Through the energetic work of the reformer John Calvin, the small city-state of Geneva became the so-called Protestant Rome in the sixteenth century. Calvin created a morals court, the Consistory, which worked in conjunction with the city council to attack a wide range of ‘sins’, including illicit sexuality, defined as all sexual activity outside of marriage. In Calvin’s time, authorities pursued male and female fornicators (including fiancés) with the same rigour and on rare occasions sentenced adulterers to death. After Calvin’s death a double standard appeared in the treatment of adultery, most blatant in the fact that sexual relations between female servants and their married masters resulted in more severe penalties for the former than the latter. Same-sex relations were considered crimes against nature, but authorities adjudged those involving men much more severely than those involving women, probably based on a belief that sexual relations between male partners degraded them to the level of women. Although a few men were prosecuted for rape, religious and political authorities largely enhanced patriarchy; given the persistent numbers of people who were summoned, they clearly were also less successful in nurturing self-control among Genevans in their sex lives than in other areas of behaviour.

Sydney was the original site of British settlement in Australia and its largest city in the twentieth century. With a reputation for hedonism, Sydney’s identity became entangled, to a marked extent, in its sexual cultures. The preoccupation with whiteness ensured that attitudes to birth control were closely related to settler racial aspirations. State regulation of sex work and female sexuality was also connected to concerns about preserving racial vigour, but it helped to secure a powerful role for organized crime and police corruption in the city’s sex industry. Key Sydney sex radicals and reformers took their place in British imperial and, to an increasing extent, global networks. Gay (or ‘camp’) male subcultures emerged in the middle decades of the century and, after a period of greater freedom during the Second World War, attracted repression in the 1950s. Lesbian subcultures emerged more slowly, but were discernible by the 1960s. At the same time as the contraceptive pill was transforming heterosexual relations, Sydney emerged as Australia’s major centre of gay life as well as a place of notable ethnic diversity and sexual variety. By the end of the century the city’s identity was bound more tightly than ever to its sexual cultures.

This chapter discusses the teachings of the rabbinic sages in Late Antiquity who worked in fundamental ways with the biblical traditions transmitted to and by them. The Hebrew Bible, whose precise shape was still under discussion in the first century CE, provided the rabbinic sages with ancient normative and legal traditions that they reinterpreted and expanded. The large archive of rabbinic traditions provides us with a tremendous wealth of representations of sexual practices, desires, and discourses, often in tension with each other, that reverberate throughout Jewish history. It further provides a framework and language for contemporary Jewish discourses of sexuality, including newly emerging identities, individual and communal, specifically for Jewish LGBTQ+ people. Three topics out of many possible have been selected for this chapter: obligations of marriage, reproduction, and same-sex and queer sexualities. They represent three topics of perennial debate in Jewish traditions around the world. For each, rabbinic texts and especially the Talmud have played a pre-eminent role in shaping the debates over the centuries.

Same-sex attraction can impair the reproductive success of women, as it motivates them to direct their mating effort toward same-sex outlets from which offspring cannot be produced. This reproductive cost could translate into strong negative selection pressures, reducing this trait to a very low frequency in the population. Apparently, this did not happen, as more than one in ten women experience same-sex attractions. The current chapter discusses various theories that aim to solve the evolutionary paradox of the high prevalence of female same-sex attraction in the population, focusing on the weak negative selection pressures hypothesis and the male choice hypothesis. In the weak selection pressures hypothesis, factors present in ancestral human societies, such as arranged marriage and conformity to heterosexual marriage, have weakened negative selection pressures on same-sex attractions, allowing them to exist in high prevalence in contemporary societies. In the male choice hypothesis, men can potentially secure substantial reproductive benefits by having as partners women who experience same-sex attractions. In effect, they have evolved to prefer such attraction in women, with this male preference expected to translate into positive selection driving female same-sex attraction to higher prevalence in the population. Controversies arising from the male choice hypothesis are also discussed.

Chapter 3 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho considers Sappho’s position in, and contribution to, ancient discourses on sexuality, as well as how modern theorists of sexuality have categorised Sappho.

Chapter 28 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the Anglophone receptions of Sappho’s poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, examining figures such as Harriette Andreadis, Margaret Goldsmith, Lawrence Durrell, Peter Green, Denys Page, Erica Jong, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley/Edith Cooper), Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, H.D., Mary Barnard,Jeannette Winterson, Judy Grahn, Anne Carson, Josephine Balmer, and Diane Rayor.

Chapter 2 explores the genealogy and meanings of supi, a polyvalent term for an intimate girlfriend in coastal Ghana. It distinguishes between supi as an intimate same-sex discourse emerging from the bonds between schoolgirls and adult same-sex lovers, and public representations of supi, including derogatory cinematic portrayals of “supi-supi lesbians” bonded to the water spirit Mami Wata. Focusing on the recollections of women of different generations, the chapter examines the notions of gift exchange and the homosocial spaces by which supi practices are informed. In these narratives supi is framed as an introduction to the ways in which same-sex passion can be known, negotiated, and celebrated in disguise. Invoked as a form of knowledge, supi amounts to an intimate sozializing and learning process. Despite the tacit character of the knowledge at stake, it is constitutive of the bonding networks of those articulate same-sex desiring women identifed as “knowing women.”

This chapter covers the recreational activities of servicewomen. The military authorities were sensitive to the off-duty pursuits of servicewomen and on occasion intervened in order to protect their ‘feminine virtue’. The chapter also deals with their romances with servicemen, incidences of sexual harassment, and lesbianism in the women’s forces. This latter issue was the subject of an ATS memorandum entitled ‘A Special Problem’.

Paris from 1900 to 1940 experienced a remarkable revival of artistic culture, including surrealism in poetry and painting, poetic realism in cinema, and much more. Parallel with these developments are the lesser-known but equally remarkable activities of the ‘women of the left bank’ who gave expression to same-sex concerns in both their poetry and their lives and so form the socio-cultural tradition known as ‘Paris-Lesbos’. The tradition is one legacy of fin-de-siècle decadence whose principal practitioners are Renée Vivien (pseudonym of Pauline Tarn), translator of Sappho and decadent poet, and Natalie Barney, the multi-millionaire heiress and unashamedly self-proclaimed lesbian whose literary connections and love affairs placed her at the centre of the legend of ‘Paris-Lesbos’. Their work involves a complex intersection of decadence, ‘sapphism’, and ‘sapphic fiction’ and includes the feminist and lesbian reappropriation of Sapphic decadence at the turn of the century and a later revival of the decadent mystique of the lesbian as a ‘femmes damnée’ in the 1920s and 1930s.

Notions of decadence, decline, and decay are intrinsically linked to the history of art. The discipline’s three recognized forefathers ? Giorgio Vasari, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Heinrich Wölfflin ? all relied on the concept of decadence (and its antonym, progress) to make sense of the history of the visual arts and to evaluate the art of their times. A developmental model of art was central to the interpretative schemes of these art historians. In this organicist model, earlier developments prepare the stage for what comes later; and after a particular style flourishes for a time, its decline is inevitable as newer styles overtake it. Decadent artists such as Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley mock aesthetic standards and moral rules, precluding universal appreciation, and proudly so. Decadent artists and decadent audiences are estranged from their society and feel disdain for those who are scandalized by decadent art’s innovative form and immoral subject matter.

From its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, decadence has been, fundamentally, a socio-cultural response to urban modernity. Indeed, decadence is all but unthinkable outside the borders of the modern metropolis. Hence this chapter treats literature less as a literary critic would and more as an urbanist thinker might. An urbanist reading of a decadent text must perforce pay attention not only to urban geography, including the plan of the city in which the work is set, its dominant architectural styles, socio-economic differences in neighborhoods, and so on, but also to the cultural, social, and psychological meanings that the urban setting produces in a particular decadent text. In this essay, the urbanist approach is brought to bear on three novels whose urban geography is especially significant to their respective narratives: Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere [Pleasure] (1889), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] (1912). These three works illustrate, respectively, the special relationship of the urban scene to cultural, social, and psychological issues germane to the decadent narrative of each novel.

Decadents were the heirs of the Enlightenment libertines who took the liberty of exploring ethics in a world in which morality was no longer handed down by God. In such a secular environment, sexual freedom was an offshoot of political and moral philosophy; free love and free thinking went together. The Marquis de Sade embodied the libertine for the eighteenth century, but the fin de siècle expanded the repertoire to admit not just sadism, but also masochism, bestiality, homosexuality and lesbianism, heterosexuality (the word was first coined to name a perversion), voyeurism, fetishism, and all manner of paraphilias (frottage, paedophilia, priapism, transvestism, and vampirism, to name but a few). These topics were mostly explored through imaginative writing (novels, plays, poetry) rather than in lived experience ? what philosophers might call ‘thought experiments’ ? but such bold discussion of taboo subjects came to characterize decadent literature in works by Swinburne, Huysmans, Rachilde, Wilde, and others.