ABSTRACT
The past two decades' most influential work on the history of sexuality has argued not simply that historical difference must be better appreciated, but that resemblance or similarity is merely superficial, while difference is real, fundamental, essential. In his important book Walter L. Williams convincingly demonstrates very real, often startling differences between dominant ideologies of sex, gender, and sexuality in ancient Rome and the modern West. Like other differentist historians of premodern sexuality, Williams tends to write as if modern homophobia were directed solely or primarily against same-sex object choice, in contradistinction to gender deviance. The centerpiece as well as longest section of "Iphis and Ianthe" is Iphis's lament, the three interconnected themes of which are her desires' utter uniqueness, their unnaturalness, and the impossibility of fulfilling them. According to Iphis, however, lesbian desire isn't only new, it's also unprecedentedly strange and unnatural- even bestiality seems normal in comparison.
