"In a Religious Celebration"? The Religious Defense of LGBT Rights in U.S. Federal Courts.

This article advances scholarship on the relationship between sexuality, religion, and the law within the United States by analyzing case summaries and court opinions of the federal appellate cases decided between 1990 and 2020 that involve a religion-based claim being used to advance or defend gay and lesbian rights. Contrary to dominant public narratives that position religion uniformly in opposition to progressive sexual values, these cases show how Americans' religious beliefs and practices include diverse sexual identities. We find that the courts' reactions to such cases, however, illustrate the tension within legal discourse and hesitancy for the courts to equate religious and moral values with affirming LGBT identities, people, and rights. Our findings suggest that the courts and litigants define what religion is-and what it is not-by positioning it in relation to sexuality.

The female orgasm and the homology concept in evolutionary biology.

The definition of homology and its application to reproductive structures, external genitalia, and the physiology of sexual pleasure has a tortuous history. While nowadays there is a consensus on the developmental homology of genital and reproductive systems, there is no agreement on the physiological translation, or the evolutionary origination and roles, of these structural correspondences and their divergent histories. This paper analyzes the impact of evolutionary perspectives on the homology concept as applied to the female orgasm, and their consequences for the biological and social understanding of female sexuality and reproduction. After a survey of the history of pre-evolutionary biomedical views on sexual difference and sexual pleasure, we examine how the concept of sexual homology was shaped in the new phylogenetic framework of the late 19th century. We then analyse the debates on the anatomical locus of female pleasure at the crossroads of theories of sexual evolution and new scientific discourses in psychoanalysis and sex studies. Moving back to evolutionary biology, we explore the consequences of neglecting homology in adaptive explanations of the female orgasm. The last two sections investigate the role played by different articulations of the homology concept in evolutionary developmental explanations of the origin and evolution of the female orgasm. These include the role of sexual, developmental homology in the byproduct hypothesis, and a more recent hypothesis where a phylogenetic, physiological concept of homology is used to account for the origination of the female orgasm. We conclude with a brief discussion on the social implications for the understanding of female pleasure derived from these different homology frameworks.

Expertise and the Public History of Sexuality 'Second Opinion' Submission for the Proposed Special Issue, 'Sexpertise: Sexual Knowledge and the Public in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries', Edited by Hannah Charnock, Sarah L. Jones, Ben Mechen.

How does the history of sexuality function as a form of 'expertise' when engaging with those outside of academia? What other types of expertise are at play in doing the public history of sexuality? This essay focuses on engagement with young people via museums and historical artefact collections within a UK context to explore the value of expertise from a range of sectors and from non-professional 'publics' and communities. It suggests that the context of UK Higher Education presents particular challenges and opportunities for professional historians doing the public history of sexuality and the way in which they can productively negotiate diverse forms of expertise.

Homosexual/Heterosexual: First Print Uses of the Terms by Daniel von Kászony (1868-1871).

Printed use of the term heterosexuality, as juxtaposed to homosexuality, may be dated to 1871. The German noun pairs Heterosexualität/Homosexualität and adjective pair heterosexuelle/homosexuelle, appeared in two 1871 nonfiction works by hack writer Daniel von Kászony (1813-1886), picking up on Károly Mária Kertbeny's terminology. Kertbeny juxtaposed heterosexual-homosexual in 1868 correspondence but refrained from using the former term in his two famed 1869 open letters to repeal Prussian anti-sodomy legislation. Printed use of the term homosexual may be dated to 1868 or early 1869, by a pseudonymous author that is almost certainly Kászony.

The potency of the butterfly: The reception of Richard B. Goldschmidt's animal experiments in German sexology around 1920.

This article considers the sexual politics of animal evidence in the context of German sexology around 1920. In the 1910s, the German-Jewish geneticist Richard B. Goldschmidt conducted experiments on the moth Lymantria dispar, and discovered individuals that were no longer clearly identifiable as male or female. When he published an article tentatively arguing that his research on 'intersex butterflies' could be used to inform concurrent debates about human homosexuality, he triggered a flurry of responses from Berlin-based sexologists. In this article, I examine how a number of well-known sexologists affiliated with Magnus Hirschfeld, his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, and later his Institute of Sexology attempted to incorporate Goldschmidt's experiments into their sexological work between 1917 and 1923. Intersex butterflies were used to discuss issues at the heart of German sexology: the legal debate about the criminalisation of homosexuality under paragraph 175; the scientific methodology of sexology, caught between psychiatric, biological, and sociological approaches to the study of sexual and gender diversity; and the status of sexology as natural science, able to contribute knowledge about the sexual Konstitution of the organism. This article thus shows that butterfly experiments function as important and politically charged evidence for a discussion at the heart of the sexological project of those involved in the founding of the Institute of Sexology: the question of the nature and naturalness of homosexuality (and sexual intermediacy more broadly) and its political consequences. In doing so, this article makes a case for paying attention to non-human actors in the history of sexology.

Madman in the Closet: "Homosexual Panic" in Nineteenth Century New England.

This analysis uses trial records from the 1860s to explore a same-sex male relationship that devolved into panic and murder. The paper's goal is to better understand how, during the middle of the nineteenth century, men who had sexual feeling for other men were forced into spaces that were qualitatively different than our current understanding of "the closet." The paper concludes that what we now call "coming out" was not an option during this era. In telling the story of how Samuel Andrews killed his best friend, Cornelius Holmes, this paper shows that the categories ordinarily presented as symmetrical binary oppositions in contemporary times-homo/heterosexual, closeted/out-did not work for Andrews and Holmes, and probably did not and could not have worked for others living under similar conditions.

Reading Foucault's History of sexuality with Freud's Mystic writing pad: on the the dual place of The will to knowledge and on the paradox of the substitutes / Ler a história da sexualidade de foucault com o bloco mágico de freud: do duplo lugar da vontade de saber e do paradoxo dos substitutos

Abordaremos o problema da temporalidade na História da sexualidade de Foucault a partir da teoria do traço mnésico, proposta por Freud no artigo Nota sobre o bloco mágico. Tal leitura nos permitirá interrogar a transmissão da história a partir da dimensão espectral da escrita foucaultiana.

We will approach the problem of temporality in the Foucault's History of sexuality from the theory of the mnesic trace, proposed by Freud in the article Note on the mystic writing pad. Such reading will allow us to question the transmission of the history from the spectral dimension of the foucauldian writing.

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: First Theorist of Erotic Age Orientation.

The nomination of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895) as the first theorist of homosexuality may be placed in the oblique light of his eligibility for the nomination as the first theorist of erotic age orientation. In Ulrichs's pamphlets, "man-manly" homosexuality emerged as a particular age orientation, with a subsequent typological breakdown that, importantly, blended gender orientation and age orientation. Into the early 20th century, erotic age orientation remained bound up with the classification and emancipation of what here was demarcated as Urningsliebe. Ulrichs's pioneering and shifting comments on age eventually fed into his legal model of consenting adults in private. They also provide a starting point for the historical understanding of the trope of "grooming pedophile" as it, arguably, crossfaded with that of the "seducing homosexual" after the latter's depsychiatricization across the Western world.

Nurses and subordination: a historical study of mental nurses' perceptions on administering aversion therapy for 'sexual deviations'.

This study aimed to examine the meanings that nurses attached to the 'treatments' administered to cure 'sexual deviation' (SD) in the UK, 1935-1974. In the UK, homosexuality was considered a classifiable mental illness that could be 'cured' until 1992. Nurses were involved in administering painful and distressing treatments. The study is based on oral history interviews with fifteen nurses who had administered treatments to cure individuals of their SD. The interviews were transcribed for historical interpretation. Some nurses believed that their role was to passively follow any orders they had been given. Other nurses limited their culpability concerning administering these treatments by adopting dehumanising and objectifying language and by focussing on administrative tasks, rather than the human beings in need of their care. Meanwhile, some nurses genuinely believed that they were acting beneficently by administering these distinctly unpleasant treatments. It is envisaged that this study might act to reiterate the need for nurses to ensure their interventions have a sound evidence base and that they constantly reflect on the moral and value base of their practice and the influence that science and societal norms can have on changing views of what is considered 'acceptable practice'.