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We do not know and we have no means of learning what forms prehistoric homosexuality took and how preliterate cultures regarded homosexuality. Sexual behavior produces no artifacts. No one doubts the existence of prehistoric heterosexuality; the present population is ample evidence that it existed. Yet, all of the present population shares the peculiar, human sexual biology that makes human homosexuality possible. Because the capacity for homosexual behavior has been preserved in humanity and is widely distributed in present populations, we may be certain that it is an adaptive trait of very ancient origin.

Human homosexuality is necessarily a part of human sexuality and must have emerged in prehistory as human sexuality replaced animal sexualness. Having said that, however, we must admit that almost anything else we say about prehistoric homosexuality is speculation. But so too are many of the dominant culture's self-flattering theories of primeval heterosexuality that are often paraded as fact. We can hope to learn the sizes of the earliest human groups, the distributions of sexes and ages in the groups, what they ate and how they got what they ate. We cannot know who loved whom or by what rules, if any, that love was expressed.

In looking at records of recent cultures we can gain some insight into the range of possible cultural accommodations with homosexuality. But since no recently existing society can properly be called more primitive than any other, cross-culture studies can yield no evidence of the distance past. Sometimes the homosexual traditions of geographically close or otherwise related cultures fall into a pattern. Much in the way that linguists can derive the properties of a prototype language by comparing related living languages, we might guess at the prototypal traditions of homosexuality from observations of living cultures. Such a process can go only so far.

Among cultures of which we have records, most are accepting or approving of homosexual relations at least for some persons in some circumstances. Of societies that do disapprove of homosexuality, many regard homosexuality as silly, childish, impractical, or simply bad policy. The Euro-American notion that homosexuality is wicked or evil is extremely rare.

As we well know, the practice of homosexuality does not depend on its being socially approved. From the very few societies that strongly condemn homosexuality we can expect little information concerning the necessarily hidden and secret homosexual practices of individuals. When the attitude towards homosexuality is even a little less negative, traditions of homosexuality do exist.

Cultures always have three parts: what the culture says people are supposed to do, what the culture believes people really do, and what people do in fact. Homosexuality is only one aspect of human life for which the stated norms, the beliefs about practices, and the actual practices may differ. Societies may have traditions of homosexuality without saying they approve of them: that is there may be customary ways in which people have homosexual relations, although they may say it is wrong to do so.

We are used to using the word "tradition" in connection with practices considered desirable. Yet traditions of which not everyone approves also exist. The Nyakyusa, for example, think that homosexual relations between adolescent males is bad, and a boy caught in a homosexual act may get a whipping from his parents. That is a tradition: the Nyakyusa traditional view of adolescent homosexuality. The Nyakyusa know perfectly well, however, that the boys engage in homosexual relations when they are away on their traditional task of herding cattle, and although they do not approve, they consider it perfectly normal and inevitable. That too is a tradition: the traditional form of male homosexuality. Nyakyusa youth do not form openly sexual relationships with much older men. Such a thing might happen, but it is nontraditional. The actual practices of the youths largely conformed to the traditional beliefs — that is, the boys really do engage in the kinds of homosexual activities that the adults think they engage in.

Individuals, of course, may invent between themselves acts and relationships that are not traditional. For example, in many societies oral sex, both heterosexual and homosexual, really is unheard of and inconceivable. Possibly some people in such societies have discovered oral sex, but idiosyncratic practices are not the stuff of culture. Occasionally, laws, where they exist, cast some light on what a culture knows. Laws are made against practices only if the practices are thought possible or probable. A society that really never heard of oral sex would not have a law against it.

Because homophobia is a large issue in the lives of American gay people, we may idealize cultures that approve or only mildly disapprove of their traditional forms of homosexuality. But no culture is perfect. Advocates of compulsory heterosexuality sometimes claim that widespread male homosexuality exists only where women are assigned inferior or secondary roles. This does not prove any connection between the status of women and the social regard of homosexuality, but only that no society exists or has existed that did not relegate women to a secondary or inferior status. Only within the last hundred years has any society made any gestures toward improving the status of women.

Some societies that have approved of male homosexuality are agricultural. Agricultural societies that approved of homosexuality — and those that did not — usually required the subjugation of agricultural workers as peons, coolies, sharecroppers, migrants, Helots, bondsmen, serfs, or slaves. Warrior societies sometimes made special accommodations to homosexuality and sometimes did not, but in either case were almost constantly involved in more or less senseless aggression against neighboring peoples. The case can just as easily be made that approval of heterosexuality causes the subjugation of women, human bondage, and war.

Moreover, the traditional forms and practices of homosexuality are not likely, when the whole truth is told, to be entirely pleasing to gay people. Gay sensibilities, as we know them, are the sensibilities of a small and oppressed minority. Nothing inherent in homosexual acts creates those sensibilities. When more of a population participates in homosexual activities and traditions — and in some societies a degree of homosexual experience is all but universal — the traditions and practices will reflect more of the sensibilities of the majority and less of those who are preferentially homosexual. In other words there are no gay utopias because there are no utopias at all, and cultures in which homosexuality is widely practiced are not necessarily particularly gay.

The Azande are an example of a society in which homosexual experience was commonplace. The Azande were a martial people of Central Africa. Zandeland was a large confederation of related principalities that, by the military prowess of the Azande, dominated a large area beyond its borders. Until colonial rule, Azande were usually either going to war or at it. Azande were largely what we imagine, on less evidence, the Spartans to have been: an army of lovers.

Nearly all young men were under arms. Zande culture endorsed male homosexual relations in the form of intercourse between the thighs (which was also the approved form in Attic Greece). Azande knew that some men were preferentially homosexual, but even those who were not thought homosexuality was a sensible alternative when heterosexual relations were taboo or impractical, as they often were. Perhaps to reduce intrabarracks rivalries, male-male marriages were contracted on terms similar to those of male-female marriages. In addition, Zande men might have male and female concubines according to their tastes and stations.

Male-male marriages were regarded as entirely equivalent to male-female marriages. Male-male marriages were recognized to be temporary, but so was any barren male-female marriage. Younger men were wives and performed wifely duties, but were not considered female in any way. When male wives grew older their marriages would be dissolved and they would themselves take wives. Eventually, at the end of their military service, Zande men were expected to take female wives and virtually all of them did so. If they desired homosexual relations later in life they might have them, and this would be particularly acceptable at times they were required, for ritual reasons, to abstain from heterosexual intercourse.

Zande traditions of lesbianism were less ideal. Azande believed that lesbianism was a form of witchcraft that could cause the death of any man who witnessed lesbian practices. In theory, the wife of a king could be put to death for lesbian activities — the king might see her in such activities, that might cause his death, and so her lesbianism was treason. Wives of lesser persons might receive a beating.

"Witchcraft," however, implies things to us that were not in the Zande traditions. Although everything that went wrong from a stubbed toe to a broken pot to death was, in the Zande view, witchcraft, witchcraft was not a pact with the devil. It was bad, but not evil. Men might practice witchcraft as well as women, and in fact, although one knew oneself to be innocent of witchcraft, one suspected that virtual everyone else did at least a little witching from time to time.

However much Azande said they disapproved of lesbianism, they believed it was very common. A stock comic figure in Zande folklore is the cuckolded husband whose rival was not another man, but his wife's lesbian lover. The women, of course, always easily fooled the husband who was often depicted as trying to detect a male rival while the women made love almost under his nose.

There is no mistaking Zandeland for a gay paradise. In fact, we know very little about Azande who were preferentially homosexual. Such is the situation throughout the anthropological record; where homosexual activity is widespread, we learn little about the preferentially homosexual minority.

The homosexual traditions of the Azande fall into one of two broad patterns of male homosexuality I have called serial bisexuality and role inversion. Both terms are inexact. In the pattern of serial bisexuality, most males are expected to have both homosexual and heterosexual activities, but at different times in their lives. What is wrong with the term "serial bisexuality," is that usually there is no bisexuality, but individuals are homosexual at one time and heterosexual at another. In the pattern of role inversion, some males, usually very few, adopt nonmasculine roles. What is wrong with the term "role inversion," is that the nonmasculine roles are not always the masculine roles turned on their heads and are not always perfectly equivalent to the female role. The nonmasculine role of men is often called, especially in American contexts, berdache (although in many respects this term is unfortunate).

In each of these patterns great variations exist. Although some cultures are more typical of the pattern than others, hardly any culture exhibits every aspect of the pattern, and some cultures are so far removed from the main lines of the pattern that it may be argued that they do not exhibit the pattern at all.

The pattern (or paradigm) of serial bisexuality has the following aspects:

Free sex play among very young children. There may be more or less sex in this sex play, which might be better described as role-playing that sometimes is sexual.

Children play house. In a number of cultures the game of house may include imitative or play sex in which children adopt the posture and motions of sex and sometimes actual penetration may occur. The roles in the game of house may be accidentally or arbitrarily assigned. A girl may play daddy or a boy may play mommy depending upon who is available in a particular play group to fill the roles. No significance is attached to how the roles are filled in the game.

No effort is made to segregate young children by sex, and the children may sleep together. When children sleep together, sex play may continue in the sleeping quarters and may be indistinguishable from adult sex except for the ages of the children. Children may form attachments that we might call puppy love. These attachments usually are heterosexual, but may not be.

The principal variations here are:

The sexual aspects of the role playing may be strongly disapproved of by adults and suppressed so far as possible. An example of this might be the upper-class British who will tolerate playing house, but who attempt to suppress playing doctor.

Relatively rigid segregation of the sexes is imposed at or a little before the age of puberty. Sometimes boys move to separate bachelor quarters. Boys may be required to avoid girls or even most contacts with females of any age, or they may simply be constantly occupied with all-male activities.

The variations here are only in the degree to which the segregation is enforced. Sometimes sexual segregation begins at an early age, as in orthodox Muslim societies, or there may not be any formal segregation at all. Virtually all cultures have expected boys and girls to pursue different interests that result in a degree of separation. Sometimes the segregation is supposed to be constant, universal, and physical. In other cases the segregation is merely a matter of social avoidance.

During sexual segregation, the boys are expected to engage in homosexual activities. Society may view these relations as desirable or undesirable, but consider them inevitable in either case and would consider any boy who did not have homosexual connections as peculiar at the least.

Part or all of the period of sexual segregation may be devoted to some form of social service, often military service.

During the homosexual period the younger boys may more or less uniformly be cast in the receptive role in sexual activity. When roles are fixed, boys in the receptive role may act in nonmasculine ways outside sexual relations. For example boys who are sexually receptive may cook when otherwise males are not allowed to cook or may adopt feminine styles of dress. In serial bisexuality, however, the nonmasculine aspects of the boys' roles are understood to be temporary. Boys are not identified as being like women and are not stigmatized as peculiar or abnormal. Boys assume the insertive sexual role and drop the nonmasculine aspects of their behavior when they are older.

The principal variations are:

The boys act in the receptive role with very much older men, as was the ideal in Attic Greece. Rarely the youths act in the insertive role with older males, as in American hustling and the Nkundo of central Zaire in the past. In a few cases, like the Nyakyusa, sexual roles are interchanged freely between boys of the same age.

In some cases the homosexual activities have only a sexual aspect and affection or romance between the partners is strongly discouraged. This is the rule in American hustling, the mutual masturbation of the Ik youth, and the ritual fellatio of the Sambia that is supposed to be performed on strangers from another village.

In other cultures the homosexual activities are only one aspect of the relationship. Zande male-male marriage represents a genuine affection between the partners. The lover of the Attic Greek youth was supposed to be a patron and mentor. While those relationships were supposed to terminate eventually, in some other societies homosexual activities were supposed to be only a part of a lifelong friendship and mutual-aid pact.

The homosexual period persists until boys reach the age of heterosexual marriage. Often heterosexual marriage is expected to occur when the young men are 20, 25, 30, or even older; that is, the homosexual period often extends well beyond adolescence and encompasses many of the males' most sexuality active years. Some of the societies with serial-bisexual kinds of homosexual traditions are polygamous and if the age of heterosexual marriage is very advanced men often marry women a generation younger than themselves.

Usually males are expected to cease all homosexual connections at the age of heterosexual marriage and virtually all men are heterosexually married. In many cases, people know that a few men do prefer homosexuality and will persist in homosexual activities beyond the prescribed period. Usually this is socially condemned, but some societies offer some kind of cover or socially acceptable excuse for homosexual activities involving a married male.

Especially in some Arab cultures, the homosexual period never really ends. Men of the Siwah oasis are expected to be bisexually active throughout life. Several cases have been mentioned in which the lovers of the youth were presumed to be heterosexually married men.

Covers for continued homosexual relations may be mutual-aid pacts as between Dahomean best friends, the soregus (water-sharing pact) of the Nama, the pacts between (Wa)Tutsi patrons and (Ba)Hutu clients in precolonial Ruanda, and the old school tie of the old boys of British public schools. Excuses may include the necessity of avoiding heterosexual relations for ritual reasons, as with the Azande, or the performance of homosexual acts for magical reasons — the wealth medicine of the Fang, for example.

Men in societies with traditions of serial bisexuality who desired to do so may remain exclusively homosexual their whole lives without drawing undue attention to themselves. Although virtually all men are married heterosexually, the traditional roles of father and husband do not often include the expectation that the husband will be the lover of the wife. Traditional society often provides alternatives that provide children for impotent or sterile men and wives of men who will not sleep with them would certain avail themselves of these alternatives. In female-female marriages, the woman in the role of wife is supposed to produce children. No one is surprised when this happens, and in every social and legal way the woman in the role of husband is regarded as the father of such children.

There is no permanent social effect of the sexual roles males assumed in the homosexual period, although homosexual relationships formed in youth may continue as friendships once the sexual component of the relationship is supposed to have ended.

This is the most definitive aspect of the pattern of serial bisexuality. Almost all males are expected to perform sexually in the receptive role at one time or another in their lives. This is perceived as normal and does not compromise the receptive partner's identity as a male. Among the exceptions are British public school boys and American hustlers.

Those in the sexually receptive role may temporarily do things that are more usually identified with the female sex. A Zande male wife may cook for his husband when otherwise a Zande male may not cook even for himself. But no one thinks the male wife is feminized by performing wifely duties. In some sexually segregated situations there may be some transvestism, but this does not seem to be taken seriously.

Because much is made of them, the Greeks should be discussed briefly. The famous homosexuality of the Greeks is actually the ideal of the upper class of Athens. Not many details are known about homosexuality in the rest of Greece, and evidently homosexuality between males below the rank of citizen was fairly much a matter of anything goes. The Greeks were as cosmopolitan as anyone in their day, and probably any kind of homosexual connection that is physically possible could be found in Athens by someone willing to look for it. In the approved form, the youth were always supposed to take the receptive role in intercourse between the thighs. The insertive partners were heterosexually married men. The youth were not supposed to derive sexual pleasure from the homosexual connection — although it strains credulity to suppose this part of the ideal was universally achieved. At any rate, the older partner was supposed to have an interest in the welfare of the youth and to patronize him in many ways. Plato's Phaedrus gives a good account of idealized and sexless patronage, but in other places Socrates is supposed to have had a somewhat less ideal relationship in mind with particularly attractive youths. From legal records we can deduce that a citizen might accept the receptive role in anal sex but ought not to accept money for doing so.

The pattern of role inversion is often called berdache in anthropological writing. Despite nearly three centuries of observations of this pattern of male homosexuality, it remains easier "to know one when I see one," than to say precisely what a berdache is. Walter Williams, a principal authority on the subject, has defined "berdache" as "a man in a nonmasculine role." The term is best applied only to phenomena in North American cultures, but has been used loosely to refer to more or less similar roles in other parts of the world.

Persons identified as berdaches usually are homosexual, but sometimes are not exclusively homosexual and rarely are not homosexual at all. Moreover, berdaches are seldom the only men in a society who are homosexually active, but being obvious, berdaches usually receive attention out of proportion to their numbers. Euro-American culture has many terms, some formal and some informal, for men who are considered nonmasculine in some respect: transvestite, transsexual, homosexual, queen, faggot, impotent, nerd, geek, weakling, coward, effeminate, artistic, and intellectual. Not all of the people described by these terms are homosexually active. For example, many if not most transvestites in Euro-American culture are heterosexual, but this distinction is often lost on Euro-American observers. Other cultures are not always much better at drawing distinctions. For example among the Korong and Mesakin peoples of the Nuba mountains the word for homosexual is same as the word for coward or weakling. Evidently the concepts are the same for a coward may be forced either to become a homosexual or to have no sexual outlet or social identity at all.

That being said, by far most berdaches are, in fact, receptively homosexual or predominantly so. The berdaches' sexual partners are men in the male role. In the gay subculture, if two queens leave a bar together someone may ask, "What are you two going to do? Bump pussies?" So too do berdaches and their cultures regard sex between two berdaches as ludicrous beyond words, if not actually taboo.

From our point of view, the masculine man insofar as he has sex with a berdache is also homosexual. In many traditions, however, the concept of homosexual as opposed to heterosexual is not meaningful. In these traditions the key distinction is that of the masculine role, which in sex is insertive, and the nonmasculine role which is receptive. When a masculine man has sex with a berdache everyone assumes, not always correctly, that the masculine man assumes the insertive role. He is regarded as behaving perfectly normally and the physical gender of his partner is immaterial.

Unfortunately, observers often fail to be perfectly objective in such situations. A common sort of report is that there is only one homosexual in the village. Too often no one asks with whom the berdache is homosexual.

Berdaches usually wear distinctive clothing, ornaments, and hairstyles. In some cultures berdache styles may be identical to the styles of women, or particularly in North America, berdaches may adopt idiosyncratic mixes of masculine and feminine styles (known in the American gay subculture as "gender-fuck drag"). Transvestism is usually fairly obvious, and anthropologists can be counted on to notice it even when more subtle aspects of homosexual traditions escape their attention.

In North America berdaches usually are best described as being a third gender. Whether this third gender is intermediate between male and female or is something of another dimension is open to discussion. Elsewhere berdaches are better describe as true role inverts or as social transsexuals. In cultures of this latter type the role inverts are supposed to be accepted as female; individuals may deny having male organs and may simulate menstruation.

In North America berdache is often regarded as a spiritual calling. It is usually recognized that no human agency can change a berdache. A berdache is usually identified as such early in life. A berdache is usually a berdache throughout life, but the berdache may choose to live as a male for a time and often exercises considerable latitude in the degree to which he expresses his berdache nature. Berdaches often have special roles in ritual that illustrate the berdaches' position as neither male nor female and both male and female. Berdaches often are regarded as having special spiritual powers and as being especially well-suited to act as medicine men or witch doctors. Berdaches often are regarded as auspicious and are usually — although not invariably — especially valued by the cultures in which they occur.

Elsewhere role inverts are not considered to have any particular powers beyond those of women. They participate in rituals as women. Sometimes role inverts are impotent men who decide it is better to be successful women than failed men. But often role inversion occurs early in live and is considered permanent. While bisexuality may escape notice in cultures that do not have a tradition of bisexuality, role inversion is usually obvious, and so there are a few reports of role inversion that seems to have occurred spontaneously in a culture that has no tradition of role inversion.

Very often in societies that provide for berdache or role inversion, homosexual relations between men in the male role are strongly taboo. In any sexual relation between men in the male role, or so it is thought, one of the partners would have to assume the sexual receptive role, and this is unacceptable. Mexican culture provides a good example of this. The role inverts are called "maricons," and are regards as more or less harmless clowns; a near translation would be "sissy." Maricons are supposed to be giggly, flighty, and silly, although capable of a catlike viciousness when crossed. Mexicans often find the gay liberation movement of the United States incomprehensible because the stereotypical maricon is utterly incapable of undertaking anything so serious as a campaign for social or political change. For a man in the male role to perform insertively in sex with a maricon may not be entirely desirable, but it is considered entirely understandable and entirely within the masculine role, especially if a female sex partner were not available or if the maricon was cute. Yet for a man in the masculine role ever to accept the receptive role in sex is an utter disgrace, or worse, and if one such occurrence is known the individual may thereafter be himself regarded as a maricon. Men in the male role are expected to fight to the death to prevent themselves being penetrated. Considerable trouble occurs when male prostitutes who expect to act in the masculine role believe that the client has attempted to compromise that role in any way. Likewise, among the Lango and neighboring peoples of Uganda a homosexual attempt by a man in the masculine role upon another man in the masculine role was a capital offense, but a man in the male role might have sex with a role invert — they might even be married — without offending the native norms (of course such things did very much offend European missionaries and colonial administrators).

The Azande, who observe a tradition best described as serial bisexuality, offer the only example I have uncovered of male-male marriage in which both parties remain undoubtedly male. But marriage between men in the male role and berdaches (or role inverts) are exceedingly common. A rough estimation of how marriage roles may be filled by the various genders is given in an accompanying table. In the table berdaches, men in a third gender role, have been distinguished from role inverts, men in the female role.

"Amazon" has been called "cross-gender female" by Evelyn Blackwood and "female berdache" by others. Clearly a man who has become like a woman is not in the same gender as a woman who has become like a man. If berdache is a third gender, amazon is a fourth, yet that the two are symmetrical is not perfectly clear. Rarely do amazon and berdache occur in fully developed forms in the same culture, but the berdache and amazon roles that appear most symmetrical are usually found in cultures that are far apart. The existence of female inverts, that is, females accepted in the male role is not well documented, and in general, data on Amazons are poor.

Occurrence of Marriage Types

Husband	Wife	Occurrence
Male	Female	Very common
Male	Male	Very rare
Male	Berdache	Common
Male	Male invert	Common
Male	Amazon	Rare
Berdache	Female	Rare
Berdache	Male	Unknown
Berdache	Berdache	Unknown
Berdache	Male invert	Unknown*
Berdache	Amazon	Unknown
Male invert	Female	Very rare
Male invert	Male	Unknown
Male invert	Berdache	Unknown
Male invert	Male Invert	Unknown
Male invert	Amazon	Unknown
Female	Female	Common
Female	Male	Unknown
Female	Berdache	Unknown
Female	Male invert	Unknown
Female	Amazon	Unknown*
Amazon	Female	Rare
Amazon	Male	Unknown
Amazon	Berdache	Unknown*
Amazon	Male invert	Unknown*
Amazon	Amazon	Unknown
*perhaps theoretically possible

In the table, marriage types for which the occurrence is unknown are for the most part theoretically impossible. Evidently, males cannot be wives unless the husband is male — and then there is only one known example. Females cannot be husbands unless the wife is female, but there are many cultures in which this form of marriage is recognized. Male inverts, for marriage purposes, are equivalent to females. As a rule, the permissibility of a marriage type in a culture is a good indicator of the permissibility of extramarital sexual relations of the same type, with the role of husband being that of the insertive or dominant partner, except that male-male sex is considerably more common than male-male marriage.

Apparently a berdache may be a husband without abandoning the berdache status. It is not altogether clear that an amazon can ever be a wife while maintaining the status of amazon.

Except for the Mohave, Zapotec, and cosmopolitan cultures which draw upon many diverse traditions, serial bisexuality and the various degrees of role inversion are seldom found in the same culture. Considerable speculation has been devoted to whether the traditions of male homosexuality in a culture have any relation to the status of women in the culture, but only one study that I know of (Monroe et alia) has attempted to resolve this issue upon the data. Monroe compared the social distance between the male and female roles to the prevalence of institutionalized male transvestism in cultures. He expected to find more transvestism where the social difference between the sexes was great, but found the contrary to be the case. Evidently where the social difference between the sexes is too great, males find that becoming female is too costly. Men find feminization practical only where the status of women is relatively high. Much more study of this question is necessary, but it seems likely that cultures permit women to masculinize their roles only where women are regarded as nearly as good as men anyway.

No traditional culture has afforded women an equal status with men. But some traditional cultures do seem to be more misogynistic than others. A cursory glance would suggest that cultures with serial bisexuality do tend to be more misogynistic than those with berdache or role-inversion traditions. A more misogynistic culture would tend to sharp role divisions such as defined by Monroe: women do not eat with men, women may not touch men's tools or weapons or clothing et cetera, women must avoid many contacts with men and may even have their own patois, men may not cook, kinship figured only through one lineage, and so forth. Additional criteria might include more obviously misogynistic traditions: belief in the ritual uncleanness of women including strong menstrual taboos but sometimes also including taboos on all female fluids including mother's milk; extreme male jealousy based on beliefs that women are especially licentious, deceptive, and sexually wanton; and beliefs that women engage in particularly egregious forms of witchcraft, and so forth. Yet, too much might be made of any such correlation if it were shown to exist.

While biology suggests human sexuality ought to be infinitely variable, human culture as Williams has observed does not exhibit an infinite variety of forms for accommodating human sexual variation. Certainly most individuals, it would seem, have a wider possible range of sexual responses than they always exhibit. Cultures of the serial bisexual type illustrate that more men are capable of homosexual response than data from Euro-American cultures would suggest. In such societies, we might say, people's sexualities are shifted toward their homosexual limits, just as in ours it appears sexualities are shifted toward the heterosexual side. Nonetheless, there are tiny minorities, both homosexual and heterosexual, whose sexual orientations are fixed and who do not accommodate themselves to social norms that differ from their own orientations.

Although threads of both patterns of male homosexual traditions are found in urban gay subcultures no good reason exists to suppose that either pattern should serve as model for social development. The patterns are old, but this does not necessary imply they are venerable. The patterns are, or recently have been, very common throughout the world, but this does not show that they are inevitable. One seems to offer encouragement to those who prefer role-defined relationships, the other seems to promise something to those who prefer their relationships role-free.

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