• FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions on LGBT History or Culture
• FAQ: Gay and Lesbian General Interest Questions
• FAQ: Gay and Lesbian Hostile Questions

• Main Page
• Introduction: History and Theory
• Section I: The Ancient Mediterranean
• Section II: Medieval Worlds [The West, Byzantium, Islam]
• Section III: Europe to World War I
• Section IV: Europe Since World War I
• Section V: North America
• Section VI: Africa, Asia, Latin America, Oceania
• Section VII: Special Themes
• Section VIII: Bibliographies
• Section IX: LGBT History Links
• Section XI: Picture Gallery
  

FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions

Please do not write to me before you have looked through here. If the answer to any question is on this site, I shall not respond.

Gay and Lesbian General Interest Questions

• Words for Lesbians and Gays in Many Languages [At Wikipedia]
• The Origins of "Faggot"
• Faggots Recipe In the UK faggots are a kind of meatball. Here's a Welsh faggot recipe.
• Origin of Lambda Sign [At CRW Flags]
• Origin of the Rainbow Flag [At CMU]
• History of Some Common LGBT Pride Symbols [At Lambda.org]
• Over the Rainbow Lyrics [At Reel Classics]
• Somewhere Lyrics, [At Reel Classics]
• Average Penis Size [At uni-klu.ac.at]

Gay and Lesbian Hostile Questions

• Gerbils [At QRD]
  Gay men do not put gerbils in condoms into their rectums. People of all sexual orientations do, in fact, put an amazing variety of objects inside themselves, but the Gerbil myth has been especially common. There is no basis in fact for the story.
• Pedophilia
  There is no topic more controversial than the issue of inter-generational sex. There are many web pages on the net which promote "boy love". I will not link to them. GLAAD and the ILGA [International Lesbian and Gay Association], about as mainstream LGBT organizations as one can find, take a specific stance Against Pedophilia and NAMBLA [Jan 16, 1994, At GLAAD]. Other non-pedophile gays have argued that the issues at least deserved to be raised - for instance the Ad Hoc Spirit of Stonewall group at Stonewall 25. Judged by the boos the pedophile groups meet at LGBT Pride Parades, they have little support in the LGBT community.
  There is nothing specifically homosexual about pedophilia - some pedophiles are attracted to children of the same sex, others to children of the opposite sex, and some to children in general. There is little doubt, furthermore, that the vast majority of cases of childsex involves men, usually fathers or stepfathers, with girls.
  One final point: although historic formulations of homosexual eros often are called "pederasty", as in Greece and Rome, these formulations were NOT about adult-child sex. The proposed younger partners were what we would now call "older teenagers", i.e. young sexually mature adults, not "boys". The advent of industrial society has created a situation in which people reach sexual maturity before they reach social maturity, but this was not the case in the periods when age-dissonant homosexuality was the norm.

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© 1997, Paul Halsall, halsall@murray.fordham.edu [a picture!]
Note: I read all mail, and keep much of it, but I will not be able to reply to all notes.

Last updated April 12, 2007