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This chapter assesses the distinctive features of female same-sex sexuality and considers their implications for modeling the nature and development of female sexual orientation. After reviewing the state of current research on these directions, it outlines some of the most provocative and promising directions for future research. Of all of the preconceptions about sexual orientation that have been questioned and revised over the years, one of the most important is the presumption that female and male sexual orientation are parallel phenomena, with the same origins and outcomes. To the contrary, women’s greater propensity for nonexclusive, fluid patterns of attraction suggests the possibility that the underlying determinants of female same-sex sexuality may be quite different from those for men, requiring different explanatory models.

This chapter explores the shifting and contextual discourses of sexuality and gender within Anjaree and Lesla, two Thai organizations that are devoted to lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender, or LGBT, communities, and which have a particular emphasis on female same-sex sexuality. These two organizations demonstrate the complex and varied approaches to activism on sexuality and gender in the Thai context.

In Greece, AIDS during the 1980s was seen as something both foreign and not significantly related to same-sex sexuality. Indeed, in the early years people were learning about AIDS even before the first cases in the country were confirmed — what this chapter calls an “epidemic of information.” As the actual epidemic of HIV infection and AIDS grew, there was a general reluctance to see it as a problem affecting the Greek gay community. This chapter examines the history of AIDS in Greece as it relates to gay men, the nation's changing politics, and AIDS activism and gay rights activism. Through archival work and interviews with current activists in Athens, it argues that the adaptation of activist strategies and arguments regarding AIDS was shaped by a range of partially articulated cultural assumptions about same-sex sexuality. It suggests that those cultural assumptions, rather than fostering institutional connections between gay rights activism and AIDS activism, encouraged a structural divide between various activist endeavors.

This chapter considers the circulation of the “global gay paradigm” within lesbian, gay, and bisexual academic and activist discourses in India. Despite scholarly criticisms of the paradigm, it shapes popular and activist accounts within the urban Indian context. In contrast, the globalization approach is absent from some of the useful scholarly work on same-sex sexualities in the Indian context. Contrasting the activist and scholarly discourses within the Indian context, this chapter highlights the politically fraught implications of this paradigm. This analysis identifies what is at stake in the globalization of sexualities paradigm from the specific and “local” context of urban India, particularly Mumbai and New Delhi, in order to point toward alternate lines of inquiry.

This chapter recounts Yone Noguchi's return to Japan, his career ascent as an expert on the Occident, his deteriorating relationships with Léonie Gilmour and Ethel Armes, and his renewed affection for Charles Warren Stoddard between 1904 and 1909. Armes called off her engagement with Noguchi while Gilmour traveled to Japan to join him. Even before Gilmour's arrival, Noguchi had married and maintained a separate household with a Japanese woman, Matsuko Takeda. This chapter discusses Noguchi's personal ambivalence regarding the gravity of same-sex sexuality as a heinous crime and his understanding that homosexuality could ruin his career as a writer. It also considers how Noguchi's Japanese-language publications began to proclaim his heterosexuality more explicitly than in his previous writings.

While Belgium is more or less accepting of same-sex sexuality, cases of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation have been documented. Young people still encounter difficulties when coming out. They show higher rates of suicide ideation and attempts than do their heterosexual counterparts. Nonetheless, the situation of gays and lesbians has improved substantially in the past couple of years, thereby potentially opening up opportunities for enhanced prevention programs for gay men with HIV infection. This chapter focuses on gay life in Belgium. In a study conducted by the authors in Belgium, older gay men are more convinced than younger gay men that engaging in sex currently is less safe when compared with the past. Those with a lower educational level were more likely to be optimistic about new HIV treatments. Overall, it was learned that about three out of five gay men were generally practicing safer sex.

This chapter considers some methodological and theoretical issues constituting the context for this book. It first introduces the reader to the sources that are the basis of the book: the medical case histories of over three hundred adult hermaphrodites published between the late eighteenth century and the start of the twentieth-century. It then briefly describes how this book is aligned with the field of the history of the body and the history of the self, as well as with the history of same-sex sexuality, cross-dressing and hermaphroditism. Franz Ludwig von Neugebauer's Hermaphroditismus beim Menschen is explored. This book was the basis for the search for sources regarding hermaphroditism. The changing medical enactments of doubting sex in clinical practice over the nineteenth century became the framework for Doubting Sex. Moreover, this book discusses how hermaphrodites themselves told physicians they dealt with their situation.