate or reproduce; for instance, twenty-five percent of Long-tailed Hermit Hummingbirds remain single and nonreproductive throughout their lives, and as much as one third of Common Murres (a seabird) and Kestrels (a type of falcon) do the same.

Among mammal species, homosexual, bisexual and transgender behavior is even more common and has been documented among small rodents and insectivores (mice, rats, bats, squirrels, chipmunks, marmots, hedgehogs, etc.); marsupials (wallabies, kangaroo, koalas, dunnarts, etc.); carnivores (lions, cheetahs, wolves, foxes, bears, hyenas, mongooses, martens, raccoons, etc.); hoofed mammals (deer, elk, caribou, moose, giraffes, antelopes, gazelles, pronghorns, wild sheep, goats, buffalo, bison, musk-oxen, zebra, horses, pigs, llamas, elephants, rhinoceros, etc.), marine mammals (river and salt-water dolphins, porpoises, Orcas, whales, seals, sea lions, walruses, manatees, dugongs, etc.) and primates (Bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, Orangutans, gibbons, langurs, Proboscis Monkeys, macaques, baboons, Squirrel Monkeys, capuchins, tamarins, langurs, bushbabies, etc.).

Homosexuality in mammals is quite complex and has been well studied both in captivity and in the wild.  Bonobos (Pygmy Chimpanzees), for example, have been found to exhibit a wide variety of different homosexual behaviors and emotions, and in small mammals such as mice and rats, scientists can induce homosexual behavior through the manipulation of their hormones during gestation.  Bisexuality is very common among mammals and has been observed in many species outside of their normal breeding season such as Walruses, Bottlenose Dolphins, Bison, Bighorn Sheep, Giraffes, etc.  Transgender behavior can also be observed among mammals—in Bighorn Sheep, some rams identify as female and herd themselves with the ewes.  While Bighorn rams typically engage in homosexual behavior all year long, the transgender rams will only allow themselves to be mounted during the mating season when the “other” ewes are in estrus!

Many varieties of intersex conditions are found in mammals such as primates, bears, whales, dolphins, marsupials, rodents, insectivores and others, and quite a few mammal species have large numbers of individuals that are nonreproductive and never breed.  For instance, more than fifty percent of American Bison and Right Whales, 75 percent of Blackbucks and Giraffes, and 80-95 percent of New Zealand Sea Lions and Northern Elephant Seals never mate or reproduce with the opposite sex throughout their entire lives.

Ratios of heterosexual, bisexual and homosexual animals vary from species to species and in many cases the homosexual populations of animals exceed those found in humans. Human populations are roughly estimated to be 80 percent heterosexual, 15 percent bisexual and 5 percent homosexual (80-15-5), but among animals these ratios can differ considerably.  Female Silver Gulls, for example, have been found to have a ratio of 79-11-10, respectively, while male Black-headed Gulls have a ratio of 63-15-22 and Galahs (a type of cockatoo), 44-11-44.

There are so many examples of gender-variant creatures in the animal kingdom that it is impossible to do them justice here.  Why such creatures exist or what purpose they serve may be debatable or even beyond our understanding, but clearly the natural world, when put under the microscope, is amazingly diverse.  Biological life is so exuberant it seems to diversify at every possible opportunity and in every conceivable way, thus reflecting the very nature of Godhead itself.

Those who attempt to limit nature, limit God.  In scientific journals from the nineteenth century, early zoologists typically imposed their own homophobia on the animal kingdom.  While praising the mating of heterosexual creatures as “beautiful representations of God’s glory,” they simultaneously condemned the homosexual behavior they witnessed among animals as “unnatural” and “so monstrous as to be unworthy of record.”  Initially, many zoologists tried to explain away homosexuality in the animal kingdom, hypothesizing that the creatures were simply deprived of opposite sex partners, mimicking heterosexual behavior, reacting to artificial environments, defective in some way, confused, or so on.  All such rationalizations, however, have since been disproved and unbiased research into the animal kingdom has disclosed to modern biologists what indigenous cultures of the world have known all along—that nature is awe-inspiring and inconceivably variegated in terms of sex and gender.

The Americas

Well-organized civilizations and tribes existed throughout the Americas for thousands of years prior to their discovery by European explorers.  Scandinavian Vikings first reached the North American continent in the eleventh century but were unable to establish a lasting presence.  Spain’s Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) rediscovered the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century and a flurry of military, commercial and religious expeditions quickly followed.  Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England all took part in the massive grab for American land, resources and souls.

Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers were quick to notice the homosexual and transgender behavior unabashedly practiced by many of the American natives.  After his exploration of the Veracruz region of eastern Mexico, conquistador Hernando Cortes (1485-1547) informed King Carlos V of Spain: “We know and have been informed without room for doubt that all [Veracruz natives] practice the abominable sin of sodomy.”  Fellow conquistador and historian Bernal Diaz del Castillo similarly noted sodomy among the nobles: “The sons of chiefs,” he wrote, “did not take women, but followed the bad practices of sodomy.”  Detailed reports written during Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas in western South America (Peru) described crossdressing and homosexuality among native priests as follows: “The devil has introduced his vice under the pretense of sanctity.  And in each important temple or house of worship, they have a man or two, or more, depending on the idol, who go dressed in women’s attire from the time they are children, and speak like them, and in manner, dress, and everything else they imitate women.  With them especially the chiefs and headmen have carnal, foul intercourse on feast days and holidays, almost like a religious rite and ceremony.”  Similar reports of “hermaphrodite” natives among the indigenous tribes of Mexico, South America, Florida and the West Indies evoked great curiosity back in Spain.  Eager to investigate, Spanish writer and traveler Francisco Coreal set out for Florida in 1669.  Once there, he discovered a class of effeminate boys who lived with the women, made their same handiworks, wore particular feathers and served the native tribesmen in various ways that included sodomy.  Coreal wrote: “I believe that these hermaphrodites are none other than the effeminate boys, that in a sense truly are hermaphrodites.”

In the West Indies and much of Central and South America, gender-variant behavior was observed by early Spanish and Portuguese explorers but not well studied, mostly because the native populations were quickly devastated by war and disease.  Nevertheless, many descriptions of third-gender beliefs can be found throughout the region, particularly within the Aztec and Maya cultures.  All Native American civilizations were polytheistic and worshiped a wide range of gods, goddesses, and nature spirits.  Third-gender natives especially honored Xochiquetzal, the Aztec goddess of spring and sexuality, who is associated with same-sex attraction, crossdressing and various types of arts and crafts.  In one popular narration, Xochiquetzal transforms herself into a barren hermaphrodite after being raped by Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec god of nighttime and illusion.  In another story, the goddess assumes a male form known as Xochipilli, who was especially worshiped by homosexual natives and presided over flowers, art, dance, music, perfume and shamanic trance.  Aztec rituals often included homosexual acts as a way of communing with the gods, and Aztec cosmology described four ages—the previous of which was said to be marked by a prevalence of peace, artistry and homosexual relations.  Masculine-type lesbians were known as patlacheh and often joined Aztec men in battle.  The male warriors were famous for their brutal combat and regularly sodomized defeated soldiers as a celebration of their victory.  Prostitution was also common in Aztec society and handsome, teenaged boys were especially valued.  Among the Maya, homosexuality was associated with Chin, a dwarfish nature spirit.  In Mayan narratives, Chin introduced homoeroticism to the nobles and allowed them to take handsome youths from lower class families to serve as partners for their sons.  These early Mesoamerican same-sex unions were a type of marriage among the Maya and recognized under tribal law.

One famous Spanish conquistador, Catalina de Erauso (1585-1650), was actually a woman who left her life as a Basque nun to become a soldier in the New World.  Granted permission by the Roman Church to dress as a man, Erauso fought valiantly against the natives of western South America and was celebrated for her heroic military service.  The Roman Church launched brutal Inquisitions throughout Latin America during the first few centuries of colonial rule wherein homosexual behavior was severely punished with fines, religious penance, public humiliation, floggings, imprisonment and death.  In 1575, Spain’s King Philip II issued an edict sparing indigenous natives from the torture, declaring them incapable of good reason.  During the mid-seventeenth century, Inquisition authorities uncovered a network of sodomites in Mexico City and reported the “abomination” to Spain.  From 1656-1663, hundreds of homosexuals were consequently executed during a well-publicized effort to purge Mexico of sodomy.  The convicted homosexuals were marched to San Lazaro, garroted in public and their dead bodies burned.  During the same time period in Cuba, the ruling Spanish Captain General sentenced twenty “effeminate” sodomites to death by burning.  Cuban homosexuals and prostitutes were also exiled to Cayo Cruz, a small island in Havana Bay commonly known as Cayo Puto or “Island of the Faggots.”  Similar disparaging attitudes toward homosexuals were expressed in a 1791 Havana newspaper article entitled “A Critical Letter About The Man-Woman,” which condemned the effeminate sodomites that apparently thrived in eighteenth-century Havana.

In the early nineteenth century, Inquisitions were ended and many Latin American countries achieved independence from Europe.  Both Spain and Portugal eliminated sodomy laws during this time and a majority of Latin American nations followed suit.  Brazil, for instance, gained independence from Portugal in 1822 and decriminalized sodomy eight years later under Emperor Dom Pedro I.  Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821 but was briefly occupied by France for five years, from 1862-1867.  Under French rule, the Napoleonic Code was adopted in Mexico and sodomy was consequently decriminalized.  Both Costa Rica and Guatemala abolished their sodomy laws during the 1870s.  Modern homosexual subcultures began appearing in large Latin American cities in the early 1900s and by the end of the century, nearly all countries had repealed their sodomy laws.  In some nations, laws against homosexuality were temporarily reinstated by dictators but then later repealed.  One of the last major Latin American countries to repeal its sodomy laws was Chile, in 1998.

Sodomy laws or not, homosexual and transgender people remained stigmatized and persecuted throughout much of Latin America.  Effeminate men were often despised in the male-oriented, Latin culture and harassed by officials under contrived charges, a phenomenon that continues up to this day in certain regions.  Nations retaining their sodomy laws included Guyana, Nicaragua and several Caribbean island nations such as Trinidad and Tobago.  Guyana punished sodomy with up to life imprisonment and Trinidad and Tobago prescribed ten to twenty years.  Both of these countries had large East Indian populations and their sodomy laws were mostly vestiges of early British rule.  Nicaragua, which previously had no sodomy laws, criminalized homosexuality in 1992 under pressure from Christian political groups.  The Nicaraguan law also prohibited public support for homosexuality but was rarely followed or enforced.

In the Caribbean, Brazil and American Southeast, descendants of African slaves established a significant presence and introduced traditional African practices such as Voodoo and Santeria into the region.  In these religious cults, female head priestesses, crossdressing priests and homoerotic rituals were not only common but also similar in many ways to indigenous Native American practices.  A majority of African-Americans, however, converted to Christianity and harbored a great deal of animosity for homosexual and transgender people, particularly in the Caribbean region.  In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the British Caribbean islands were among the most hostile while the Spanish islands were predominantly closeted and the Dutch, guardedly tolerant.  Some of the last Caribbean islands to decriminalize sodomy were Cuba (1979), the U.S. Virgin Islands (1984), Bermuda (1994), the Cayman and British Virgin Islands (2001), and Puerto Rico (2003).  Caribbean islands retaining sodomy laws included St. Lucia (twenty-five years imprisonment), Antigua and Barbuda (fourteen years imprisonment), Jamaica (ten years of hard labor), Barbados, and Grenada.  In the Bahamas, public sex was legal for heterosexuals but punished by up to twenty years in prison for homosexuals.

On the island of Hispaniola, sodomy was decriminalized under European rule in both the Dominican Republic and Haiti but homosexual and transgender people remained harassed, just as they were in neighboring Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico.  Female-to-male intersex conditions were relatively common in the Dominican Republic and locally known as guevedoche or “penis at twelve.”  This well-studied condition, also called pseudo-hermaphroditism (steroid 5-alpha reductase deficiency), is found on certain islands and isolated jungle areas around the world.  Infants born with this syndrome are commonly mistaken for and raised as female; however, they are chromosomally male and develop as such (sometimes only partially) upon reaching puberty.  One of the earliest known cases of pseudo-hermaphroditism in America is that of Thomasine Hall, who was born and christened a girl in England but began dressing as a man at age twenty-two.  Hall joined the English army for several years and then later moved to America, where she reassumed her original female identity.  This caught the attention of colonial authorities, however, and the questionable woman was summoned before an American court in 1629.  Upon examination, Thomasine Hall was found to have fully developed male organs and a baffled court subsequently ordered her to dress partly as a man and partly as a woman.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Latin America was predominantly Roman Catholic and a majority of its nations were quietly tolerant of homosexual and transgender people. Gay communities flourished in large cities such as Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Buenos Aires, and civil rights protections—along with some legal recognition for gay couples—were enacted in countries such as Brazil, Mexico and Argentina.

In North America, settlers from England and France became prominent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Although indigenous native tribes were quickly decimated in the East, those west of the Appalachian Mountains survived longer and were well-documented by Euro-American settlers.  Seventeenth-century French explorers in both Quebec and the Mexican Gulf region noticed a class of crossdressing, homosexual natives and coined the term berdache to describe them.  Berdache is of Arabic origin and refers to a young homosexual partner.  The word has since become derogatory and most Native Americans now prefer the traditional term “two-spirit,” which refers to tribal members with both male and female spirits or natures.  Although French and English records of North American tribes describe Native American culture in great detail, two-spirit natives were typically mentioned only in brief or disparaging terms.  Nevertheless, two-spirit traditions have been documented (and in some cases, photographed) in nearly 150 indigenous North American tribes and societies.  In roughly half of these, female counterparts were also reported that lived and dressed as men.  Included among the tribes were the Seminole, Navajo, Mohave, Crow, Zuni, Pueblo, Hopi, Kutenai, Blackfeet, Hidatsa, Cheyenne, western Algonquian and nearly half of the thirty-five tribes living along the Pacific Northwest.  Two-spirit natives comprised a distinct social class within most of these tribal communities; for example, among the Hidatsa of the northern Plains, two-spirits were observed at no less than fifteen to twenty a village and typically pitched their tipis together in a group.

Native American tribes used a wide variety of names for their two-spirit brethren.  The Mohave of the American Southwest, for example, called two-spirit men “alyha” and two-spirit women “hwame.”  In most Native American societies, two-spirit men were assigned a semi-sacred status and often served as shamans or ceremonial dancers.  In battle, two-spirit men were commonly put in charge of bringing food and ammunition to the male warriors while two-spirit women often undertook a man’s lifestyle and actively participated in the fighting and hunting expeditions.  Many of the two-spirit men were transgender—they lived among the women and excelled in all their tasks—but were not known to practice castration.  Both two-spirit men and women crossdressed or wore specific types of clothing and feathers, and their engagement in homosexual behavior was accepted by their fellow tribesmen.  One of the best-known American two-spirits is We’wha (1849-1896), a celebrated Zuni shaman who was invited to Washington D.C. in 1886 and subsequently honored, photographed and widely discussed.  We’wha’s ambiguous gender and sexuality created a sensation among Washington’s elite and the two-spirit was dined at the White House and introduced to U.S. President Grover Cleveland.

Native Americans practiced a polytheistic religion worshiping many different gods and nature spirits.  Euro-Americans, however, had little interest in the pagan beliefs of Native Americans and were mostly condescending of their tribal practices.  By the late 1900s, a majority of tribal descendants had converted to Christianity and abandoned their traditional beliefs.  Euro-American culture, on the other hand, moved in a contrary direction.  Homosexuality was punishable by death in early colonial America and one of the first known executions for sodomy occurred in Dutch-ruled New Amsterdam (now New York).  In 1646, Jan Creoli was convicted of a second offense of sodomy, condemned in the name of God, choked to death and then “burned to ashes.”  In 1660, another trial in the same colony convicted Jan Quisthout van der Linde of sodomy with a servant.  The servant was flogged while Quisthout van der Linde was tied into a sack, thrown in a river and drowned.  In 1674, the English took permanent control of the New Amsterdam colony and renamed it New York.  Sodomy laws prescribing the death penalty were continued under English rule and validated by Biblical references from the Old Testament.  When the United States of America was established after gaining independence from England in 1776, homosexuality and crossdressing were strictly prohibited and sodomy was punishable by death in nearly every American state.  The laws mostly served as a public declaration against homosexual behavior and were only occasionally brought to trial.  Shortly after Independence, American states replaced the death penalty for homosexuality with long prison sentences that remained in effect throughout the nineteenth century.  In 1850s California, for example, a convicted homosexual could be sentenced from five years to life in prison.  While most Latin American countries followed Spain and Portugal by decriminalizing sodomy in the 1800s, English-speaking nations such as the United States, Canada and many Caribbean islands mirrored Britain and kept their sodomy laws intact well into the twentieth century.  As a result, all nineteenth-century homosexuals in North America were closeted and lived highly secretive lives.  One prime example of this is the United State’s own fifteenth president, James Buchanan (1857-1861), who is widely believed to have been homosexual.  As the nation’s only bachelor president, Buchanan never married but shared a home in Washington D.C. with his longtime friend, William King, for sixteen years prior to his presidency.  The two were often slighted as homosexual in political circles and King in particular was referred to as “Miss Nancy” or as Buchanan’s “wife” and “better half.”

In the early 1900s, homosexuality came to be viewed more as a psychopathic illness and prison terms were reduced in many states.  Homosexual subcultures had existed in large American cities since the early nineteenth century but became increasingly prominent after World War II, when the United States emerged as a modern superpower.  In 1948, Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey’s groundbreaking book, Sexual Behavior In The Human Male (The Kinsey Report), created a sensation in conservative America and brought the taboo subject of homosexuality up for debate.  In 1950, America’s first homosexual organization, The Mattachine Society, was founded in New York City and in 1952, Christine Jorgensen became America’s first modern transsexual after returning home from a sex-change operation in Denmark.  In 1956, beat poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) crossed censorship lines by publishing Howl, a book celebrating his homosexuality.  The first U.S. state to decriminalize sodomy was Illinois in 1962 and others gradually followed.  In 1969, homosexual riots broke out at the Stonewall Inn in New York City as a response to routine police harassment, marking the beginning of the modern gay movement.  Sodomy laws had long been used by authorities to stigmatize and harass homosexual citizens in the U.S. and most states were extremely reluctant to abolish them.  In 1975, for example, the California legislature just barely managed to repeal its sodomy laws by a single vote.  In New York, sodomy laws were ruled unconstitutional by the state court in 1980 but not formally repealed until twenty years later.

During the latter half of the twentieth century, many educated Americans began viewing homosexuality and transgender identity as primarily innate and biological.  In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental and emotional disorders and two years later the American Psychological Association followed suit.  In 1981, HIV/AIDS was diagnosed for the first time among American homosexual males.  The disease initially fueled homophobia but also prompted many gay men to reconsider their promiscuous behavior and move toward committed, monogamous relationships and marriage.  Wisconsin was the first state to outlaw discrimination against homosexuals in 1982 and Minnesota was the first to ban discrimination against transgenders in 1993.  That same year, the Intersex Society of North America was formed to provide support for intersex individuals.  In the 1950s, American doctors began performing sex-assignment operations on intersex infants that often caused severe physical and psychological trauma later in life.  The ISNA was established to promote a more natural and accepting approach toward intersexuality and to abolish all unnecessary surgery and stigma.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States of America was a predominantly conservative, Christian nation but mostly tolerant of homosexual and transgender people.  Modern gay communities, some of the largest in the world, thrived in cities such as San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Miami.  In 2000, Vermont was the first state to grant civil unions for gay couples and in 2003, the United States Supreme Court invalidated all U.S. sodomy laws (173 years after Brazil and 212 years after France).  Remarkably, nearly a dozen states still had various laws against homosexuality in their books at the time of the ruling.  In 2004, Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriage and the issue was hotly debated nationwide.  Several Christian and Jewish denominations began including gays in their congregations, blessing their unions and allowing them to serve as priests, but most major denominations remained strongly opposed to homosexuality and did not at all welcome gays, lesbians or transgenders into their folds.  Rather, they actively fought against them both socially and politically.

Canada gained independence from Great Britain in 1867.  Sodomy laws were inherited from Britain but no death sentences were ever recorded.  Canadians were flogged for homosexuality until 1894, after which prison terms of up to fifteen years were meted out instead.  Canada repealed its sodomy laws in 1969 and five years later, Chris Vogel and Rich North, a gay couple from Winnipeg, shocked the world by becoming the first homosexual couple to publicly marry in a church and file a legal challenge (a Manitoba judge declared their marriage invalid later that year).  In 1986, equal rights and freedom from discrimination were guaranteed to homosexuals and transgenders under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  The new charter allowed Canada, in 2005, to become the first country in the New World and the fourth overall to legalize same-sex marriage.  In the early twenty-first century, gay and transgender communities thrived in large Canadian cities such as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

The South Seas

The indigenous cultures of the South Pacific were at one time, and in many cases still are, among the most isolated in the world.  Prior to their discovery by Europeans from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, these societies had little if any contact with outside civilizations.  The vast region includes Australia, New Guinea, New Zealand and all of the various Polynesian islands of the Pacific Ocean.

When Europeans first explored the South Seas they found large, thriving settlements along many of the island coastlines.  Some of the more inhabited islands, such as Tahiti and Hawaii, had populations of up to two hundred thousand and were comparable in size with many European and American towns of the same time period.  Within these communities, homosexual and transgender natives were well documented by early French and British explorers such as Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, James Cook, William Bligh, and others.  Third-gender natives were evident in all of the major Polynesian islands including Tahiti, Fiji, New Zealand, Hawaii, Tonga, Samoa, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, etc., and to a lesser degree among the dark-skinned aborigines that formed smaller tribes along the coasts of Australia and New Guinea.

In Polynesia, European explorers were surprised to encounter societies that had long regarded bisexual, homosexual and transgender conduct as normative.  Third-gender natives were common on all of the islands and known by different names.  In Tahiti, for instance, male-to-female transgenders that lived and behaved as women were called mahu.  In the Hawaiian Islands, whose inhabitants are believed to have originated from Tahiti, the mahu were also present along with the aikane—sexually related or “friendly” men that were essentially masculine-type homosexuals and bisexuals.  In Tuvalu, the word pinapinaaine substitutes for mahu, as does the word fa’afafine (“like a woman”) in Samoa and fakafefine in Tonga.  All of these various terms referred to the different types of transgender and homosexual men found among the South Sea natives.  Polynesian mahu lived and worked alongside the women and excelled in traditionally female tasks such as lei making and basket weaving.  They did not perform castration but instead tied their genitals up tightly against the groin.  Hawaiian aikane and their counterparts on other islands were commonly engaged as male servants, messengers, guards and confidantes to the royal class.  Both the mahu and aikane were known for their talent in the elaborate dance ceremonies performed throughout the islands.  Bisexuality was quite common in Polynesia and many island kings kept both male and female partners in their royal huts for intimate relations.  Lesbians were less reported in the South Seas although early British ethnographers observed such women in several of the western islands, such as New Hebrides (Vanuatu).  Among the Maori tribes of New Zealand, intimate companions of the same sex were known as takatapui and often engaged in homoerotic or bisexual relations.  Two Maori ancestors, Tutanekai and Tiki, were renowned as takatapui and are traditionally portrayed playing their flutes together under the moonlight on a secluded island.

Polynesians worshiped a wide range of gods and island spirits but eventually abandoned their indigenous beliefs to adopt Christianity.  Soon after their conversion, islanders began stigmatizing the mahu and enacted laws to punish homosexuality.  French Polynesia, consolidated under France in the nineteenth century, was the exception and never established sodomy laws.  The small Pacific nation is comprised of the Society Islands, which include Tahiti, as well as the Austral, Marquesas and Tuamotu Islands.  Several Polynesian islands decriminalized homosexuality during the late 1900s such as American Samoa, Guam, Hawaii, Micronesia, New Caledonia and Vanuatu.  Most islands, however, retained strict, British-inherited sodomy laws well into the early twenty-first century.  The Cook, Fiji, Kiribati, Solomon and Tuvalu Islands all punished homosexuality with up to fourteen years of prison; the Marshall, Niue, and Tokelau Islands prescribed ten years and Western Samoa, seven.  Sodomy laws in Polynesia were based on strongly held religious beliefs and many of the islands were extremely reluctant to abandon them.  In Fiji, for instance, laws prohibiting private homosexual conduct were invalidated by the High Court in 2005 but the ruling was highly criticized and challenged by many islanders.

Hawaii’s first written laws were established in 1833 and did not specifically mention sodomy.  In 1850, however, a law was enacted under British supervision that prescribed up to twenty years imprisonment with hard labor and a fine.  The new sodomy law remained in effect after the U.S. annexation of 1898 and cases were occasionally brought to trial.  Hawaii’s last sodomy case was tried in 1958, one year before statehood, and the law was eventually repealed by the state legislature in 1972.  Hawaii took a step backward in 1998 when it became the first U.S. state to effectively ban gay couples from marriage through a constitutional referendum.

In New Zealand, homosexuality was punishable by hanging under early British rule but no executions were ever reported.  During one famous trial from 1836, six young Maori men accused the Reverend William Yate of sodomitic relations.  The Reverend, second in line to the Bishop of Sydney, was not convicted but forced to return to England in disgrace.  In the mid-nineteenth century, New Zealand replaced the death penalty with long prison sentences.  Few cases were ever brought to trial, however, and sodomy was eventually decriminalized in 1986.  Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation was outlawed throughout New Zealand in 1993 and civil unions were established in 2004.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, much of Polynesia scorned homosexual and transgender behavior but indigenous third-gender traditions persisted throughout all of the islands, whether rural or urban.  In modern cities such as Auckland, Honolulu, Papeete and Suva, homosexual and transgender locals aligned with their Western counterparts to form small but thriving gay communities.

Early European explorers also reported homosexual and transgender behavior among the aboriginal tribes of New Guinea and Australia.  The Portuguese first sighted New Guinea in the sixteenth century and the Dutch discovered Australia in the early 1600s.  Throughout the islands of New Guinea, the Papua Gulf region and western Melanesia, the practice of ritualized homosexuality has been observed among various tribes such as the Samba, Anga and Keraki for many years.  In these unusual ceremonies, young boys from the age of seven to fifteen, without exception, are made to perform oral sex on older boys and swallow their semen in a series of initiation rites.  The rites are believed to instill male potency in the youths and after the age of sixteen they are considered fully potent and married off to women.  From that point onward, all homosexual behavior stops with very few exceptions.  In a similar tradition found among the Marind-anim tribes of Irian Jaya in Western New Guinea, tribesmen honor an ancestor known as Sosum by dancing around a giant red effigy of his penis while performing homosexual acts on young initiates.  According to local legend, Sosum’s mother-in-law cut off his penis when he was having too much intercourse with his wife.  The Sosum ritual similarly warns new initiates not to emasculate themselves by overindulging with their future brides.

Another unusual occurrence in this region is the above-normal birth rate of female-to-male intersex children (pseudohermaphrodites).  The Sambia tribes of New Guinea are so familiar with this particular intersex condition that they rarely misidentify it and acknowledge three distinct sexes in their culture—male, female and kwolu-aatmwol or “transforming into a man.”  Kwolu-aatmwol tribe members are accommodated within Sambian society but quietly disparaged and isolated.  They are also somewhat feared—kwolu-aatmwol are believed to have mystical powers and often become shamans or witchdoctors.  Most world cultures accept intersex people either by passing them off as ordinary men and women or through the recognition of a third sex category.  In many indigenous societies, intersex children are raised as shamans while in other cultures they are given to monasteries and encouraged to live as celibates.  A few societies have been known to kill their intersex infants at birth, such as those of ancient Greece and Rome.  Most intersex conditions, however, are either unnoticeable at birth or mild enough so that the majority of intersex people live relatively normal lives.

Several countries ruled over Papua New Guinea until the island nation achieved full independence in 1975.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than ninety percent of Papua New Guinea’s population was Christian and British-derived sodomy laws punished homosexuality with up to fourteen years in jail.  Native tribes, on the other hand, lived in isolated regions and were able to maintain traditional practices and beliefs with little interference.

In Australia, aborigines existed for thousands of years prior to European contact.  Early Caucasian settlers were hostile toward the dark-skinned Native Australians and came very close to exterminating them.  As a result, little is known about the traditional beliefs and practices of Australia’s original inhabitants although most scholars believe they were similar to other tribal cultures in the region.  Early but unsubstantiated reports mention sightings of crossdressing aborigines, sodomitic rituals and homosexual apprenticeships along Australia’s northern islands and eastern coast.  Captain James Cook rediscovered Australia in 1770 and a British penal colony was established in the area of Sydney in 1788.  Under British rule, homosexuality was punished by hanging and sodomy cases were routinely brought to trial.  Australia’s first hanging for sodomy occurred in 1828 and executions reached a peak during the 1830s.  Beginning in 1864, long prison sentences replaced the hangings while floggings were meted out for minor sodomy offenses.  In late nineteenth-century Australia, homosexual men and women thrived in private social circles and an urban homosexual subculture emerged by the 1920s.  Authorities launched several crackdowns on homosexuality after World War II but the persecution ended in the 1960s when Western attitudes toward sexuality were liberalized throughout much of the modern world.  In 1975, South Australia was the first state to repeal its sodomy laws while Tasmania was the last, in 1997.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Australia was a mostly conservative, Christian country but largely tolerant of its homosexual and transgender citizens.  Modern gay communities thrived in cities such as Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and various civil rights were offered from state to state.     

East Asia

The countries of East Asia have a long history of gender diversity and relative tolerance.  Prior to European colonialism, Hindu traditions thrived throughout Indochina, down the Malay Peninsula and across the Indonesian archipelago.  One example of this is the large Angkor Wat Vishnu temple of Cambodia, built in the eighth century A.D.  Another example can be found on the island of Bali in Indonesia, where Hindu culture flourishes to this day.  Up until the first few centuries A.D., much of the Indonesian islands were under the control of East Indian traders and priests that brought with them traditional Hindu attitudes regarding gender diversity and tolerance.  Buddhism was also imported into the region a few centuries later and became prevalent from Indochina all the way up to Japan.  Both of these religions preached virtue, responsible family life and asceticism among their adherents but at the same time tolerated various types of sexualities within general society.  Unlike Europe and other parts of the world, East Asia has little if any history of widespread execution or torture of homosexuals.

The indigenous natives of East Asia lived relatively simple, rural lives for thousands of years and typically viewed human sexuality in a light-hearted, playful fashion.  This attitude is demonstrated in early East Asian folksongs, poetry, art and especially dance.  Traditional dance performances have been an important part of Asian culture since time immemorial and dance troupes were customarily either all male or all female.  This practice in theatre and dance, wherein crossdressing men played female roles and crossdressing women played male roles, fostered a great deal of gender levity that invariably attracted many homosexual and transgender people into the profession.

Throughout the Indonesian archipelago, third-gender natives were acknowledged for centuries by traveling Hindu, Islamic and Dutch merchants.  Homosexual and transgender Indonesians remain common in the islands today and are known by terms such as waria, banci, bencong and many others.  Waria is the most familiar of these and is especially used to address male-to-female transgenders.  As a combination of the Indonesian words for female (wanita) and male (pria), waria reflects their mixed-gender status as both woman and man.  Indonesians traditionally viewed the waria as symbols of prosperity and their presence was believed to bring good luck.   In a similar tradition still practiced today, intersex animals are kept as pets in the belief that they bestow good fortune upon the family and village.  Another time-honored custom still found in many remote sections of Indonesia is the practice of homosexual apprenticeships.  In this tradition, accomplished shamans and artists known as waroks offer tutelage to young male disciples or gemblaks that often involve homosexual relationships.

In the eleventh century A.D., Islam was introduced into the western islands of Indonesia and gradually spread eastward until, by the 1500s, most of the country was Muslim.  Unlike other parts of the Islamic world, however, male castration never became a widespread practice in medieval Indonesia.  The Dutch gained control of the islands in the seventeenth century and established the highly lucrative Dutch East India Company.  Both the Muslims and Dutch overlooked third-gender behavior among native Indonesians and sodomy laws were never legislated.  After gaining independence from the Netherlands in 1949, Indonesia remained legally neutral toward homosexuality.  Nevertheless, Islamic beliefs increasingly stifled traditional attitudes toward gender diversity and authorities often harassed homosexual and transgender citizens.   In 2003, calls by Islamic fundamentalists to legislate Shari’a or strict religious laws throughout the islands brought Indonesia’s traditional stance of tolerance into question.  Several local districts were allowed to adopt Shari’a law and an immediate persecution of homosexual and transgender citizens ensued.  Nearby Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore also had large Muslim populations and were even more conservative than Indonesia.  In these three countries, British colonialists instituted strict sodomy laws during the 1800s that remained firmly in place well into the early twenty-first century.  Brunei punished homosexuality with up to ten years in prison, Malaysia with twenty and Singapore with life.  In addition, Malaysia and Singapore had repressive laws banning any organization or public expression in support of homosexuality.

On Mainland Indochina, early rural cultures were full of gender diversity and this is reflected in the colorful same-sex dance and theatre traditions found throughout the region from Burma to Vietnam.  Traditional Siamese culture recognized three sexes known as ying (female), chai (male) and kathoey (effeminate homosexuals and transgenders).  Another term used for the third sex in northern Siam is pu-mia or “male-female,” which refers to the crossdressing transgenders found in that region and describes their mixed-gender status.  Early British colonists in both Burma and Siam noticed homosexuality as well as crossdressing among the natives and often complained about their inability to distinguish the men from the women.  In her book, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (London: 1870), Anna Leonowens wrote about the gender-ambiguous natives she encountered in Siam as follows: “Here were women disguised as men, and men in the attire of women, hiding vice of every vileness and crime of every enormity—at once the most disgusting, the most appalling, and the most unnatural that the heart of man has conceived.”

Great Britain incorporated Burma into the British Indian Empire during the nineteenth century but allowed Siam to remain an independent yet supervised kingdom.  Under British influence, Siam briefly enacted sodomy laws during the early twentieth century although not a single case was ever brought to trial.  In 1949, Siam changed its name to Thailand and sodomy laws were abolished seven years later during an effort to purge Thai legal codes of obsolete edicts.  By the end of the twentieth century, over ninety-five percent of Thais were Buddhist and the country was among the most tolerant in Asia.  Modern Thailand became an international center for gender-variant people of all types and famous for its drag queens, legal prostitution and easily accessible transsexual operations.  Gay tourism grew in popularity and local homosexual and transgender Thais united with their Western counterparts to form thriving communities in resort areas and large cities such as Bangkok.  Burma, on the other hand, remained stagnant in terms of civil liberties and social tolerance.  Under British rule, strict sodomy laws were established in the mostly Buddhist nation that punished homosexuality with up to life in prison.  Burma gained independence from Great Britain in 1948 but chose to keep the inherited sodomy laws.  In 1989, the highly isolated country changed its name to Myanmar and eventually reduced its punishment for homosexual behavior to ten years in prison.

The early indigenous cultures of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were similar to that of Siam and Burma.  All three became predominantly Buddhist with some traditional animist tribes in remote rural areas.  Vietnam was heavily influenced by China, which ruled the region from the second century B.C. until the early tenth century, while Cambodia thrived under the impressive Khmer Empire from 800 to 1450 A.D.  Laos was more closely related to Siam and they united as a single kingdom in the fourteenth century.   Detailed legal codes from Vietnam’s Le and Nguyen Dynasties, beginning in the fifteenth century, banned male castration but not homosexual behavior.  While Vietnam’s laws often mirrored those of the Chinese, in this case Vietnam outlawed male castration even though China did not.  Similarly, when China passed laws discouraging homosexuality in 1740, Vietnam chose not to follow suit.  In the nineteenth century, France dominated all three countries and established French Indochina.  Sodomy laws were never enacted under French rule and Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos all achieved independence in 1954.  By the early twenty-first century, all three countries had resisted criminalizing homosexuality although the general mood toward homosexuals and transgenders was mostly conservative.

The Philippines were first sighted by Portuguese explorers in the early sixteenth century and colonized by Spain from 1565 onward.  Documents from early Spanish colonists mention male-to-female crossdressing and “nonconforming” behavior among the island’s indigenous animist shamans.  Under Spanish rule, homosexuality was a punishable offense and Christian Inquisitions were conducted until Spain abolished its sodomy laws in the early 1800s.  Independence was achieved through revolution in 1896 but the United States took possession of the islands two years later.  In 1946, the Philippines was granted full independence by the Americans.

Research conducted on the Philippines’ island of Negros in the 1950s and ‘60s by anthropologist Donn Hart reveals a longstanding presence of homosexual and transgender individuals in the region, from the slightly effeminate dalopapa or binabaye to the fully transgender bayot.  Similar third-gender subcultures can be found throughout the country’s many islands, each with its own set of local categories and terms.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Philippines remained a diverse and mostly tolerant nation despite the fact that over ninety percent of its inhabitants were Roman Catholic.  Homosexuality remained decriminalized, transsexual operations were legal and male prostitution was often a livelihood for some of the islands’ poor.  Gay and transgender Filipinos maintained a significant presence in large cities such as Manila and were known as bakla in the local Tagalog language.  Masculine women and lesbians were also common in the Philippines and called lakin-on.

China has a long history of gender diversity dating back many thousands of years.  The legendary king and founder of Chinese culture, Emperor Huang Di, is described by ancient poets as having male lovers and was by no means alone in this regard—for two centuries during the height of the Han dynasty, ten openly bisexual emperors ruled China.   Their names and the names of their acknowledged male lovers were recorded in the official histories of that period, beginning with Emperor Gao Zu (ruler from 206-195 B.C.) and his favorite, Jiru, and ending with Emperor Ai Di (ruler from 6 B.C. to 1 A.D.) and his much adored male concubine, Dongxian.  There were also no less than nine emperors after this period that had openly homosexual relationships, from Emperor Jian Wen Di of the Liang Dynasty (ruler from 549-551 A.D.) to Emperor Puyi, the last Qing or Manchu emperor of the twentieth century.  China has an excellent history of record-keeping and early court chronicles from the eighth century B.C. onward document Chinese kings with third-gender servants in their royal assemblies.  In many cases, the servants were intimately connected with the king and often acted as confidential advisors and friends.  Homosexual and transgender citizens were also known to serve as shamans, dancers and prostitutes in early Chinese culture and a good amount of homoerotic literature exists from the Six Dynasties Period (222-589 A.D.), such as that written by poet Ruan Ji.  Some of the poetry also includes references to lesbian love affairs.  

The three most important religions of ancient China were Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism.  Taoism is China’s traditional, indigenous religion and worships various gods, nature spirits and human ancestors.  Many Tao gods and goddesses are depicted living either alone or with another deity of the same sex, such as the mountain god, Shanshen, and the local earth god, Tudi.  Tudi is always depicted as male but Shanshen is sometimes male and sometimes female.  Tao teachings stress harmony in nature and the importance of maintaining a balance between the female (yin) and male (yang) principles.  Some Taoists believe that homosexual behavior indicates an imbalance of yin or yang while others understand that third-gender people are naturally balanced or “neutral” since they possess both male and female qualities.  Confucius (551-479 B.C.) was an early Chinese philosopher and ethicist whose teachings slowly grew in popularity after his death.  Confucianism was adopted by Emperor Hu in the second century B.C. and has influenced China’s moral, social, political and religious practices for many centuries.  The Analects of Confucius is the primary source of Confucian teachings and stresses social loyalty and righteous living.  Homosexuality is not specifically mentioned in the text but traditional gender roles are prescribed and failing to produce a son is considered the worst neglect of duty.  On the other hand, Confucius exalted all that was ancient—he recognized China’s longstanding tradition of accommodating third-gender citizens but maintained they should never assume positions of power.  Buddhism was brought to China from western India during the second century B.C. along trade routes (the “Silk Road”) extending out of Central Asia.  It was acknowledged by Emperor Hu of the Han dynasty but slow to gain in popularity.  Buddhist teachings of asceticism and monastic life were initially foreign to both the nature-worshiping Taoists and family-oriented Confucianists but by the sixth century A.D., Buddhism became widespread and was a major religious influence.

Muslim merchants introduced Islam into China during the eighth century along the same trade routes that had brought Buddhism.  Islam sustained a significant following in northern China and influenced the region for eight centuries.  Muslims popularized the practice of male castration among third-gender servants and slaves, just as they had in India, and the castrations involved a complete removal of both the penis and testicles.  Castrated servants were highly popular among Chinese royalty for many centuries but became less common when Islam began to wane in the 1600s.  The last vestige of China’s eunuch system ended in 1912 with the collapse of the Qing Dynasty.

Christianity first arrived in China during the sixteenth century but never became widely popular.  Catholic missionaries operating from the Portuguese colony of Macao, such as Jesuit Matthew Ricci of Italy, noted an acceptance of homosexuality in the region but could do little to change it.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Great Britain also observed homosexuality in China while establishing its own lucrative trading port in Hong Kong.  In his book, Travels in China (London: 1806), English traveler John Barrow described the sodomy he found among Chinese officials as follows:  “The commission of this detestable and unnatural act is attended with so little sense of shame, or feelings of delicacy that many of the first officers of the state seemed to make no hesitation in publicly avowing it.  Each of these officers is constantly attended by his pipe-bearer, who is generally a handsome boy, from 14 to 18 years of age, and is always well dressed.”  The British were condescending toward the Chinese and exploited them shamelessly.  For this reason, all things British were met with suspicion and resistance in China, including their Christian faith.

Zhu Gui, a grain tax official for the Fujian Province, lodged China’s first recorded complaint against homosexuality in the eighteenth century.  Gui complained of several homosexual cults, such as Hu Tianbao, which worshiped images of embracing male deities at local shrines.  In 1740, the Qing Dynasty enacted China’s first law against homosexuality but it was rarely enforced and the penalties were mild.  The new law had little impact on longstanding homosexual traditions in China other than to make them more secretive.  British-ruled Hong Kong instituted harsh sodomy laws in 1865 prescribing life imprisonment while Portuguese Macao resisted any such legislation.  When the Republic of China was established in 1912 after the abdication of the Qing Dynasty’s last emperor, the country’s new legal code did not criminalize private homosexual behavior.  After the 1949 Communist takeover, however, strict sodomy laws were established and a persecution of China’s homosexual and transgender citizens began.  This reached its zenith during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, when Chinese Communists launched a vicious attack against homosexuals and punished them with long prison terms and executions.  The radicals also destroyed all ancient and modern artifacts depicting homoeroticism and only a few, privately owned collections managed to survive the onslaught.  China’s Cultural Revolution was a sorry deviation from the region’s traditional tolerance of gender diversity and stands out as one of its worst instances.  Afterwards, homophobia gradually eased as China slowly began to modernize.  In 1991, Hong Kong became the first Chinese city to abolish sodomy laws and Mainland China soon followed in 1997.  Homosexual and transgender citizens maintained a strong presence in early twenty-first century China but were mostly stigmatized and kept underground.  Modern Chinese terms for homosexuals included tongzhi (comrade) for men and lazi for women.

The original inhabitants of Taiwan were polytheistic aborigines of Malay and Polynesian descent that had lived on the island for thousands of years.  Records from the Han Dynasty acknowledge Taiwan since the third century A.D. but hostile natives prevented the Chinese from settling there.  Portuguese explorers sighted the island in 1544, naming it Formosa, and the Dutch established a small colony in the early seventeenth century.  Soon afterward, however, a large influx of Chinese immigrants overtook the mostly rural island and the Qing Dynasty reclaimed Formosa in 1683.  Chinese women were originally restricted from immigrating and as a consequence, male homosexuality became common during this time.  Sodomy was never punished under Chinese rule, however, or when Japan took over Taiwan from 1895-1945.  During Japanese rule, a type of all-female folk opera known as Koa-a-hi became widely popular throughout the island.  In this artistic tradition, women played both male and female roles and often extended their masculine stage personas into the Taiwanese social life.  In 1949, Mainland China fell to Communist rule and Taiwan became a refuge for Chinese nationalists.  The island nation eventually became an independent, prosperous country and continued to resist enacting sodomy laws.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Taiwan was among the most tolerant of Asian countries in regard to civil liberties and had small but thriving gay and lesbian communities in large cities such as Taipei and Kaohsiung.

Korea’s ancient oral traditions and folklore contain numerous accounts of sexual relationships between men.  One popular story from the eighth century A.D. describes a young Buddhist monk, Myojung, who was courted by several male aristocrats that included a Chinese emperor from the Tang Dynasty.  Another interesting account from the eighth century involves Korean Emperor Hyegong (ruler from 765-780 A.D.), the thirty-sixth ruler of the Silla Dynasty.  Crowned king at the age of eight after the death of his father, Hyegong grew up to be girlish and was described as “a man by appearance but a woman by nature.”  Fifteen years after his ascendance to the throne, royal subordinates killed Hyegong when they were no longer able to tolerate his femininity.  In fourteenth-century Korea, Emperor Kongmin (thirty-first ruler of the Koryo Dynasty) was famous for falling in love with young boys.  After his wife’s death, the king spent much of his time pursuing young Buddhist monks and even established an organization devoted to their recruitment.  In the fifteenth century, court chronicles describe how Emperor Sejong (the fourth ruler of the Chosun Dynasty) met with his cabinet in 1436 to discuss rumors about his daughter-in-law’s lesbian behavior.  To preserve the dignity of the royal court, the girl was expelled from the palace on contrived charges.

Korea’s indigenous religious traditions are very similar to Chinese Taoism and gender diversity was accepted in ancient times.  Buddhism was introduced during the fifth century A.D. and became Korea’s official religion under the Silla Dynasty in the seventh century.  Confucianism was introduced from China in the seventh century and became the recognized state ideology in 1392 under the Chosun Dynasty.  Christianity entered Korea during the seventeenth century but did not become popular until after World War II.  In the 1950s, the Korean peninsula was divided into North and South.  By the early twenty-first century, neither country had enacted sodomy laws although homosexuality was severely restricted in the communist North.  Homosexual and transgender subcultures persisted in the democratic South, especially in large cities such as Seoul, but were somewhat constrained by conservative attitudes.

In Japan, Shintoism is the traditional, indigenous religion and a wide range of gods, nature spirits, and human ancestors are worshiped.  The ancient Japanese were straightforward about human sexuality but also honored family traditions and virtue.  Shintoists are well known for their seasonal holidays celebrating fertility and large festivals are observed in Japan, even today, wherein enormous phallic effigies are taken out of local shrines and paraded through the fields.  Homosexuals and other gender-variant persons are mentioned throughout Japanese history and commonly described as house attendants, artists, dancers and prostitutes.  Young Kabuki actors, called kagema, were especially notorious as male prostitutes and worked in teahouse brothels known as kagemajaya.  The kagema are popularly portrayed in numerous homoerotic Japanese poems and paintings that were especially prominent during the Heian Period from 794-1185 A.D.

Buddhism introduced ascetic values into Japan at the end of the fifth century A.D. but Japanese Buddhists were notoriously negligent in their vows.  For many centuries, homosexual behavior was commonly associated with Japan’s Buddhist monasteries and is well documented in surviving diaries kept by the priests themselves.  Early Jesuit missionaries of the sixteenth century often commented upon the homosexual behavior they encountered among Buddhist clergy and in 1636, Dutch officers Caron and Schouten wrote of Japan’s homosexuality as follows: “Their Priests, as well as many of the Gentry, are much given to Sodomy, that unnatural passion, being esteemed no sin, nor shameful thing amongst them.”  In 1691, Dutchman Engelbert Kaempfer observed effeminate boy prostitutes in the town of Okitsu and noted that the Japanese were “very much addicted to this vice.”  Male tutorships known as shudo are a time-honored custom of Japan and were especially prevalent during the Tokugawa period from 1600-1857 A.D.  During this period accomplished masters, known as nenja, offered apprenticeships to young male disciples or wakashu that frequently involved homosexual relations, especially among the samurai warriors.

Japan was initially resistant to Western influence but opened up to modernization during the Meiji period from 1867-1912.  During this time there was a brief legal enforcement of anti-sodomy laws from 1873-1881 but otherwise, nanshoku or homosexuality has never been illegal on the island nation.  All-female theatre troupes became popular in the early twentieth century and women playing male roles, known as otokoyaku, were sometimes implicated in lesbian scandals.  Male homosexuality was reportedly common among Japanese troops during World War II and crossdressing male prostitutes, called dansho, became evident in large cities immediately after the war.  From the 1960s onward, homosexual and transgender bars, nightclubs and entertainment venues maintained a regular presence in Japanese urban culture.  Lesbian subcultures were also visible and female-to-male crossdressers were known as dansosha.  At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Japan was among the most tolerant of East Asian countries.  Japanese citizens privately tolerated gender diversity and there were no virulently anti-gay religious organizations in Japan as there were in the Christian West.  Modern gay and lesbian communities thrived in cities such as Tokyo, Yokohama and Osaka, and several municipalities in Japan banned discrimination based on sexual orientation and transgender identity.

Central and West Asia

The vast region of Central and West Asia has a long history of accommodating homosexual and transgender people, especially within the ancient civilizations of India, Persia, and along the Silk Road of the Central Asian plateaus.  As previously described, Vedic India acknowledged the existence of a third-sex category (tritiya-prakriti) and accommodated gender-variant people as dancers, actors, house servants, barbers, masseurs, prostitutes, flower-sellers, priests and so on.  Early Vedic teachings stressed responsible family life and asceticism but also tolerated different types of sexualities within general society.  In ancient times, Vedic practices and beliefs were more widespread and extended westward to Persia, along the Arabian Sea coastline, southward to the various islands of the Indian Ocean, eastward into Indochina and Indonesia, and northward up to the Central Asian steppes.

In addition to Vedic Hinduism, several other religions originated in India such as Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism—each with their own unique yet often similar understanding of gender variance.  Buddhism in particular became very influential throughout much of India and Asia.  Lord Buddha appeared in northeastern India (now Nepal) during the sixth century B.C. and is accepted by Hindus as a partial incarnation of Vishnu or God.  He was the son of a Hindu king but renounced all worldliness to practice asceticism.  After attaining enlightenment, Buddha preached his realizations throughout much of northern India.  His teachings of renunciation, proper action, compassion and the ultimate dissolution of the self were encoded by his followers and gradually spread throughout Asia.  As an offshoot of Hinduism, many Buddhist terms and concepts are taken directly from Vedic teachings such as karma, dharma, nirvana, etc.  In the same way, early Buddhist texts like the Vinaya utilize familiar Sanskrit terms to describe the third sex.  Chief among these is the word pandaka, a variation of the Sanskrit term panda or “impotent.”  The different types of pandaka mentioned in the Vinaya are identical to those found in Vedic texts and include familiar terms such as napumsaka and paksha-pandaka.   The definitions of these words are also identical and describe various types of men that are impotent with women such as homosexuals, transgenders and the intersexed.  Another word used in Buddhist Pali texts, ubhatobyanjanaka, refers to people with both male and female natures.  Early Buddhism thus inherited its knowledge of a third sex from Vedic teachings and similarly tolerated gender-variant people in society.

The Jain religion is also closely related to Hinduism and was established in northwestern India just prior to Buddhism.  Its teachings are based on a line of spiritual preceptors or tirthankaras, beginning from 900 B.C. and ending with the prophet Mahavirya, a contemporary of Lord Buddha.  Jainism is very similar to ascetic Hinduism and its teachings stress compassion, celibacy, vegetarianism and fasting.  Jains do not acknowledge a supreme being but worship various deities and saints.  Like Hindus, they have historically recognized a third sex and accommodated gender-variant people in society.  Jain teachings mention nine natures that trigger passion (nokashayas), three of which include purushaved (the desire of women for men), striyaved (the desire of men for women) and napumsakaved (the desire of “eunuchs” for one another).

Another religion originating in northwestern India is Sikhism, which began in the sixteenth century with spiritual preceptor Guru Nanak.  Sikhism honors a supreme being and is similar in many ways to both Hinduism and Islam.  Sikh holy books are silent on homosexuality but stress marriage and family life for all of its adherents, even to the extent of forbidding monasticism.  There is consequently little space for homosexuals and transgenders in traditional Sikhism, although some adherents point out that Guru Nanak strongly emphasized human equality and rejected the idea of creating outcastes.

Religions foreign to India include Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Bahaism.  Christianity was introduced in the first century A.D. by St. Thomas, an original disciple of Jesus.  The new religion established a following along the western coast of Kerala but never became widely popular in India.  Several Jewish communities also established themselves in India at approximately the same time.  Known as the “lost” Jews of India’s southwestern Konkan Coast, these small communities were first officially recognized as Jewish during the twelfth century.  Unlike other regions of the world, followers of Judaism were never persecuted in India.  In 1498, Vasco da Gama landed in Goa, north of Kerala, and claimed the area for Portugal and the Roman Church.  The Portuguese established several lucrative trading ports during the sixteenth century and Inquisitions were launched in an attempt to forcibly convert Hindus to Catholicism.  Homosexuals were also persecuted during this time and thousands of Indians fled to neighboring Karnataka to escape the persecution.  Several other European countries established ports along India’s coastlines in the seventeenth century—such as the French at Pondicherry and the Dutch, Danes and Brits—but none were able to convert many Indians to Christianity.  Nevertheless, the British colonization of India from 1757 to 1947 had an enormous impact on the country in terms of instilling strong, Victorian-era sexual mores on the Hindu population.

Islam was the most effective foreign religion to impact India.  From the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries, invading Muslims from West Asia established Islamic sultanates that often clashed with sovereign Indian states to the south.  In most cases the two religions coexisted peacefully, but during times of war, defeated Hindus were often either forcibly converted to Islam or slain.  In other instances, Hindus voluntarily converted for economic reasons or to escape India’s stifling caste system.  Muslims introduced the widespread practice of slavery and male castration into North India and accommodated crossdressing, homosexuality and male prostitution among the eunuch class.  When the British took control of the country in the nineteenth century, sodomy and crossdressing were criminalized and eunuchs persecuted.  From 1860 forward, homosexuality was punished throughout the British Indian Empire with up to life in prison.  India’s independence was achieved in 1947 after a nonviolent struggle spearheaded by Mahatma Gandhi, but large Muslim populations in the northwest and east forced India to partition off two sizeable tracts of land now known as Pakistan and Bangladesh.  The predominantly Buddhist island of Ceylon was granted independence a year later and adopted the name Sri Lanka in 1972.  Hindu Nepal and Buddhist Bhutan remained independent kingdoms but were strongly influenced by India.  In Nepal, homosexual and crossdressing men have a long history and are known as meti.

India and its bordering nations maintained conservative attitudes after British rule and were largely intolerant if not openly hostile toward homosexual and transgender citizens.  All were extremely reluctant to abolish the inherited sodomy laws and in fact none had by the early twenty-first century.  India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan all prescribed jail terms of up to life in prison while Sri Lanka punished homosexuality with up to ten years.  Other island nations in the Indian Ocean were similarly strict—the Maldives prescribed life imprisonment, Mauritius five years and the Seychelles were nonspecific.  Pakistan, strongly influenced by Islamic fundamentalism, was correspondingly the most hostile country in the region and prescribed the death penalty for homosexual conduct.  Throughout much of the Indian subcontinent, sodomy laws served more as a public statement against homosexuality than anything else.  The laws were in fact rarely enforced and large underground homosexual and transgender communities existed throughout the entire region.  In Pakistan, for instance, male prostitutes and transgenders known as zenana maintained a strong presence in urban areas despite the country’s harsh laws against homosexuality.  In the 1990s, small but modern gay communities and organizations began appearing in major cities such as New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Karachi and Kathmandu.  In 2004, plausible calls were made for the first time in India to repeal the outdated and untraditional laws.

To the west, ancient Persia goes back thousands of years and is well known for its historical accommodation of homosexuality, crossdressing and male prostitution.  In the seventh century B.C., tribes of Aryan descent established the first of several great Persian empires.  Extending from the western border of India all the way to Asia Minor and Greece in the east, Persia’s Achaemenid Empire thrived for three centuries but was conquered by Alexander the Great in 330 B.C.  One of the earliest and best-known examples of a third-gender Persian is Bagoas, the favorite male concubine of Emperor Darius III.  After the emperor’s death, Bagoas was presented to Alexander the Great as a gift and the two fell deeply in love.  Bagoas is described by ancient historians as “exceptional in beauty and in the very flower of boyhood, with whom Darius was intimate and with whom Alexander would later be intimate.”

As a custom of the ancient world, Persians typically employed homosexual and transgender servants in domestic affairs where they also often served as sexual partners.  In the seventh century B.C., male castration was introduced into Persia from conquered Assyria and Media to the west, but the practice was more related to imported slaves rather than freeborn Persian citizens.  Another import from Assyria was the practice of ritual castration—a tradition found in certain Middle Eastern goddess cults wherein male-to-female transgenders castrated themselves and adopted female personas in the name of their venerated goddesses.

Ancient Persians were polytheistic and worshiped a wide range of deities that were similar to the Vedic pantheon of India.  During the Achaemenid Period, Zoroastrianism was adopted as the chief religion by both the ruling monarchy and a majority of its citizens.  Zoroastrianism was founded by the prophet, Zoroaster, around 1800 B.C. in the steppes of Central Asia and is closely related to Vaishnava Hinduism.  It acknowledges a supreme God along with various good and evil deities and also worships both the sacred fire and sun.  Many scholars believe that Judaism was either derived from or strongly influenced by the early Zoroastrian teachings of Persia.  The original portions of Zoroastrianism’s holy book, the Avesta, do not mention homosexuality.  Later sections condemn it as demonic but do not prescribe any punishment, and adherents of Zoroastrianism lived peacefully alongside Persia’s traditional acceptance of gender diversity for over a thousand years.  It became the court religion of three Persian empires from 558 B.C. to 651 A.D. and spread along Central Asia’s Silk Road as far east as China.  In the seventh century A.D., Islam moved into West Asia and quickly replaced Zoroastrianism as the dominant religion of Persia.  A century later, large numbers of Zoroastrians fled to the western Indian state of Maharastra to avoid religious persecution and their communities remain the religion’s largest concentration of followers to this day.

Persian culture thrived under Islamic rule and an abundance of homoerotic poetry and art emerged during this period, especially from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.  A type of Islamic mysticism, known as Sufi, also flourished during this time and focused on divine love and esoteric teachings rather than exoteric ones.  Islamic sultanates in Persia and other parts of Asia, including North India, were quite liberal for many centuries and tolerated a wide range of sexual practices.  Homosexual and eunuch servants were popular symbols of prestige among Central and West Asian royalty and often served as male concubines.  Young dancing boys, known as kocek or baccha, were widely popular throughout the region and well known for their practice of crossdressing and male prostitution.  In Islamic Persia, male brothels were legally recognized and paid taxes to the government from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

Persia grew more conservative from the eighteenth century forward and in the mid-1800s, a new religion was founded known as the Bahai Faith.  Based on the teachings of Prophet Bahaullah, Bahaism was largely fashioned from Islam but stressed the spiritual unity of all faiths.  Although original Bahai teachings forbid monasticism and do not acknowledge gender diversity, most modern adherents emphasize compassion toward homosexuals and other minority groups.  Bahai adherents were persecuted in Islamic Persia but maintained a sizeable following and have since spread worldwide.  As with Zoroastrianism, the Bahai Faith’s largest concentration of followers now resides in India.

Persia changed its name to Iran (“land of the Aryans”) in 1935 and became a fundamentalist Islamic state in 1979.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Iran was one of the most repressive countries in the world in regard to its persecution of third-gender citizens and Shari’a laws prescribing the execution of homosexuals were routinely enforced.  Nevertheless, homosexual and transgender subcultures continued to exist in the Islamic state but were highly secretive and kept underground.

Ancient Bactria stood to the north between Persia and India in what is now predominantly northern Afghanistan and Pakistan.  It was originally Vedic but gradually adopted Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and finally, Islam.  Several Bactrian cities such as Bactra and Kambhojapura (now Kabul) served as important trading centers along the Silk Road, controlling all commerce moving in and out of India.  The Silk Road was a crucial transport route of the ancient world and extended from China in the east to Damascus in the west.  From Damascus, shipments were then routed northward to Anatolia and Europe or southward into Egypt.  The Silk Road was an extremely powerful asset of Central Asia and prosperous empires, cities and trading posts flourished along its path for thousands of years.  Among the many items of transport were homosexual servants, castrated slaves, crossdressing dancers and male prostitutes that were carried in caravans moving across Asia and beyond.

Several important commercial centers were established at junctions along the Silk Road such as Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara in what is now modern-day Uzbekistan.  These prosperous centers were attractive targets for nomad warriors such as the Huns, who occupied the region during the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.  Islam was introduced in the seventh century and quickly became the dominant religion.  In the early thirteenth century, Genghis Khan (1162-1227) conquered much of the region and established the Mongol Empire.  As the largest and most powerful empire of medieval Asia, the Mongol Empire eventually extended from Ukraine in the west to China in the east and lasted for two centuries.  Genghis Khan kept a mostly neutral stance toward religion and gender diversity—in general, he did not interfere with regional traditions as long as they posed no threat to his rule.  Khan developed an interest in Buddhism at the end of his life but was mostly inclined toward Chinese Taoism.  In 1691, Mongolia became a province of China and gained independence as Buddhist kingdom in 1912.

The Silk Road slowly declined from the sixteenth century forward when Europeans circumvented it through widespread maritime shipping.  Russia took control of Central Asia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the region was assimilated into the Soviet Union in 1917; with the exception of Afghanistan and Mongolia, which remained self-governing.  When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Central Asian states were granted independence and quickly assumed conservative, Islamic identities.  Kazakhstan, Krygystan and Tajikistan had no sodomy laws by the end of the twentieth century but Turkmenistan punished homosexuality with two years in prison and Uzbekistan with three.  In 1996, Afghanistan became a fundamentalist Islamic state ruled by the Taliban wherein homosexuals were routinely hanged in public and historic Buddhist monuments destroyed.  The oppressive regime was removed by the United States at the end of 2001 but the death penalty for homosexuals remained in place.  Mongolia became a democracy one year before the collapse of the Soviet Union.  While the mostly conservative Buddhist nation had no specific sodomy laws, it maintained the right to persecute homosexuals under a nondescript edict prohibiting “the immoral gratification of sexual desires.”

Central and West Africa

The many different tribal cultures of sub-Saharan Africa have accommodated homosexuality and transgender behavior in a variety of ways since time immemorial.  Although no indigenous system of writing existed in this region prior to the nineteenth century, early European explorers and colonists were quick to record the numerous examples of gender diversity they observed among African natives.

The ancient city of Timbuktu in what is now Mali was once one of the continent’s most prosperous and affluent trading centers.  Prior to widespread maritime shipping, West Africa’s riches were sent up the Niger River to Timbuktu where Berber and Arab traders carried the merchandise across the Sahara Desert to ports along the Mediterranean.  Among the precious cargo were African slaves, the most popular of which were women and effeminate boys.  The boy slaves were often castrated by the Arabs, sold as domestic servants or homosexual concubines, and thus distributed throughout the ancient world.  In the sixteenth century, Portugal and Spain circumvented the Saharan trading routes by establishing shipping ports along Africa’s West Coast.  The slave trade was especially lucrative and African Negros were in high demand with White and Hispanic landholders in the New World.  One of the earliest accounts of homosexuality in sub-Saharan Africa comes from Denunciations of Bahia (1591-1593), a series of court records kept during the Portuguese Inquisitions of Brazil.  The account was used to convict a Congolese slave, Francisco Manicongo, of sodomy and reads as follows: “In Angola and the Congo…it is customary among the pagan negros to wear a loincloth with the ends in front which leaves an opening in the rear…this custom being adopted by the sodomitic negros who serve as passive women in the abominable sin.  These passives are called jimbandaa in the language of Angola and the Congo, which means passive sodomite.  The accuser claimed to have seen Francisco Manicongo ‘wearing a loincloth such as passive sodomites wear in his land of the Congo and immediately rebuked him.’”

From the seventeenth century forward, a growing number of reports from European colonialists documented sodomy and crossdressing among African natives.  In 1687, Italian missionary Giovanni Cavazzi wrote a slanderous account of an unusual but locally venerated priest of the Nquiti (Kongo) Kingdom known as Ganga-Ya-Chibado.  The Kongo priest wore women’s clothing and was referred to as “Grandmother.”  French clergyman Jean-Baptiste Labat, in his early eighteenth-century observations of African slaves living in the Caribbean, similarly mentioned funeral rites performed by a Kongo priest that involved homosexual acts.

In the language of the Upper Congo, effeminate men are called uzeze while among the Mbala they are known as kitesha.  A kitesha lives and dresses differently from the other men—he walks and acts like a woman, wears women’s clothing (although not their kerchiefs) and is considered lucky.  There are also kitesha women that are similarly androgynous by nature.  In 1938, Belgian missionary Gustave Hulstaert observed lesbian relationships among the Nkundo wives of Congolese polygamists.  Within the Mbo tribes of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), homosexual and transgender men are called mangaiko or akengike and play leading roles in the tribe’s initiation dance, wearing both male and female attire.  American anthropologist Joseph Towles witnessed the ceremony in the late twentieth century and was told that a crossdressing mangaiko he saw leading the dance “had no wife and disregarded all manly behavior.”  In remote regions of the Central Congo, British anthropologist John Weeks observed homosexuality among the Bangala and Loanga tribes in 1909 and heard reports of homosexuality among the Hutu and Tutsi tribes in what is now Rwanda.  Five years earlier, Dutch missionary Jan Van der Burgt reported crossdressing “hermaphrodite” priests in Burundi known as ikihindu and ikimaze.  In the Urundi dialect of Central Africa, no less than five words are used to describe the various types of homosexual and transgender tribesmen found in the Rwanda-Burundi region, west of Lake Victoria.

The royal kings of early Uganda are well known for their harems containing both women and men.  Prior to the British takeover in 1886, King Mwanga’s persecution of Christian pages was said to be largely motivated by their rejection of his amorous advances.  The king found it increasingly difficult to staff his harem of pageboys and became enraged when his favorite, Mwafu, also refused him.  In 1957, crossdressing transgenders were reported as common in Uganda’s Iteso and Gisu tribes, and among the Nyoro, an initiation ceremony still practiced today requires new initiates to demonstrate spirit possession by “transforming” themselves into women.  In the Bantu languages of Central Africa, lesbians are called misago (“to grind”), which describes their sexual acts.  The misago women of Uganda resist marriage to men, are interested in careers and engage in loving affairs between themselves.

Among the Bantu-speaking tribes north of the Congo River in what is now Gabon and Cameroon, homosexual intercourse was considered bian nku’ma or “a medicine for wealth,” according to German ethnographer Gunther Tessman in 1904.  The natives believed that homosexual behavior could bestow the power of riches, especially upon the dominant male.  On a later expedition in 1921, Tessman described homosexuality among adolescent boys in Bafia of central Cameroon.  Gustave Hulstaert, on his own travels through the region, similarly reported young boys playing a game called gembankango in which they chased each other through the trees like monkeys, finishing in “reprehensible scenes.”

Nigeria and many other countries in West Africa are well known for their indigenous tribal religions such as Voudon, Sango and Bori.  These religious cults worship various nature spirits and perform possession ceremonies officiated by women and homosexual men.  Among the Hausa tribes of Nigeria, homosexual transvestites are commonly known as ‘dan daudu or “son of Daudu” (a popular, mischievous Bori spirit they are believed to represent) while masculine-type homosexuals are referred to as k’wazo.  A ‘dan daudu acts as an intermediate between women and men, is friendly with the presiding priestess and often engages in prostitution.  Some are homosexually married and consider it a traditional practice.  The Bori cult of Nigeria was spread to other parts of Africa such as Kenya, Tunisia, Egypt, and even as far as Syria and Arabia.

Sango traditions among the Yoruba tribes of Nigeria also involve spirit possession ceremonies led by female priestesses and crossdressing priests.  Practitioners attribute magical properties to homosexuality and believe that a ‘dan daudu can impart good luck into a dominant male partner.  They also believe that homosexuality causes impotence in normal or bisexual men.  Both the Sango and Voudon traditions were spread to the Americas via the slave trade and combined with various aspects of Catholicism.

Female homosexuality was reported in Nigeria among the Hausa, Nupe and Efik-Ibibio tribes.  One Efik-Ibibio woman who grew up during the nineteenth century recalled how she had a deep, marital relationship with another female.  Both of their husbands knew about the relationship and the village affectionately nicknamed them “twin sisters.”

On his journey through Dahomey (Benin) in the late 1780s, Robert Norris, an English slave trader, reported seeing “eunuchs” known as lagredis that acted as wives to the tribal kings.  On his own expedition into the region in 1864, Captain Sir Richard F. Burton stated: “It is difficult to obtain information in Dahomey concerning eunuchs, who are special slaves of the king, and bear the dignified title of royal wives.”  In 1938, American anthropologist Melville Herskovitz reported homosexuality among the Fon tribes of Dahomey.  The Fon told him that homosexual behavior was common among tribal adolescents but rare for adults, and some claimed that homosexuality was even more prevalent between women.

Although Burton was unable to find eunuchs in Dahomey, he did manage to locate the mysterious, so-called Amazon women of the Fon and Ashanti tribes.  In 1864, Burton documented over two thousand masculine tribeswomen serving as warriors and reported how two-thirds of them were maidens with passions and love between each other.  He also mentioned “a corps of prostitutes” kept for the Amazons’ use.  Several years earlier, in 1850, English naval officer Frederick Forbes wrote down his own observations: “The Amazons are not supposed to marry, and, by their own statement, they have changed their sex.  ‘We are men,’ they say, ‘not women.’  All dress alike, diet alike, and male and female emulate each other: what the males do, the Amazons will endeavour to surpass.”  One Amazon chief asserted her gender transformation as follows: “As the blacksmith takes an iron bar and by fire changes its fashion, so we have changed our nature.  We are no longer women, we are men.”  The Amazon she-warriors assured victory to an entire line of Dahomey kings for nearly three centuries from the 1600s onward.  At their peak in the early nineteenth century, Amazon women numbered as high as six thousand and comprised nearly a third of the Dahomey army.

In 1861, Englishman Robert Hutchinson reported male slaves among the Ashanti in Ghana that were treated as lovers and wore pearl necklaces with gold pendants.  The homosexual slaves were killed when their masters died.  Ethnologist Eva Meyerowitz, stationed in Ghana during the 1920s-1940s, observed that among the Ashanti and Akan, “men who dressed as women and engaged in homosexual relations with other men were not stigmatized, but accepted.”  She added that the situation might have changed later on as a result of missionary activity.  Transgender Ghanaians are sometimes referred to as kojobesia (“man-woman”) and among the Fanti of Ghana, James Christensen recounted the tribe’s belief, in 1954, that people with heavy souls desired women while those with light souls desired men.  In 1971, Italian anthropologist Italo Signorini studied the agyale or friendship marriages among the Nzema tribes of southwestern Ghana.  In this tradition, men married younger boys, shared a bed with them and observed all the social equivalents of a normal marriage—a bride price was paid, a wedding ceremony held and divorce required if the couple parted.  Age differences were typical and both men appeared conventionally masculine.  Signorini noted that most of the men insisted their marriages were nonsexual, but he added that homosexuality in Ghana had become highly stigmatized in recent years.  Agyale marriages also occurred between women although more rarely.  Lesbian relations were observed among the young, unmarried Akan tribeswomen and sometimes continued after their marriage to men.

In Burkina Faso of the Upper Volta River, Frenchman Louis Tauxier reported sorone within the Mossi tribes during an expedition in 1912.  The sorone were beautiful boys, aged seven to fifteen, that dressed like women and served as pages and sexual partners to the village chiefs.  They were often entrusted with state secrets and forbidden to be sexually intimate with women.  Among the Dagara tribes of southern Burkina Faso, homosexual and transgender people served as shamans and were considered special gatekeepers who straddled both worlds in order to help sustain the universe.

In 1886, German explorer Friedrich von Hellwald noted a group of effeminate natives within the Liberian Kru tribes whose domestic services to the other men included sodomy.  Wilhelm Hammer also reported homosexual relations among Kru youths in 1909 and pointed out they were not at all rare.  American anthropologist Wilfrid Hambly, in 1937, wrote down his own observations of homosexual behavior in the region while traveling through both Liberia and Sierra Leone.

In Senegal (then Saint Louis), French ethnographer A. Corre, in 1894, encountered dark-skinned tribesmen of feminine dress and demeanor, who, he was told, made their living from prostitution.  In Boke (Guinea) he saw a native prince’s dancer miming his own sexually receptive role in a tribal ceremony.  In 1935, English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer reported that among the Wolof tribes of Senegal, transvestite men were common sights and effeminate in their mannerisms, dress, hairdos and makeup.  Known as gordigen (man-woman), they did not suffer in any way socially although the Muslims refused them burial.  English historian Michael Crowder, while stationed in West Africa during the 1950s, also confirmed that the gordigen were largely tolerated among the Wolof tribes.

In the nineteenth century, European powers divided the land and resources of Africa among themselves.  In West Africa, Portugal controlled Port Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau) in the north and Portuguese West Africa (the southern Congo and Angola) in the south.  Spain controlled the Western Sahara, Canary Islands and Equatorial Guinea while France held the largest amount of territory that included the northern French Congo, Gabon, Chad, Dahomey, the Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger and Senegal.  The Belgians held the interior Congo while the Germans claimed Liberia, Togo and Cameroon.  Great Britain controlled the highly lucrative and densely populated regions of Nigeria, Uganda, Gambia, Sierra Leone and Ghana (the Gold Coast).  All of these countries achieved their independence from European colonialism in the second half of the twentieth century.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Central and West Africa was mixed in terms of its distribution of Christian, Islamic and indigenous tribal beliefs.  Christianity was practiced more in the south, Islam in the north, and indigenous tribal religions maintained strongholds throughout.  A majority of Central and West African nations had no sodomy laws including Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Central African Republic, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Republic of the Congo and Rwanda.  Several nations did have laws against homosexuality and punished it with three years of prison (Guinea, Togo), five years (Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Senegal) or fourteen (Gambia).  Benin, Equatorial Guinea and Sierra Leone offered nonspecific penalties while the most draconian punishments were meted out in predominantly Christian Uganda, which prescribed life imprisonment, and Islamic Mauritania, which prescribed the death penalty.  Nigeria’s strict anti-sodomy laws punished homosexuality with fourteen years of prison in the Christian south and a death penalty in the Islamic north.  Despite the laws, homosexual subcultures continued throughout the region and small, underground gay communities and organizations persisted in cities such as Lagos, Accra and Dakar.        

South and East Africa

The indigenous cultures of South and East Africa have a long history of homosexuality, transgender behavior, and even same-sex marriage between both men and women.  In early seventeenth-century Luanda (the capital of Portuguese Angola), Catholic priests Gaspar Azevereduc and Antonius Sequerius documented third-gender natives known as chibados.  The chibados dressed like women, spoke effeminately and married other men “to unite in wrongful lust with them.”  More shocking to the priests was the fact that such marriages were honored and even prized among the tribesmen.  In a similar record, Portuguese Jesuit Joao dos Santos wrote in 1625 that the chibados of southwestern Africa were “attyred like women, and behave themselves womanly, ashamed to be called men; are also married to men, and esteeme that unnaturale damnation an honor.”  In his writings about seventeenth-century Angola, historian Antonio Cardonega mentioned that sodomy was “rampant among the people of Angola.  They pursue their impudent and filthy practices dressed as women.”  He also stated that the sodomites often served as powerful shamans, were highly esteemed among most Angolan tribes and commonly called quimbanda.

In the Kalahari Desert of what is now Botswana, German ethnologist Peter Kolb reported in 1719 that certain men among the Khoi-Khoin tribes were sexually receptive to other males and known as koetsire.  In 1801, German traveler Christian Frederick Damberger reported being propositioned and sexually assaulted by the son-in-law of a Muhotian king.  After listening to Damberger’s complaint, the ruler laughed and saw nothing uncommon about the incident.  In 1857, Scottish explorer David Livingstone noticed crossdressing shamans among the Ambo tribes of South-West Africa and in 1906, missionary Johann Irle condemned the homosexual behavior he witnessed among the Herero tribes.  When Irle told the natives such behavior was declared unnatural in the Bible, the Herero replied that since childhood they knew it as nothing but natural.

In the 1920s, anthropologist Kurt Falk, a longtime resident of German South-West Africa (now Namibia), reported homosexuality as well as various types of same-sex marriage among the Wawihe, Ovambo, Ovashimba, Ondonga, Herero, Naman (Hottentots) and Klippkaffir (Nguni or Xhosa).  Natives taking the passive role in homosexual relationships were known as eshengi or kimbanda and often served as shamans. The Naman formed friendship marriages called soregus, which often involved homosexual relations, and the Herero formed distinct erotic friendships, both male and female, which were called oupanga.  In the 1970s, Portuguese ethnographer Carlos Estermann observed a large number of the highest order of Ambo that dressed like women, did women’s work, and married other men.  Such men were called esenge and the Ambo considered them possessed by female spirits, which slowly took away their manhood.

The earliest recordings of homosexuality in Africa come to us from the ancient San rock paintings of Zimbabwe.  Dated back many thousands of years, some of the images depict “egregious sexual practices” such as male-to-male copulation.  In what is now southwestern Zimbabwe, Livingstone noticed “immorality” among the younger natives and asserted, in 1865, that the elderly chief’s polygamous monopolization of women was responsible for the sin.  Among the Shona tribes of Zimbabwe, no words exist for genital or orgasm but there is a word for homosexual—ngochane.  In northwestern Zambia, Victor Turner reported boy circumcision ceremonies in which the young initiates mimed oral copulation with older males, and in 1920, Edwin Smith and Andrew Dale documented an Ila tribesman who crossdressed, worked and slept with the women but did not have sexual relations with them.  The Ila tribes called such men mwaami or “prophet.”

In the nineteenth century, Great Britain controlled the interior regions of southern Africa and granted exclusive mining rights to British magnate Cecil Rhodes in the 1880s.  The region was subsequently divided into Southern and Northern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), and the British South Africa Company was established.  The lucrative mining industry attracted migrant workers from all over southern Africa and crowded, all-male camps fostered an increase in homosexual relationships that were modified according to various tribal customs.  The British noticed the homosexual behavior at the camps and from 1892 to 1923 Southern Rhodesia tried over 250 sodomy cases.  During the trials, the most common defense put forward was that sodomy had been a longstanding “custom” among African natives.  Black Rhodesians were typically punished with less than a year in prison for the crime while Whites often received longer sentences.  By the 1920s, however, court magistrates began dismissing all sodomy cases deemed consensual.

In southeastern Africa, Bori cults—along with their crossdressing shamans and possession rituals—are still quite common among the Zulu.  Shamans are known as inkosiygbatfazi (“chief of the women”) while ordinary transgenders are called skesana and their masculine partners, iqgenge.  Zulu warriors traditionally asserted their manhood by substituting boys for women and in the 1890s, Zulu chief Nongoloza Mathebula ordered his bandit-warriors to abstain from women and take on boy-wives instead.  After his capture, Nongoloza insisted that the practice had been a longstanding custom among South Africans.  Indeed, homosexual marriage was documented among the Zulu, Tsonga and Mpondo migrant workers of South Africa at least since the early nineteenth century.  Boy-wives were known by various names such as inkotshane (Zulu), nkhonsthana (Tsonga), tinkonkana (Mpondo), etc. and were procured by paying a bride price to the boy’s older brother.  Wedding ceremonies involved a traditional dance in which the male brides crossdressed and wore false breasts.  The celebrations lasted an entire weekend with some of the boys dressed in traditional tribal garb and others in Western-style white gowns.  After the weddings, the boy-wives would serve their new husbands in domestic chores, just like ordinary wives, and the male partners in turn would provide them with presents, clothes, blankets and so on.  Fidelity was expected and the young inkotshane were not allowed to grow beards.  In many cases, the boy-wives were known to outgrow such marital arrangements and either move on to women or marry their own inkotshane.  Homosexual marriage peaked among the Zulu during the 1950s, when weddings were held every month, but the tradition had disappeared by the end of the twentieth century.

In the Soweto townships of South Africa, people commonly use the Sesotho term, sitabane, to address homosexuals, effeminates, and men without girlfriends.  The word actually refers to someone with both male and female genitals but is nonetheless applied to gay or transgender men.  Family members treat their sitabane relatives as women and believe, in one sense, that they are actually female.  Another term used for effeminate men throughout South Africa is moffie.  The term is derogatory and derived from the English word, hermaphrodite.

The continent of Africa has a long history of bold-spirited matriarchs, priestesses and queens—particularly in the south.  In the seventeenth century, Dongo queen Anna Nzinga dressed as a man and maintained more than fifty crossdressing chibados in Angola.  She insisted that both she and the crossdressing couriers were all men and boldly led her people to victory in war against the Portuguese.  In Lesotho, Queen Mujaji I, a prestigious Lovedu queen of the nineteenth century, kept a large harem of wives and legitimized the practice for many neighboring tribes such as the Khaha, Mamaila, Letswalo and Mahlo.  In many African cultures, queens could legally assume the royal throne and marry their co-wives after their husbands died.  Indeed, the practice of female marriage was previously common throughout Africa, even among non-royals, and has been documented in over thirty populations including the Lovedu, Zulu and Sotho of South Africa; the Kikuyu, Nuer and Nandi of East Africa, and the Fon, Yoruba and Ibo of West Africa.  Female husbands were typically older, childless, strong in demeanor, and sufficiently endowed in terms of cattle and wealth.  They purchased their wives as close companions and became the legal father to any offspring.  They often performed men’s tasks and dressed partially in male clothing, but were not considered fully male or female.  The wives, for their part, typically disliked men and appreciated the greater freedom and companionship they achieved through their female husbands.  Most of the couples denied any sexual dimension to their relationship, considering it an entirely private matter.  In Lesotho, similar but less formal “friendship marriages” between women with male husbands are still quite common today.  The unions are christened with a family celebration and each partner is called motsoalle or “special friend.”

In the nineteenth century, Portugal controlled Angola in the southwest and what is now Mozambique and southern Tanzania in the southeast (Portuguese East Africa).  The French controlled the island of Madagascar while the Germans held what is now Namibia and aligned themselves with the sovereign Transvaal and Orange Free State of the Boers (ethnic Dutch).  The British governed the southern tip of Africa along with the central territories now known as Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, many South Africans considered homosexuality a foreign import and sodomy was illegal in nearly every nation.  Zambia prescribed a punishment of up to fourteen years in prison, Zimbabwe with ten years, and Botswana, seven.  Mozambique punished homosexuality with three years of imprisonment while Angola, Malawi, Namibia and Swaziland were nonspecific in their penalties.  Only Lesotho, Madagascar and South Africa had no sodomy laws.  South Africa in particular stood out as a shining example of homosexual and transgender acceptance, mostly due to its recent experience with apartheid and racial oppression.  In 1996, the country became the first in the world to guarantee in its Constitution equal rights and protections on the basis of sexual orientation.  This led to the abolition of all sodomy laws two years later.  In 2006, South Africa became the first country in Africa to legalize same-sex unions and modern gay communities thrived in large cities such as Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.

East Africa was strongly influenced by Islam for many centuries prior to the arrival of European colonists, but homosexuality and other forms of gender diversity were nonetheless observed among most indigenous tribes in the region.  In the nineteenth century, Europeans reported homosexual and transgender behavior on Africa’s East Coast from Tanzania in the south to Nubia (the Sudan) in the north.  Bori cults imported from West Africa were also common in the region along with their spirit possession rituals, head priestesses and crossdressing priests.

Arabs first settled in the Tanzanian islands of Zanzibar and Pemba in the early twelfth century A.D., bringing along with them traditional third-gender types such as the xanith.  In 1860, an American consular officer stationed in Zanzibar reported that “numbers of sodomites have come from Muscat (Oman), and these degraded wretches openly walk about dressed in female attire, with veils on their faces.”  In 1899, German ethnologist Michael Haberlandt studied “sexual contrariness” among Zanzibar natives.  He reported homosexual men that he believed were born with “contrary” desires and which the natives described as amriyamuungu or “the will of God.”  In Zanzibar, homosexuals are referred to as mke-si-mume (woman, not man) and also mzebe or hanisi (impotent).  Haberlandt noticed their presence at festivals and dances wherein some dressed up as women and others as men, often with special headdresses.  Most earned their livings through prostitution.  Lesbians were also reported in Zanzibar that dressed as men, undertook masculine endeavors, and utilized dildos to satisfy one another.  On mainland Tanzania in the 1930s, British researcher Monica Wilson reported homosexuality among young Nyakyusa males during her fieldwork near Lake Nyasa.  She was told that lesbian practices existed as well but saw no direct evidence of it.  Among the Kaguru women of central Tanzania, Thomas Beidelman mentioned female initiation ceremonies wherein older women demonstrated sexual acts before young initiates.

In the 1920s, American anthropologist Felix Bryk noted homosexual bachelors among the Bagishu and Maragoli tribes of Tanzania and western Kenya.  He claimed that such “hermaphrodites” were numerous and called inzili by the Bagishu and kiziri among the Maragoli.  In 1909, British anthropologist Sir Claud Hollis observed Nandi circumcision ceremonies in Kenya wherein the boys wore female clothes for eight weeks prior to the ritual.  A similar crossdressing rite was found within the Maasai initiation ceremonies.  The Meru tribes of Kenya have a religious leadership role known as mugawe, which involves priests wearing female clothing and hairstyles.  In 1973, British ethnologist Rodney Needham noted that the mugawe were often homosexual and sometimes married to other men.  Traditional Bori practices were also observed within the Mabasha tribes of Kenya. 

In 1987, anthropologist Gill Shepherd reported that homosexuality was relatively common in Kenya, even among Muslims (both male and female).  Most Kenyans initially discourage transgender behavior among their children but gradually come to accept it as an inherent part of the child’s spirit (roho) or nature (umbo).  Shepherd observed third-gender men, known in Swahili as shoga, who served as passive male prostitutes and wore female clothing, makeup, and flowers at social events such as weddings, where they typically mingled with the “other” women.  At more serious events such as funerals and prayer meetings, the shoga would stay with the men and wear men’s attire.  Other Swahili terms for homosexual men include basha (dominant male), hanithi (young male partner) and mumemke (man-woman).  Lesbians are known as msagaji or msago (“grinders”).  They appear as ordinary women in public but are bold with men and frequently go out of the house alone.  Shepherd noted that dominant women in Kenyan lesbian relationships are typically older and wealthier.

The Somali tribes recognized two categories of men—waranleh (warriors) and waddado (men of God).  The latter were considered physically weak but mystically powerful.  Among the Semitic Harari people of Ethiopia, German researchers such as Friedrich J. Bieber encountered “Uranism” (a nineteenth-century term for homosexuality and transgender identity) in the early twentieth century.  Bieber noted, “Sodomy is not foreign to the Harari,” and also found it among the Galla and Somali “albeit not as commonly.” 

The Konso of southern Ethiopia have no less than four words for effeminate men, one of which is sagoda and refers to men who never marry, are weak, or who wear skirts.  In the mid-1960s, Canadian anthropologist Christopher Hallpike observed one Ethiopian Konso that lived by curing skins (a female occupation) and liked to play the passive role in homosexual relations.  In 1957, American anthropologist Simon Messing found male transvestites among the Amhara tribes that were known as wandarwarad (male-female).  They lived alone and were considered like brothers to the tribeswomen.  The husbands of the women were not at all jealous of the close friendship between their wives and the wandarwarad.  Messing reported that the wandarwarad were unusually sensitive and intense in their personal likings.  He also found “mannish women” among the Amhara known as wandawande.

In 1969, Frederic Gamst reported homosexual relations among the shepherd boys of Kemant tribes in central Ethiopia and in 1975, Donald Donham observed a class of effeminate men among the Maale of southern Ethiopia known as ashtime.  The ashtime “dressed like women, performed female tasks, cared for their own houses, and apparently had sexual relations with men.”  Also called wobo or “crooked,” one ashtime complained to Donham of being “neither man nor woman.”  Ashtime men were traditionally gathered and protected by the Maale kings.  On the night preceding any royal ritual, kings were forbidden to have sexual relations with their wives but could share their beds with the ashtime.  In neighboring Eritrea, Paolo Ambrogetti of Italy reported homosexual behavior between youths and older men at the turn of the twentieth century that often involved payment.  The youth’s fathers didn’t seem to mind and most of the boys turned to women once they grew older.

In the Sudan, traditional Zande culture is well known for its homosexual marriages, even into the 1970s, as reported by British anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard in 1971.  Some Zande princes preferred men over women and could purchase a desired boy for the price of one spearhead.  They would then become husbands to the young man, provide him with beautiful ornaments and address him as badiare (beloved).  The boy-wife in turn would fetch water, firewood, and carry the prince’s shield.  Zande princes often took their boy-wives to war but kept them behind at camp.  They were strictly off limits to the other soldiers and if any man had relations with them he could be sued for adultery.  If a prince died in battle, the boy-wife would be killed since he had eaten the prince’s “oil.”  Unmarried boys, known as ndongo-techi-la, also accompanied the Zande men to battle and served as women to the common soldiers.  By the end of the twentieth century, the Zande tradition of homosexual marriage had largely disappeared from the Sudan.

In 1947, British anthropologist Siegfried Nadel reported masculine-type homosexuals among the Heiban tribes of Sudan and transgender types among the Otoro, Moro, Nyima and Tira.  Korongo tribes called effeminate men londo whereas the Mesakin referred to them as tubele.  Homosexual marriage was observed in both tribes and a man could marry a younger boy for the bride price of one goat.  In 1963, Dr. Jean Buxton complained about the great amount of homosexual behavior he found among the Mandari tribes, and in 1977, Pamela Constantinides described homosexual and effeminate male priests in a healing cult known as Zaar.  The Zaar cult was similar to the Bori and served as a refuge for women and effeminate men in conservative, Muslim-dominated Sudan.  Indeed, Islamic influence in East Africa caused many native tribes to deny their traditional acceptance of homosexuality, thus relinquishing it to the underground.  In his 1972 study of the Nuer tribes of Sudan, for instance, Brian MacDermott was repeatedly told that no homosexuality existed; nevertheless, he inevitably spotted it from time to time and in one case found a tribesman who identified and lived as a woman.  The third-gender native was discreetly accepted by the Nuer as female and allowed to marry a man.  Lesbianism was also practiced in polygamous Zande households, as reported by British anthropologists Charles and Brenda Seligman in 1930.  Marital friendships between females were known as bagburu and often involved intimate sexual relations.  The practice is viewed more suspiciously nowadays and considered by some Zande husbands as a type of witchcraft.

In the nineteenth century, Germany controlled Tanzania and most of Ethiopia while the Italians governed Eritrea and much of Somalia.  The French ruled Djibouti while the British claimed Kenya, the Sudan, northern Somalia and Zanzibar. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, homosexual and transgender behavior was illegal in all East African nations with draconian penalties meted out in many.  This was mainly due to the strong Islamic fundamentalism found in the region.  Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia prescribed less than ten years of imprisonment for sodomy while Djibouti was nonspecific.  Kenya and Tanzania prescribed fourteen years; Zanzibar, twenty-five, and Sudan was the most draconian, punishing homosexuality with either one hundred lashes or the death penalty.  Despite the harsh laws, homosexual subcultures and traditions persisted, albeit underground, in most rural areas and large cities of East Africa such as Nairobi, Mombasa, Addis Ababa and Khartoum.  

North Africa and the Middle East

The Middle East stands at the crossroads of three continents and has historically played a major role in the world’s social, political and religious culture.  In ancient Egypt, three sexes were recognized—male (tai), intermediate (sekhet) and female (hemet).  The intermediate sex, positioned as a third gender between male and female, was also known by the word hem (effeminate) and nekek (passive male partner).  Hem is additionally interpreted as “coward,” “delicate man,” “close servant” and  “priest.”  Early European Egyptologists typically translated these words as eunuch but most scholars today do not believe male castration was an established practice of ancient Egypt, especially prior to Assyrian and Islamic influence.

The indigenous religion of Egypt was polytheistic and worshiped a wide range of gods and goddesses.  The primeval god, Atum, is described as hermaphrodite and the origin of Egypt’s four predominating deities known as Osiris (male), Isis (female), Seth (intermediate male) and Nephthys (intermediate female).  Seth is often depicted with the head of a jackal, symbolizing his loyal but mischievous nature, and these qualities were also attributed by the Egyptians to their royal servants, priests and the intermediate sex in general.  Seth’s mischievous nature is nicely illustrated in The Contendings of Horus and Seth, a text of the early Middle Kingdom (2040-1674 B.C.) wherein he plots to overtake his divine nephew, Horus: “When it was evening a bed was spread for them and they lay down.  During the night Seth made his penis stiff and placed it between the loins of Horus.  Horus put his hand between his loins and caught the sperm of Seth.”  Horus had been advised of Seth’s plot by his mother, Isis, who took Seth’s sperm from Horus and threw it into the Nile.  Isis then obtained sperm from Horus and secretly fed it to Seth.  At a divine council invoked to determine the next chief of the gods, the judges called to witness the sperm of both Seth and Horus.  Seth’s sperm appeared from the Nile, much to his surprise, whereas the sperm of Horus sprung from Seth’s forehead as the moon disk and was taken by the god, Thoth.  Horus was thus declared chief of the gods and Seth was disgraced having unknowingly received his seed.

Seth and Nephthys are sometimes described as a couple but share no pastimes together and produce no children.  Nephthys spends all her time serving Isis and likewise Seth with Osiris and Horus.  Both Seth and Nephthys stand out as barren among the many fertile gods of Egypt and are associated with the desert regions.  Other Egyptian gods and goddesses were known for their bisexuality—a sign of increased virility or fertility—and included Min, a nature god depicted with a large erection, and Hapi, an obese deity in charge of the Nile floods.

One of the earliest Egyptian pharaohs associated with homosexuality is King Neferkare, who is described having an affair with his top military commander, Sasenet, during the Sixth Dynasty (2460-2200 B.C.).  Three separate texts mention Sasenet amusing the king’s desires “because there was no woman or wife there with him.”  In the narratives, a commoner hears rumors about Neferkare and sees him going out late at night to have intimate relations with the general at his apartment.  Another example of an early Egyptian same-sex union can be found at the tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep at Saqqara near Memphis.  Discovered in 1964 and dated to about 2450 B.C., the tomb depicts two royal servants (hem) holding hands, feasting together, embracing one another and nose kissing.  Both men were confidential manicurists to Pharaoh Niuserre and their desire to be entombed together is most extraordinary.  Inscriptions inside the tomb describe the couple as “joined in life and joined in death.”

Sexual intercourse with either women or men was viewed as ritually defiling in ancient Egypt, particularly at temples and holy places.  In The Book of the Dead, a compilation of funerary texts gathered from tombs dated 1552-945 B.C., the deceased are enjoined to promise: “I did not sexually penetrate a nekek (passive male).”  Similarly, The Teaching of Vizier Ptahhotep from the Twelfth Dynasty (1991-1785 B.C.) states, “one should not copulate with a hem for he will become needful in love and never calmed.  Let him become satisfied through abstinence alone.”  In his article, Eunuchs In Pharaonic Egypt (1954), Belgian scholar Frans Jonckheere refers to these injunctions to support his claim that the nekek and hem of ancient Egypt were eunuchs: “The eunuch,” he notes, was one “to whom antiquity readily attributed the vice against nature.”

Egypt was mostly under foreign rule from 525 B.C. forward and incorporated into the Roman Empire in 30 B.C.  St. Mark introduced Christianity into Egypt in 62 A.D., after which Egyptians gradually abandoned their traditional polytheistic beliefs and practices.  In the second century A.D., Clement of Alexandria warned Christians against using hem or eunuch servants to guard women.  “The true eunuch,” he said, “is not unable but unwilling to have sex.”  Egypt became the center of the Coptic Christian Church by the fourth century and in 641 A.D., Muslims aligned with Christians and Jews to drive out the East Romans and establish their own systems of worship.  The Great Library of Alexandria was destroyed during this time and Islam quickly became prominent in Egypt and throughout North Africa.  For nearly a thousand years, Muslims accommodated homosexual and transgender people in the region where they continued to serve prominently as house attendants and royal confidantes.  Castration was popularized and crossdressing male dancers, known as khawalat, offered their services as passive male partners and prostitutes.  French and British foreigners arriving after the eighteenth century were quick to notice the Egyptian Muslims' lenient attitudes toward homosexuality.  Even as late as the 1930s, American anthropologist Walter Cline commented about the homosexuality he found in the western oasis town of Siwa as follows: “All normal Muslim Siwan men and boys practice sodomy.  Among themselves the natives are not ashamed of this; they talk about it openly as they talk about love of women.”

Various other cultures along the coast of North Africa share a similar history of accommodating homosexual and transgender behavior.  As early as the tenth century B.C., Phoenicians settled much of the Mediterranean from Lebanon to Morocco and are believed to have kept third-gender priests, servants and concubines.  Phoenician culture was polytheistic and worshiped a wide range of deities that included a supreme goddess, Tanit, and a supreme god, Baal.  Goddess worship was especially prominent and temples dedicated to female deities such as Astarte were well known for their courtesan priestesses and crossdressing priests.  The city of Carthage in what is now Tunisia began as a small Phoenician colony in the ninth century B.C. but grew to become one of the greatest civilizations in the region.  The Romans completely destroyed Carthage in 146 B.C., however, and incorporated much of North Africa into the Roman Empire.

In the seventh century A.D., Muslim Arabs invaded North Africa and converted nearly all of the indigenous Berber tribes to Islam.  They ruled the area for over ten centuries and, as previously described, were well known for their accommodation of homosexuality, crossdressing and male castration.  In the nineteenth century, France took control of Algeria and Tunisia while Great Britain occupied Egypt.  Morocco remained independent and the Turkish Ottoman Empire controlled Libya.  North Africa gradually became more conservative and by the late twentieth century, Islamic fundamentalism was very prominent.  Sodomy laws were established in all five countries with prescribed prison sentences of up to three years in Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia.  Egypt routinely persecuted homosexual men and transgenders under vague “contempt of religion” or “immoral behavior” laws that prescribed jail terms of up to five years.

Ancient polytheistic cultures similar to those of North Africa existed throughout the Middle East and included well-established civilizations such as the Assyrians of Mesopotamia and the Hittites of eastern Anatolia (Turkey).  All of these cultures were known for their accommodation of third-gender servants, palace guards, priests, dancers and prostitutes.  In the Mesopotamian kingdoms of Akkad, Sumer, Assyria and Babylonia, homosexual and transgender men were known by many different names such as assinnu, kurgarru, kalaturru, kulu’u and so on.  Human slavery was common in the region and young male slaves recognized as effeminate or especially handsome were often castrated and employed as domestic servants.  Most scholars believe that the systematic practice of male castration originated in Mesopotamia and spread from there throughout the ancient world via the slave trade.  Middle Assyrian laws were quite harsh; The Code of Assura (1075 B.C.), for instance, prescribed castration for adulterers and armed soldiers caught engaging in passive homosexual behavior—some of the earliest known edicts for male castration in the world.  A Sumerian list of dream omens from the seventh century B.C. states that if a man submits himself sexually to other men in a dream, then, like an assinnu, he will experience strong desires for men in his waking life.  Sumerian cosmology describes how the assinnu were created in order to rescue the goddess, Ishtar, from the land of the dead.  Since they “did not satisfy the lap of any woman,” the assinnu alone could resist the temptations of the underworld and save the goddess.  The worship of Ishtar was popular in ancient Babylon and her temples were citadels for courtesans and third-gender priests alike.  The Sumerians also recognized a class of women known as salzikrum or “male daughters” that were masculine and typically childless by nature.  The Babylonian story of the great Atrahasis flood, attributed to overpopulation, mentions a similar class of childless women created after the deluge to help keep the population down.

Mesopotamia became predominantly Muslim in the seventh century A.D. but continued to accommodate a third-gender subculture for nearly a thousand years.  It was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire up until World War I, when Britain took control of what is now Iraq and Kuwait while France governed Syria.  The region was granted independence after World War II and grew increasingly conservative.  By the end of the twentieth century, homosexual and transgender behavior was highly stigmatized and driven underground.  Syria punished homosexuality with prison terms of up to three years and Kuwait with ten.  Iraq had the most draconian laws and prescribed the death penalty.

In ancient Palestine, Judaism stood out as uniquely monotheistic in the Middle East and worshiped a supreme God similar to Zoroastrian and Vaishnava Hindu traditions.  Third-gender men were known in Hebrew as saris and are mentioned throughout the Torah.  The word saris is of Akkadian origin and means “he who is at the head,” referring to the chamberlains, priests, officers, guards and attendants of that time who were typically either homosexual, castrated, or both.  While the word saris is loosely translated into English as “eunuch,” it more accurately refers to an administrative post wherein appointees were often homosexual or castrated but not necessarily so. The Jewish Talmud mentions two types of saris—sarisadam (castrated) and sarischammah (impotent by nature or birth)—and points out that it was sometimes possible for the latter type of saris to have offspring.

The saris of the Torah had the same qualities and occupations that third-gender men of other cultures did and are often mentioned favorably.  In the book of Daniel, for instance, the book’s namesake is placed under the care of Ashpenaz, a saris of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar.  Daniel (1:9) states: “Now God had brought Daniel into favor and tender love with the prince of the eunuchs.”  In Kings I, Obadiah is a saris in charge of King Ahab’s palace; he is a devout believer in God and helps hide one hundred of the Lord’s prophets.  Jeremiah is saved by Ebed-Melech, an Ethiopian saris in the royal palace of Judah.  In the book of Esther, beautiful girls are placed under the care of Hegai, a eunuch in charge of the king’s harem.  Isaiah (56:3-5) promises that any saris following God will be given a place in the Lord’s house and also instructs women who do not bear children to “break forth into singing”(54:1).  In the Torah, ascetic women that are not inclined toward men and avoid marriage are called ‘almah.  Moses’ sister, Miriam, is described as an ‘almah and the book of Proverbs (30:18-90) suggests that such women were very difficult for a man to know.  King Solomon’s harem, comprised of sixty wives and eighty concubines, is said to have contained countless ‘almah.  In at least one verse, the Torah glorifies same-sex over opposite-sex love.  In Samuel II (1:26), David laments the death of his beloved Jonathan as follows: “Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”

Despite such positive portrayals of third-gender people and same-sex love, the Torah simultaneously condemns male castration (Deuteronomy 23:2), crossdressing (Deuteronomy 22.5), and prescribes the death penalty for sexual relations between men or women (Leviticus 20:13).  The latter edict is the earliest known instance of capital punishment for homosexual behavior and was unique in the ancient Middle East.  It would influence Christian and Islamic teachings for centuries to come and result in the future suffering of countless third-gender citizens worldwide.  Orthodox Jews often quote the above verses to condemn gender-variant people and also cite the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, wherein a mob of men attempt to homosexually rape two village guests.  Reform Jews, on the other hand, point out that many prohibitions listed in the Torah are no longer punished or even stigmatized in contemporary Judaism such as divorce, cutting one’s beard, getting a tattoo, eating shellfish or pork, working on the Sabbath day, etc.  They also mention that the saris was not considered male or female by ancient definition and stress that the attempted rapes of Sodom cannot be compared to the affectionate relationships of modern homosexual couples.

Christianity was derived from Judaism and sustained many of the religion’s traditional teachings.  Its founder, the prophet Jesus (6 B.C.-30 A.D.), said little about third-gender people except for one well-known verse from Matthew (19:12): “For there are eunuchs, who were born from their mother’s wombs; and there are eunuchs, that were made eunuchs by men; and there are eunuchs, that made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.”  This verse is similar to the Talmud interpretation of saris and includes homosexuals if we take the traditionally wide definition of eunuchs as “men who are impotent with women.”  As with the Torah, the New Testament often mentions eunuchs favorably.  The book of Acts (8:26-39), for example, describes how the first non-Jewish convert to Christianity was a black, Ethiopian eunuch who worked as a royal treasurer for the queen of Nubia.  It also mentions how an angel of God directed Phillip to meet the unnamed eunuch and baptize him.

Several verses from the New Testament condemn same-sex relations as unnatural (Romans 1:26-27), in line with ancient Jewish teachings, and fundamentalist Christians use these passages to demonize homosexuals and other gender-variant persons.  Stressing a rigid, two-gender system that includes only clearly defined male and female roles, such Christians do not accept gender diversity as a part of God’s nature.  Progressive Christians, on the other hand, emphasize Jesus’ message of compassion, loving one’s neighbor, and caution against oversimplifying nature or presuming to know everything about it.  They also point out that most Christians today accept divorce even though it is directly condemned by Jesus and equated with adultery (Matthew 19:9)—an offense punished in the Bible with death.

Christianity spread westward and greatly influenced Europe while Palestine became predominantly Muslim for over a thousand years.  A series of brutal military expeditions, known as the Crusades, were launched by European Christians from the eleventh to the thirteenth century to reclaim Palestine from the Muslims but were ultimately unsuccessful.  The Ottoman Turks ruled the region up until World War I, after which the British controlled Cyprus, Palestine and Jordan while the French governed Lebanon.  Independence was achieved after World War II and in 1948, the Jewish people overtook Palestine and established the modern state of Israel.  Sodomy laws were inherited from the British but never enforced in the new Jewish state.  They were eventually repealed in 1963 and limited civil union rights were granted in 1994.  At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Israel had prominent gay communities and offered impressive, Western-style protections for its third-gender citizens.  This new attitude of social tolerance was largely influenced by the severe persecution Jews had suffered during the Holocaust of World War II.  Israel’s neighbors, Jordan and Cyprus, were also free of sodomy laws but Lebanon punished homosexuality with up to one year in prison.

On the Arabian Peninsula, polytheistic tribes existed up until the advent of Islam—a religion founded by Prophet Mohammed (570-632 A.D.) in the seventh century A.D.  Islam worships a supreme God similar to the Judeo-Christian tradition and its teachings are presented in the holy Qur’an and hadiths (sacred accounts of the life of Mohammed).  Throughout the Muslim scriptures, several references are made to third-gender men.  The Qur’an (42:50) describes such men as ’aqeem or “ineffectual” as follows:  “[The supreme authority of Allah] marries together the males and the females, and makes those whom it wills to be ineffectual.”  It also states that some men are “without the defining skills of males” (24.31).  The hadiths use similar terms to describe third-gender men such as mukhannath (effeminate man), majbub or mamsuh (castrated eunuch), and khasy—a word similar to saris that refers to ineffectual men holding favored or distinguished posts.

The Qur’an scorns both male castration (29:28-29) and “approaching other males in lust” (7:81, 26:165-166, 27:55), but only mildly and with no punishment offered.  The scorn was traditionally applied only to ordinary males and not to the ‘aqeem.  In a popular narrative from the hadith of Bukhari (62:8), a companion of Mohammed tells the Prophet that, as a young man, his soul is tormented and he cannot find it within himself to marry a woman.  Mohammed remains silent and the youth repeats his question three times.  Finally, after the fourth time, the Prophet says: “O Abu Huraira, the pen is dry regarding what is befitting for you.  So be a eunuch for that reason or leave it alone.”  For many centuries, this passage was used by Muslims throughout the world to support the Middle Eastern custom of castrating young men deemed ‘aqeem or ineffectual. 

Several Muslim texts indicate that homosexuality was a common occurrence in early Arabia, especially among the ineffectual men and eunuchs.  When Joseph is sold to the Egyptian eunuch, Potiphar, for instance, the Qur’an (12:20) assures the reader that Joseph’s slaveholders “abstained from him.”  The Qur’an also contains several descriptions of paradise, mentioning “innumerable immortal boys, like hidden pearls and with dark eyes” that serve as immaculate partners in the promised gardens of heaven.  In the hadith of Bukhari (62:6:9), Mohammed’s companions ask the Prophet if they can use other males “as eunuchs” to fulfill their sexual urges, since they were far from their wives.  Mohammed forbids them from doing so but their familiarity with the practice is made clear.  The same hadith enjoins that if a man penetrates a young boy, he is forbidden from marrying the youth’s mother (62:25).  In yet another section, Mohammed evicts an imposter mukhannath when he demonstrates lust for the women he is assigned to guard (114:162).  Further along in the text, the Prophet curses males who impersonate women for the purpose of gaining lustful access to them.  This latter reference is sometimes used by Muslims to condemn crossdressing but is clearly out of context in regard to those who are factually mukhannath or effeminate.  Other hadiths admonish crossdressing, male homosexuality and lesbianism (sihaq) more strongly and prescribe a death penalty. 

Fundamentalist Muslims condemn homosexual and transgender people by referring to eighth-century Shari’a laws based upon the above-mentioned hadiths.  They also stress a rigid, two-gender system that forbids not only gender diversity but also monasticism.  Moderate Muslims, on the other hand, point out that Shari’a laws were not in effect during Mohammed’s time and refer to Islam’s longstanding history of tolerance for ineffectual men and eunuchs in many parts of the world.  It is a well-known fact, for instance, that eunuchs were placed in charge of guarding the Prophet’s tomb in Medina since the twelfth century A.D. and possibly even before that.

In the Arabian country of Oman there is a contemporary example of an Islamic third gender known as the xanith.  Studied in 1977 by Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan, the xanith are regarded by Omanis as neither man nor woman but with the characteristics of both.  They excel in women’s tasks and are considered to be impotent with females, effeminate, and gentle by nature.  The xanith do not practice castration but are nonetheless permitted to associate closely with women.  On festive occasions they can be seen singing, dancing and eating along with them, and their facial expressions, voice, laugh, movements and gait are all feminine.  The xanith wear a mixture of male and female clothing and often serve as homosexual partners or prostitutes to other men.  Despite their unusual appearance and behavior as an intermediate gender, the xanith are generally well accepted among the Omani people.

The modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was established in 1927 after nearly four centuries of nominal rule under the Ottoman Empire.  The kingdom is the center of Islam and deeply conservative.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, countries on the Arabian Peninsula were among the world’s most draconian in terms of gay and lesbian persecution.  Homosexuality was punishable by death in both Saudi Arabia and Yemen while the United Arab Emirates enforced prison terms of up to fourteen years.  The countries of Bahrain, Qatar and Oman all prescribed jail sentences of ten years or less.  As a consequence of the harsh laws, homosexual and transgender subcultures throughout the Arabian Peninsula remained highly secretive and underground. 

Southern Europe

In ancient Greek cosmology there were originally three sexes—male, female and hermaphrodite.  Zeus, the king of gods, divided each of these in half and created three different types of sexualities.  The two male halves, once divided, aspired to unite with other men; the two female halves desired other women, and the two hermaphrodite halves became men and women who sought out their opposite sex.  Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) conceived of gender in the form of a ladder; with virile men on the top, fertile women at the bottom, and impotent intermediates in between.

Many ancient Greek and Roman deities are clearly portrayed in homoerotic and bisexual relationships.  Zeus, for example, known as Jupiter in Rome, became so smitten by Ganymede that he took the beautiful youth to Olympus and made passionate love to him there.  In a similar story, Poseidon (Neptune), god of the sea, takes young Pelops to the celestial mountain for the same purpose.  Apollo, a sun deity worshiped in both Greece and Rome, is vividly described falling in love with the handsome youth, Hyacinth.  At a sporting match together, Apollo once threw his discus with all his might to impress the boy.  Hyacinth, in turn, ran to catch the weapon but it was blown off course by the wind-god, Zephyrus.  The errant discus killed Hyacinth and Apollo was completely devastated by the loss of his beloved.  He forbade Hades from taking Hyacinth to the underworld and created a flower in the boy’s memory.  Several other Greek and Roman deities are also portrayed in homoerotic relationships such as the nature god, Pan (Faunus), and Dionysus (Bacchus), god of wine.

Greek moralist Plutarch (46-127 A.D.) wrote that Heracles (Hercules) had so many male lovers they were beyond counting and included Apollo, Aberus (son of Hermes or Mercury) and several of the Argonauts.  Nestor was considered Heracles’ favorite but Iolaos also had a prominent place in the Greek hero’s heart.  Aristotle recounts that in his time, male lovers pledged their faith to one another at the tomb of Iolaos.  Achilles and Patroclus of Homer’s Iliad were also considered icons of male homosexuality and their relationship inspired the Greek philosopher, Plato (427-347 B.C.), to argue in favor of an army comprised of same-sex lovers.  Such a battalion was indeed formed in the fourth century B.C. and known as the Sacred Band of Thebes.  Comprised of more than three hundred soldiers, the homosexual army was renowned for its valor in battle until being defeated by Phillip II of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.), in 338 B.C.  Alexander himself was well known for his love of men and maintained a lifelong union with his beloved friend, Hephaestion.  Considered one of the most successful military commanders in history, Alexander the Great unified Greece and went on to conquer Egypt, Asia Minor, Syria, Babylon, Persia, Bactria and western India. 

In both Greek and Roman society, bisexuality and dominant homosexual behavior were considered normative and extolled as signs of male virility and strength.  In the fourth century B.C. it was not at all uncommon for two male lovers to share a home together or engage in homosexual relations at public bathhouses and symposiums (aristocratic clubs).  Men that were excessively effeminate, however, or that exclusively assumed the passive role in sex with other men were typically disparaged and treated like women.  Known as eunouchos, such passive homosexuals served as valets, chamberlains, male concubines and guards of the gynoecium (female apartments).  The modern term “eunuch” is derived from eunouchos and means “in charge of the bedroom.”  Like the Hebrew word saris, eunouchos originally referred to an administrative post wherein appointees were typically homosexual or effeminate men but not necessarily so; the etymology of the word itself has nothing to do with castration.

Early Greeks employed male emasculation chiefly as a punishment for rape and adultery or sometimes in warfare.  Greek historian Herodotus documents one of the earliest known instances of castration in his work, The Histories, wherein it is described how the seventh century B.C. Corinthian tyrant, Periander, condemned eight hundred young nobles of Corcyra to such humiliation.  Most scholars do not consider the systematic castration of male servants to be a traditional practice of ancient Greece; rather, it was more closely associated with slaves imported from the East.  Herodotus wrote that in Greece, the custom was considered “undignified, with only a few exceptions.”  He also describes how Sardis—the ancient capital of Lydia in what is now western Turkey—served as a hub for Eastern slave traders selling young, castrated boys known as ektomias.  The ektomias were viewed as exotic novelties in the fifth century B.C. and sold to satisfy the lust of wealthy customers throughout the Mediterranean.

Male castration was even more despised in Rome where the practice was attributed to the Assyrians and eventually outlawed in the first century A.D.  As in Greece, male castration was less common than often assumed and more related to imported slaves rather than freeborn citizens.  A few notable exceptions include the various transgender cults of the time that practiced voluntary castration as a means of celibacy and sex change.  The Cybele cult of second century B.C. Rome, for instance, held initiation rites to the goddess wherein men castrated themselves, wore women’s clothing and assumed female names and identities.  Another popular goddess worshiped by male-to-female transgenders was Atagartis, a matriarchal deity imported from ancient Syria.  Such transgender worshipers were called galli in Rome and considered tertius sexus (a third sex).  In a well-known narrative concerning the origin of transgenders, Prometheus, while drunk and half asleep, mistakenly places male genitals on women and female genitals on men.

In both ancient Greece and Rome, homosexual apprenticeships were quite common wherein younger, adolescent pupils known as eromenos served as loving partners to their accomplished masters or erastes.  Plato and Xenophon, two prominent disciples of Socrates (470-399 B.C.), described their teacher as “helpless” among beautiful, adolescent boys.  Plato considered erotic relationships between men as love’s highest expression and dismissed those who thought otherwise. “Same-sex love is regarded as shameful by barbarians,” he said, “and by those who live under despotic governments, just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them.”  Later in life, Plato envisioned an ideal world in which all earthly pleasures were foresworn and procreative sex was pursued solely as a matter of duty.

On the island of Lesbos, Sappho (630-570 B.C.) was highly regarded as a female poet and honorably referred to as “the Tenth Muse.”  She was devoted to goddess Aphrodite, ran a school for girls, and wrote many poems speaking of love and infatuation between women.  In ancient Greece and Rome, lesbians were known as tribas (from the Greek verb, “to rub”) and the term virago described mannish women associated with masculine Roman goddesses such as Minerva and Diana.  Virago women made love to other females and delighted in manly pursuits such as handball, running, jumping, wrestling and lifting heavy weights.

Greece reached its zenith in the fourth century B.C. and then slowly declined until becoming a Roman province in 146 B.C.  Rome reached its height in the first century B.C. but fell to Germanic barbarians in the fifth century A.D., when the empire was effectively divided in half.  Christianity arrived in both countries during the first century A.D.  Although the new religion was initially ridiculed and persecuted, it slowly became popular and ultimately convinced Greeks and Romans to abandon their traditional polytheistic beliefs.  In 324 A.D., Emperor Constantine I legalized Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, which at that time extended from Spain, Britain, and Gaul (France) in the west to Pontus (Turkey), Egypt, and Palestine in the east.

Attitudes toward homosexuality, eunouchos and third-gender citizens in general declined rapidly throughout Europe under Christian rule.  In 389 A.D., Rome took away the right of eunouchos to make or benefit from wills.  A year later, an imperial Roman decree criminalized sex between men with a prescribed penalty of death by burning.  Although widely ignored at first, the new law stigmatized homosexuals and pushed them underground and behind closed doors.  In 538 and 544 A.D., Justinian I enacted further laws against homosexuality in the East Roman or Byzantine Empire.  Two centuries later, the Visigothic Code was established in West Roman Europe ordering the castration or death of anyone found guilty of sodomy.

With traditional Greek and Roman homosexuality relegated to the underground, third-gender eunouchos were gradually reconceptualized as sexless, castrated eunuchs.  The original Byzantine definition of eunuch was very broad and divided into three types—natural, castrated and ascetic.  Natural eunuchs were essentially men lacking a natural desire for women and the Basilian Christians wrote of them as follows: “Some men by birth have a nature to turn away from women, and those who are subject to this natural constitution do well not to marry.  These, they say, are the eunuchs by birth.” (Stromata 3.1.1.)  St. Gregory Nazianzos, a fourth-century bishop of Byzantium, described natural eunuchs as “womanlike and, among men, not manly, of dubious sex.”  Castrated eunuchs were those whose organs had been removed and ascetic eunuchs were men who foreswore women for the sake of God.  By the twelfth century, however, most Europeans referred to eunuchs as castrated males alone and only privately whispered about their effeminate and homosexual natures.

The status of eunuchs in Christian Europe was a topic of debate for many centuries, with some religious authorities condemning them as poisonous, lusty, deceitful, conniving, unlucky, etc. and others defending them as gentle, talented, religious and deserving of compassion.  In his well-known twelfth-century work, Defense of Eunuchs, archbishop Theophylaktos argued in their favor as an important and contributing social class of Byzantine society.  Unfortunately, however, he limited his definition of eunuchs to castrated men alone and criticized the “unholy,” licentious eunuchs of Persia and Arabia.  Although Theophylaktos adopted this new, limited definition of the eunuch to appease the doubts of his fellow clergymen, it nonetheless ushered in a disingenuous trend that would continue for centuries.

However defined or conceived, the eunuchs of Byzantine society occupied many different roles and worked as doorkeepers, house attendants, cooks, valets, bookkeepers, treasurers, secretaries, singers, actors, barbers, doctors and so on.  They often served as go-betweens in transactions between men and women, and commonly controlled access to the emperor.  Byzantine royalty traditionally kept their own corps of palace eunuchs and several sources hint at their service as sexual partners.  Physiognomic texts of the day describe eunuchs as feminine in voice and gait, with raised eyebrows, slack limbs, shrill voices, shifty eyes and inappropriately giddy laughter.

The Byzantine Empire lasted until 1453 A.D., when Ottoman Turks led by Mehmet II conquered the nation and established Islam as the dominant religion.  Under Mehmet’s rule, attitudes toward homosexuality became more relaxed and the eunuch class flourished.  Mehmet himself kept a large harem that included many eunuchs, and after toppling Constantinople, the sultan added several young Byzantine boys to his collection.  Homoerotic poetry was popular throughout the Turkish Empire for many centuries as were the third-gender dancing boys known as kocek and baccha.  Bathhouses (hamam)—wherein young male attendants called tellaks washed, massaged and sexually gratified their clients for a fixed price—were commonplace, and there were also hamams for women that facilitated lesbian relations.

In the far western reaches of the Ottoman Empire in regions now known as Albania and the western Balkans, occasional cases of female-to-male transgenders were reported from the early 1800s onward.  Known as tombelija (sworn virgins) or muskobanja (manlike women), such females lived and dressed as men, assumed male identities, performed male jobs, fought in battle and were generally accepted in their villages as male.  As the name suggests, the tombelija would often live as celibates although in certain cases they were known to have female partners.  The villagers sometimes called such women hadum (eunuchs) and described them as “neither female nor male.”  By the late twentieth century, the number of sworn virgins dwindled as the Balkans began to modernize and traditional female roles became less restrictive.

Greeks rebelled against the Ottoman Turks in the 1820s, establishing an independent monarchy in 1830.  Sodomy laws were enacted during this time but repealed over a century later, in 1951.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Greece was a mostly conservative, Eastern Orthodox nation with modern gay and lesbian communities in prominent cities such as Athens, Thessaloniki and Iraklion.  The Balkan states were also conservative and had similarly decriminalized sodomy.  Small countries in the north, such as Croatia and Slovenia, were somewhat progressive and offered limited civil rights for gay couples.  Bulgaria, to the east, decriminalized sodomy in 1968 but remained very conservative, as did the modern Republic of Turkey, established in 1923.  Although Turkey never officially enacted sodomy laws, homosexuals were often persecuted by authorities and legally banned from organizing, even into the early twenty-first century.  Other conservative countries in the region included Albania, Serbia, Romania and, across the Black Sea, the former Soviet states of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.  None of these countries had sodomy laws but were very repressive toward homosexuals.

In Western Europe, the Holy Roman Empire (843-1806 A.D.) was established in the ninth century wherein homosexuals were strictly persecuted under the Visigothic Code.  Forced to live in secrecy and shame, many third-gender citizens took refuge within the inner sanctums of early Christian monasteries.  In the Middle Ages, the Empire was fractured into small rival states, each with their own separate laws regarding sodomy.  The Roman Church launched Inquisitions to eliminate homosexuals but such hostile attitudes became somewhat relaxed during the artistic and culturally refined Renaissance period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century.  During this time, many discreet homosexuals such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci became world-renowned for their artistic contributions.  In 1599, Rome sanctioned the castration of boy singers (castrati) and during the Enlightenment period of the eighteenth century, advancements in science and social philosophy challenged traditional Church teachings.  This led many Italian states to abolish sodomy laws by the mid-1700s and in 1861, Italy became established as a unified country, independent of the Roman Catholic Church.  Boy castrations were outlawed in 1870 and sodomy was decriminalized throughout Italy in 1889.  Homosexuals were persecuted under the Fascist Italian government of the 1930s but calls for resurrecting old sodomy laws were left unanswered.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Italy was a progressive country although somewhat constrained by longstanding Roman Catholic traditions and beliefs.  Modern gay and lesbian communities thrived in cities such as Rome, Milan and Naples.

In France, homosexuality was accepted under early Roman rule but forced underground with the advent of Christianity in the second century A.D.  In 486, the Frankish realm was established as a Christian state aligned with Rome and homosexuals were persecuted under Biblical laws.  France was divided into three nations in 843, invaded by the Normans in 1066, and consequently ruled by the English until sovereignty was achieved in 1453.  At this time, a powerful French monarchy was established known for its liberal, aristocratic culture that included discreetly homosexual figures such as Louis XIII.  Homosexuality nevertheless remained publicly stigmatized and the Roman Church conducted random Inquisitions.  Paris was a well-known hub for male prostitution in the late 1600s and in 1702, one of the last public burnings occurred wherein several men were set fire at the stake following a well-publicized homosexual prostitution scandal.

France gained prominence in the world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by launching naval expeditions and establishing colonies in the Americas, Africa and the South Seas.  One notable commander of the French fleet in the Indian Ocean, Admiral Pierre-Andre Suffren de Saint-Tropez (1729-1788), was infamous for encouraging homosexual behavior aboard his ships and even matched up sailors in “marriages.”  The Enlightenment of the 1700s nourished a homosexual and lesbian subculture among French artists and the upper class; homosexual literature was prominent at this time and the topic much debated.  French writer Voltaire (1694-1778), for instance, proclaimed homosexuality an abomination but also argued for its decriminalization in 1777.  Indeed, during the French Revolution (1789-99), a revision of the penal code in 1791 removed homosexual practices from its list of punishable offenses, effectively making France the first Christian nation in the world to decriminalize sodomy.  This landmark revision was further ratified in 1810 when the Code Napoleon legalized all private sexual acts between consenting adults.  The new legal code influenced many other European nations to abolish their own sodomy laws in the nineteenth century, including Spain, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and several German states.  France became increasingly liberal up through the twentieth century with thriving gay communities in cities such as Paris, Lyon and Marseille.  The world’s first anti-discrimination law protecting homosexuals was enacted in 1985 and civil unions were established in 1999.

In Spain and Portugal, homosexuality thrived under Roman rule but became restricted when invading Germanic tribes established Christianity and Biblical law around 400 A.D.  The Islamic Moors took over the Iberian Peninsula in 711, after which attitudes toward homosexuality and male castration became more accommodating and mirrored those found elsewhere throughout the early Islamic world.  In the eleventh century, Christians began a war to recapture the Spanish Peninsula and by 1276, the Moors had been driven back into the southern state of Granada (Andalusia).

Portugal was recognized by Spain as an independent Christian state in 1385.  Although sodomy was a punishable offense, homosexual practices thrived and medieval poems sung by Portuguese troubadours often spoke of same-sex attraction between both men and women.  In 1492, Muslim Moors were driven out of lower Spain and the Roman Church began launching Inquisitions to enforce strict orthodoxy throughout the Iberian Peninsula.  The Spanish Inquisitions were especially brutal, and Jews, Muslims, pagans and homosexuals were all fair game.  In the Castile city of Zaragoza alone, 534 sodomy trials were documented between 1570 and 1630 with 102 citizens sentenced to death by public burning at the stake.  In Portugal, over four hundred trials were held between 1536 and 1821 with thirty burned at the stake.  Hundreds of others were forced to march in processions of shame and humiliation, after which they were tortured, deprived of all possessions and exiled.  Many priests were also tried for sodomy during this time but in most cases they were silently sent away to other countries.  Court records in Lisbon were particularly extensive and identified a persistent homosexual subculture in Portugal that included transvestite dancers and passive male partners known as fanchonos.  The fanchonos were especially despised by court officials and nearly always convicted once brought to trial.

Both Spain and Portugal became important world powers from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century by launching expeditions around the globe and colonizing much of the Americas, Africa and Southeast Asia.  After the European Enlightenment, Church Inquisitions were abolished and revised criminal codes omitted sodomy as a crime in both countries, including their overseas colonies, by the early 1800s.  Portugal reinstated anti-sodomy laws under the Salazar dictatorship from 1926-1974 but removed them in 1982.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Portugal was a mostly conservative, Roman Catholic country with gay communities in large cities like Lisbon and Porto.  In Spain, homosexuals were persecuted under General Franco’s unpopular dictatorship from 1936 to 1975.  Although sodomy laws were never officially reinstated, three-year jail sentences were typically meted out to homosexuals under contrived charges.  After the death of Franco and with the advent of democracy in 1978, Spain became increasingly secular and witnessed a rapid liberalization of social mores.  In the early twenty-first century, gay communities thrived in Spanish cities like Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia.  The rights of third-gender citizens were protected and in 2005, Spain became the third country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage.

Northern Europe

The early tribes of northern Europe were polytheistic and worshiped a wide range of gods, goddesses and nature spirits.  Included among such tribes were the Celts of Britannia and northern Gaul, the Germanic Teutons of the Central North, and the Norse or Vikings of Scandia, Iceland and the Jutland Peninsula (Denmark).

The traditional beliefs and practices of the Norse were not written down until approximately 800 A.D., several centuries after their conversion to Christianity.  Nevertheless, a good amount of information still exists about this early indigenous culture.  In Norse narratives, several prominent gods change their sex and engage in homoerotic behavior.  In one popular account, Odin, the king of gods and ruler of the underworld, is accused of being an ergi (effeminate homosexual) after practicing the womanly magic taught to him by Freya, the Norse sun goddess.  He also has homoerotic relations with his brother, Loki, the god of mischief and cunning.  Loki himself spends twelve years as a woman and in one narrative takes the form of a mare to mate with a giant stallion.  The god bears a foal from the union that later becomes known as Sleipnir, the eight-legged steed of Odin.  In the underworld kingdom of Valhalla, Odin is served by the Valkyries—masculine warrior goddesses that escort fallen soldiers into the afterlife.  The Norse goddess of love and beauty, Freya, is sometimes portrayed as a hermaphrodite with masculine features.  Freya’s priests were typically ergi and twelfth-century Danish historian, Saxo Grammaticus, scorned them and the “effeminate gestures” they used in their rituals.  Known as seidskratti, the third-gender priests of Freya practiced women’s magic wearing female clothing and hairstyles.  Freya’s brother, Frey, is often portrayed sporting with both women and men.  Represented by a phallic symbol, Frey is the Norse god of fertility, agriculture, peace and prosperity.  Several Icelandic heroes were also known to engage in transgender and bisexual behavior such as Helgi Hundingsbana, who in one saga disguises himself as a maiden; and Grettir the Strong, who is described having intercourse with nearly everyone in town including the farmer’s sons, deans, courtiers and abbots.

Male prostitution was reportedly prevalent in early Scandinavia with the fixed price set very low, and several small gold foil plaques, known as goldgubbers, have been found depicting same-sex couples locked in embrace, both male and female.  Ancient Norsemen viewed homosexuality in much the same way that other early cultures did—bisexuality and dominant homosexual behavior were accepted as signs of virility and strength, but excessive feminine behavior and passive homosexuality were typically disparaged.  Men who avoided women were known as fuoflogi (he who flees from the vagina) and women who avoided men were known as flannfluga (she who flees from the phallus).  The term ergi, along with several others, referred to passive homosexuals, effeminate men and cowards, and it was one of the most insulting words that one warrior could use against another.  In the brutal world of Viking warfare, defeated enemies were often homosexually raped or castrated as a gesture of humiliation.  The term ergi also referred to people that were sexually neutral—such as young boys or old men—and a well-known Scandinavian proverb states, “Everyone becomes an ergi when they grow old.”

Diodorus Siculus, a Roman historian of the first century B.C., documented one of the earliest known references to homosexuality among the Celtic tribes of Britannia and northern Gaul.  In a historical account describing early Roman contact with Celtic tribes in the fourth century B.C., Diodorus wrote: “Despite the fact that their wives were beautiful, the Celts abandon themselves to a passion for other men.  They usually sleep on the ground on skins of wild animals and tumble about with a bedfellow on either side.  Paradoxically, they do not regard this as a disgrace; rather, whenever their freely-offered gift of sexual gratification is not received favorably, they regard it as a dishonor.”

Beginning in the second century A.D., various tribes throughout northern Europe launched a series of expeditions and invasions that extended southward to Spain, eastward to Russia and as far west as Britain, Iceland, Greenland and the North American continent.  Lasting for about eight hundred years, the excursions changed the face of Europe and succeeded in bringing down the Roman Empire.  Germanic Visigoths defeated most of Western Europe, settled in the regions they conquered and were quickly converted to Christianity.  In the seventh century A.D. they implemented the Visigothic Code, a compilation of Roman and Biblical laws that strongly punished homosexuality by castration and death.  These harsh penalties persisted in many European nations and former colonies around the world, well up until the mid-nineteenth century.

The Anglo-Saxons of Jutland invaded the Roman Diocese of Britain from the fourth to the sixth century A.D., and the Normans invaded and settled in northern France and England in 1066, establishing a powerful monarchy that quickly gained prominence in the latter country.  During this time, homosexuals and transgenders were persecuted under the Visigothic Code and relegated to the shadows of medieval English society.  One of the earliest examples of an English homosexual is King Edward II, who ruled the nation from 1307-1327.  As a prince, Edward had little interest in fighting battles and found more pleasure in arranging royal theatrical and musical events.  He fell into a deep relationship with Piers Gaveston, the Earl of Cornwall, but his father, King Edward I, was displeased with the union and had the earl exiled.  When Edward called Gaveston back after his father’s death, the royal court had the earl executed under contrived charges.  Edward then developed a relationship with Hugh Despenser, a son of the earl of Winchester, but when the court similarly threatened him with exile, Edward II challenged the order.  The king was subsequently imprisoned and later executed in a particularly grotesque fashion—a red-hot plumber’s iron was inserted through his anus so that the inner portions of his abdomen were burned beyond the intestines.

Various laws prescribing death by burning, torture, castration and public humiliation in the pillory were enforced against homosexuals in England until King Henry VIII revised the English penal code in 1533.  The new code included the infamous Buggery Act, which declared sodomy a felony punishable by hanging until death and forfeited all of the convicted felon’s property to the crown.  Like most sodomy laws, the Buggery Act was primarily used for blackmail and intimidation, and only a handful of convictions were ever actually carried out.  A year later, the Church of England separated from Rome.  This ended Roman Inquisitions but also abolished the English monasteries that had afforded refuge to many third-gender Christians.

In Renaissance England, homosexual subcultures flourished within the artistic, literary and theatrical communities of densely populated towns such as London.  Many discreetly bisexual personalities such as William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and admitted homosexuals such as John Wilmot, Christopher Marlowe and others, became well known for their literary accomplishments during this time.  As homosexual subcultures grew, so did the terminology surrounding them.  In the late seventeenth century, the English word “hermaphrodite” replaced the medieval term “eunuch” as the nomenclature of choice for homosexuals.  John Garfield’s scandalous periodical, The Wandering Whore (London: 1660), described such people as follows: “There are likewise hermaphrodites, effeminate men given to much luxury, idleness, and wanton pleasures, and to that abominable sin of sodomy, wherein they are both active and passive in it, whose vicious actions are only to be whispered among us.”  In England’s urban slang, homosexual men became widely known as “mollies” while homosexual women were called “tommies.”

England joined with Scotland in 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain and became an important world power by establishing global trade, foreign colonies and a strong naval fleet.  Great Britain’s emergence as Europe’s first industrialized nation further consolidated its position as the world’s premier superpower.  Whereas many European nations abolished their sodomy laws after the Enlightenment, Great Britain remained persistently draconian throughout the nineteenth century.  Its revised penal code of 1860, enforced in colonies around the world during the Victorian Era (1837-1901), succeeded only in changing the penalty for sodomy from death by hanging to life imprisonment.  One infamous victim of the new law was Sir Hector Archibald Macdonald (1853-1903), a celebrated British soldier who committed suicide when his homosexuality was uncovered while stationed in India.

Great Britain declined as a world superpower after World War II and in 1967, sodomy was finally decriminalized in both England and Wales—nearly two hundred years after France (Scotland decriminalized in 1980 and Ireland in 1993).  Throughout the next several decades, attitudes toward homosexuality and gender diversity improved greatly in the United Kingdom and modern gay communities thrived in cities such as London and Birmingham.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, civil protections were afforded to Britain’s third-gender citizens and civil unions granted in 2005.

The Netherlands harshly persecuted homosexuals in the name of religion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as described in the beginning of this chapter.  At the same time, the Dutch sailed around the world and established lucrative colonies in Southeast Asia, the Americas and Africa.  In 1795, the country was invaded by France and consequently adopted the Napoleonic legal code in 1811, thus ending the Netherlands’s brutal sodomy laws.  Four years later, the country became an independent monarchy.  There were calls at this time to reinstate sodomy as a crime but they were left unanswered—the new Kingdom of the Netherlands had become irreversibly influenced by French liberalism.  In 1830, Belgium declared its independence from the Netherlands and became a separate state.  Although religious backlashes and social discrimination continued well into the twentieth century in both countries, homosexual subcultures and organizations persisted from the nineteenth century onward.  In the early twentieth century, Dutch homosexuals were inspired by the third-gender theories being advanced in Germany.  During World War II, however, occupying Nazis enforced anti-homosexual laws on the Dutch and Belgians but with no permanent effect.  After the war, homosexual subcultures flourished in large cities like Amsterdam and Brussels from the 1950s forward and were accompanied by a general acceptance from the public.  In 1973, openly gay men and women were allowed to serve in the Dutch military and transsexual operations were legally recognized in 1978.  Civil protections were extended to homosexuals in 1993 and civil unions granted in 1998.  In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize homosexual marriage, followed by Belgium in 2003.

The early Germanic tribes of central Europe practiced beliefs similar to the Norse but were converted to Christianity while invading the Roman Empire between the fourth and sixth centuries A.D.  King Charlemagne (742-814) united the Frankish realms of Western Europe at the beginning of the ninth century, thus laying the groundwork for the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire in 843.  Since the adoption of Christianity, homosexuals had been driven underground throughout the Germanic region and were persecuted under the Visigothic Code and by Inquisitions from Rome.  In 1517, the German monk, Martin Luther (1483-1546), initiated a rebellion against the Roman Church later known as the Reformation, which divided Christians into Catholics in the south and Protestants in the north.  This greatly weakened the Holy Roman Empire and led to the creation of several self-governing German states. 

One of the earliest known German homosexuals was Frederick II the Great (1712-1786), an influential Berlin-born king who established Prussia as a major European power in the eighteenth century.  Frederick the Great ignored his wife, kept many male lovers and had a well-documented interest in European homosexual culture and literature.  Frederick was a much-respected king who not only doubled the size of Prussia but also set the stage for Berlin’s prominence as the future German capital.  Twenty years after the death of Frederick the Great, the Holy Roman Empire collapsed at the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte of France.  A German Federation of different states then emerged in the north, each with their own set of sodomy laws.  Several German states, such as Bavaria and Hanover, adopted the Napoleonic Code and decriminalized sodomy at this time.  Bavaria’s king, Ludwig II (1845-1886), was a well-known homosexual during this period.  The king had several male lovers, refused to take a wife, and nearly bankrupted the country by building several highly extravagant castles.  Arrested by the German court and declared insane, Ludwig II was found drowned in a lake under mysterious circumstances along with his psychiatrist.  Despite his eccentricities, the Bavarian king was popular with most of the citizens and his death was greatly mourned.

In 1871, King Wilhelm of Prussia established a new German Empire and revised Germany’s legal code.  Although some German states had previously abolished their sodomy laws, the revised code copied the Prussian model and reestablished sodomy as a crime throughout the new nation.  Known as Paragraph 175, the law was initially seldom enforced or taken very seriously.  During the same time period, sexology emerged as a new science in Germany and psychiatrists began analyzing and cataloging various types of men with different sexual natures.  For the first time in modern history, scholars began to consider that homosexual attraction might be innate and biological.  New concepts and terms emerged during this period such as “the third sex” (das dritte Geschlecht), “sexual intermediates” (sexuelle Zwischenstufen), “transvestites” (Transvestiten) and “psychic hermaphrodites” (ein Zwitter im Geiste).  In the 1860s, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895) coined the term Urninge (“Uranism”), which referred to people of a third sex that were born with inverted male and female natures.  Ulrichs argued that since Uranism was innate it should not be stigmatized or criminalized and wrote many articles to that effect, calling for the repeal of Paragraph 175.  The modern term “homosexuality” (homosexualitat) first appeared in an 1869 German pamphlet written by Karoly Maria Kertbeny putting forth the same argument.  Although Ulrichs initially limited his description of Uranians to effeminate homosexuals only, he later widened the definition to include masculine types (Mannlinge), feminine types (Weiblinge), lesbians (Urninde) and bisexuals (Uranodioninge), distinguishing them from “circumstantial” or pseudo-homosexuals (Uraniaster).

By the 1880s, sexology was fashionable in psychiatric circles throughout Europe and every important psychologist published books and articles on the topic.  While most doctors considered homosexuality a psychopathy or mental disorder, many were willing to entertain the idea that same-sex desire could possibly be innate.  Krafft-Ebring, for example, an influential German psychiatrist and author of Psychopathia Sexualis, conceded one year before his death that homosexuality was indeed inborn and not pathological per se, as he had earlier claimed.  In 1897, Magnus Hirschfeld founded the very first modern homosexual movement known as the Wissenschaftlich-Humanitare Komitee.  Hirschfeld was the main defender of homosexuality as an innate third sex and argued for the repeal of Germany’s sodomy laws.  In 1899 he published the first annual journal for homosexuals, Jahrbuch Fur Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, which ran until 1923, and in the same year he sent a petition to the German Reichstag requesting that Paragraph 175 be removed from the German criminal code.

Turn-of-the-century Wilhelmine Germany (1870-1918) developed a significant homosexual subculture that included many prominent Germans such as Kaiser Wilhelm’s own second-born son, Eitel Fritz.  This prompted the government to enforce Paragraph 175 more strictly during the Great War, which in turn lead to further protests against the law.  The world’s very first demonstration for homosexual rights took place a day before Germany’s surrender in 1918, when Magnus Hirschfeld appeared with other speakers before a Berlin crowd of five thousand to demand the decriminalization of homosexuality throughout the German nation.

After the Great War, Berlin became one of the most liberal cities in Europe in regard to its burgeoning homosexual subculture.  Although Paragraph 175 remained on the books during the all-too-brief period between World War I and II, third-gender citizens were largely tolerated and homosexual bars, nightclubs, organizations and societies flourished throughout much of Germany.  There were backlashes, however, and homosexuals soon became scapegoats along with Jews for the country’s many problems.  When the Nazi political party rose to power in 1933, homosexuals were persecuted and their bars and clubs shut down.  Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science was raided and its contents publicly burned in front of the Berlin Opera House.  Nazis requested and received lists of known homosexuals from the police and Paragraph 175 was expanded to include all types of homosexual behavior no matter how subtle.  Over 100,000 citizens were arrested for homosexuality during the Nazi years; of these, approximately 50,000 served time in prison and about 15,000 died in concentration camps (the exact figures remain unknown).  Homosexuals were forced to wear inverted pink triangles and endure hard labor, castration, hormone treatments and various types of medical experiments.

After World War II, homosexuals were left uncompensated for their tribulations during the war.  Most were obligated to serve out their prison sentences under Paragraph 175 and the Nazi revision of the law remained in West German books until 1969.  In the early 1970s, modern gay subcultures emerged in West Germany and were prominent in cities such as West Berlin, Hamburg and Munich.  A reunified Germany abolished Paragraph 175 for good in 1994 and various civil rights were granted soon thereafter, including civil unions for gay couples in 2000.

Austria was a part of the Holy Roman Empire with close historical ties to Germany.  Early homosexual Austrians include Prince Franz Eugen of Savoy (1663-1736) and Emperor Charles VI (1685-1740).  In the eighteenth century, sodomy was a capital offense in Austria and homosexuals were beheaded, after which their heads and bodies were burned.  As in Germany, Austria did not adopt the Napoleonic Code decriminalizing sodomy; instead, Emperor Francis II lessened the punishment in 1803 to one year of prison.  When homosexual subcultures began emerging in the nineteenth century, Austrian authorities responded by increasing the prison sentence to five years and also specifically prohibited sodomy between women as well as men.  Despite the increase in penalties, both male and female homosexuality flourished in late nineteenth-century Austria.  After the Great War, organizations for lesbians were formed wherein members identified themselves as “women of the third gender.”  Many prominent Austrians were influenced by German sexology including Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the father of modern psychiatry.  Freud considered persistent same-sex attraction in adults a psychopathy but entertained the idea that biological factors could be involved in its genesis.  In 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria and homosexuals were persecuted under Paragraph 175.  After the war, independence was regained and sodomy laws were abolished in 1971.  At the same time, however, a new law was passed banning homosexual organizations and all public support for homosexuality.  Nevertheless, modern gay subcultures slowly increased during the next several decades and the repressive law was repealed in 1996.  Early twenty-first century Austria was more conservative than neighboring Germany but had modern gay communities in cities such as Vienna.

Russia was originally comprised of various disunited Scythian and Eastern Slavic tribes until Scandinavians immigrated into the region during the ninth century A.D., establishing a capital in Kiev.  Shortly thereafter, the new Russian settlers abandoned traditional Norse beliefs and converted to Orthodox Christianity through contact with the Byzantine Empire.  Comradeship has a long history in Russia and early Orthodox saints, such as Boris and Gleb, were celebrated as time-honored examples of brotherly love.  Orthodox Russians held ceremonies known as pobratimstvo (wedded brotherhoods) and posestrimstvo (wedded sisterhoods) that enabled ordinary Russians to emulate such saintly couples.

In the thirteenth century, Mongol warriors from Central Asia invaded Kiev and Russian populations migrated northward to Muscovy (Moscow).  Foreigners wrote about widespread homosexuality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Moscow, claiming that Russian tsars, such as Ivan the Terrible, engaged in sodomy and witchcraft.  Most of the claims were motivated by foreign prejudice but Russians soon adopted the same homophobic and anti-pagan attitudes themselves.  The earliest record of homophobia in Russia appears in a sixteenth-century list of sins that condemned crossdressing and warned against the ever-growing threat of sodomy in Russian monasteries.  Another well-known instance comes from the early seventeenth century, when Muscovites overthrew Tsar Dimitry after accusing him of sodomy.  The Russians demonstrated their hostility toward the deposed tsar by dragging his corpse through Moscow along with the mutilated body of his reputed lover, Petr Basmanov.

In spite of such hostility, sodomy was not an official crime in Russia for many centuries.  Same-sex bathhouses were quite popular during the 1600s and known to facilitate both paid and unpaid sexual relations between men.  In the early eighteenth century, Peter the Great (1672-1725) initiated a process of Westernization that included Russia’s first sodomy law in 1716, which banned same-sex relations in the army and navy.  After his death, a similar ban was proposed for the general public in 1754 but not enacted until 1835.  Despite the new sodomy laws, male prostitution and homosexual subcultures flourished in nineteenth-century cities such as St. Petersburg and Moscow.  Certain streets and public gardens were known gathering places for homosexuals and specific signals, such as wearing a red tie, sent propositions to potential partners.  Russian bathhouses remained popular meeting places for men whereas lesbians, known as koshki, gathered around female brothels that were legal in Russia until 1917.  Homosexual art and literature flourished at the turn of the century and many prominent Russian artists were discreetly homosexual, such as composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky.  Mikhail Kuzman’s 1906 novella, Wings, became famous as the first modern “coming out” story with a happy ending, and Russian doctors were influenced by modern German literature exploring sexology.  Homosexuality and transgender identity came to be viewed as hermaphroditic medical conditions in which effeminate men were diagnosed as babatia or babulia and mannish women as muzhlanka.  The muzhlanka women were not at all uncommon in Russia and preferred over the babatia.  They dressed as men, assumed male identities and appear quite often in Russian historical and medical texts.

During the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, sodomy was decriminalized because of its association with Biblical teachings, which the new Communist Party viewed as antiquated and irrational.  Most Bolsheviks considered homosexuality a medical condition and even favored lesbianism, seeing little wrong with it for the new Soviet woman.  Homosexual male subcultures also survived with little fuss as long as they remained discreet.  This changed under the reversals of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, however, when sodomy was again criminalized in 1933 and punished with harsh Gulag sentences.  The new law was mostly an attempt to encourage heterosexuality, along with the Soviet birth rate, under the shadow of impending war.  Despite the new law, homosexual subcultures persisted in the Soviet Union and life inside the Gulag itself was reportedly rife with homosexual behavior.  In the 1950s and ‘60s, Soviet psychiatrists attempted to cure homosexuality through drugs and shock therapy but with little success.  Transsexual operations were explored and became routine from the 1960s forward.  After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, sodomy was decriminalized two years later and modern gay communities became visible in Russian cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg.  In the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, backlashes from religious conservatives threatened to check civil liberties for Russian homosexuals and their future was left in question.  The same was true in the former Soviet states of Ukraine, Moldavia, Belarus and the Baltic States.

Nations previously associated with the Soviet Union such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Finland were also mostly conservative in terms of gay and lesbian rights.  Poland was established in the tenth century A.D. as a predominantly Roman Catholic country with a negative view toward homosexuality.  Several early Polish kings were accused of sodomy such as Boleslaw the Bold, who ruled from 1076-1079, and Wladyslaw IV, who ruled from 1434-1444.  Wladyslaw IV led a crusade against the Turks but his ultimate defeat was attributed to the homosexual relations he had one night before a decisive battle.  As a result of the charge, Wladyslaw IV was the only crusader king never canonized by the Church.  Poland’s last king, Stanislaw Augustus (1732-1798), was reportedly bisexual and had relations with a British ambassador as a young man.  After the Enlightenment, Napoleonic codes were briefly introduced into the Duchy of Warsaw in 1808 but a succession of occupying powers reinstated sodomy laws in Poland from 1835 onward.  Several lesbian writers became prominent in the nineteenth century and Poland had thriving homosexual subcultures between the first and second World Wars.  Sodomy laws were repealed in 1932 but homosexuals remained persecuted under Nazi and later communist rule.  After gaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1989, modern gay communities and organizations emerged in cities such as Warsaw, Cracow and Gdansk.  Although Poland’s new 1997 constitution banned discrimination “on any grounds,” such rights were visibly withheld from gay and lesbian citizens.  Anti-gay prejudice increased and was even encouraged by the Church and right-wing Polish nationalists.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, initial hopes for modern civil liberties in Poland were brought into question and the same was true for neighboring Slovakia.  The Czech Republic, Hungary and Finland were less conservative and had thriving gay communities in Prague, Budapest and Helsinki, respectively.  Limited civil partnership rights for gay couples were legislated in all three countries.

In the Norse homelands of Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, homosexuality was traditionally tolerated until the introduction of Christianity in the seventh century A.D.  Even then, sodomy was rarely prosecuted, although technically punishable by death, and most towns issued warnings to homosexuals or exiled them whenever specific problems arose.  Since the Nordic countries were sparsely populated, homosexual subcultures did not become evident until the late nineteenth century.  In Denmark, an increase in homosexual scandals and male prostitution in the 1800s caused authorities to exile many prominent citizens and eventually reduce the penalty for sodomy to one year in jail.  In the early 1900s, Denmark was influenced by German sexology and authorities recommended that sodomy be decriminalized altogether.  Homosexual clubs and organizations were formed after the Great War and the world’s first sex change operation was performed in 1930 on Danish painter Andreas Wegener, who traveled to Germany for the procedure.  Denmark became increasingly liberal and finally decriminalized sodomy in 1933.  After World War II, however, Nazi influence on Denmark left the nation in a conservative mood and homosexuals were often stigmatized and in some cases subjected to castration or shock treatments as “cures.”  The conservative mood ended in the 1960s and modern gay communities flourished in large cities such as Copenhagen throughout the next several decades.  In 1989, Denmark became the first country in the world to establish civil union laws for gay couples. 

Both Iceland and Norway were under Danish rule for several centuries beginning in 1380 A.D.  Norse settlers had arrived in Iceland around 850 and Norwegian King Olaf I converted Icelanders to Christianity during the eleventh century.  When Denmark decriminalized sodomy in 1933, the law was extended to Iceland since the small island nation was still under Danish rule.  In 1944, Iceland gained full independence.  Gay organizations appeared in the 1970s and their first challenge was to coin appropriate Icelandic terms for homosexuality.  Early Christians had constructed negative words with offensive connotations, so gay activists adopted the terms hommi (gay male), lesbia (lesbian) and samkynhneigo (homosexual orientation) to establish a more respectful dialog.  The new words were met with initial resistance but quickly grew in popularity and replaced the old terms within ten years.  Iceland established non-discrimination policies in 1992 and civil union laws in 1996.  Norway’s history in third-gender tolerance similarly progressed from traditional Norse attitudes to early Christian intolerance, until finally culminating in modern, liberal acceptance.  Norwegian sodomy laws were abolished in 1972 and civil unions granted in 1993.

In Sweden, one of the earliest non-Viking references to homosexuality can be found in Heliga Birgitta’s fourteenth-century work, Revelations, wherein she accuses King Magnus Eriksson, who ruled Sweden from 1332-1363, of having intercourse with a nobleman and “loving men more than God or your own soul or your own spouse.”  As in Denmark, early Swedish laws avoided the topic of sodomy and homosexual offenders were typically exiled.  Strong, independent women appear frequently in Swedish history and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many crossdressing women are documented fleeing their homes to adopt traditionally male positions such as guardsmen, sailors and soldiers.  Queen Christina (1626-1689) often dressed as a man during her reign as Sweden’s matriarch and refused to take a husband.  The queen was well known for the intimate relations she shared with her lady-in-waiting, Ebba Sparre.  King Gustav III (1746-1792) similarly kept male lovers in the Swedish royal court and historians have never doubted his sexual inclination for men.

Homosexual subcultures thrived in Sweden during the nineteenth century and are well known for their many prolific writers.  In response, the Swedish government established sodomy as a crime for both men and women in 1864 with a penalty of up to two years in prison.  In the early twentieth century, German studies in sexology became popular in Sweden and reformers petitioned for the repeal of sodomy laws.  This was realized in 1944, but conservative backlashes after World War II forced homosexual and other third-gender organizations underground.  During the 1970s, however, homosexuality was received more favorably and the topic much debated in public, with a positive outcome.  Sweden enacted the world’s first law legalizing transsexual operations in 1972 and a law protecting homosexuals against discrimination in 1988.  Civil unions were adopted in 1995 and a law against inciting violence toward homosexuals was legislated in 2003.  By the dawn of the twenty-first century, several Christian denominations in northern Europe, including the Church of Sweden, began welcoming gays into their congregations, blessing their unions and allowing them to serve as priests.

References and suggested reading:

• Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl
• Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History by Gilbert Herdt
• Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies In African Homosexualities by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe