ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen a burgeoning of studies on homosexuality in the social sciences, much of it inspired by the feminist and Gay Rights movements of the 1970s. The focus of this new literature, particularly in sociology and history, concerns the historical and cultural influences on homosexual behavior. Plummer suggests that "specific ways of experiencing sexual attraction and gender behavior are bound up with specific historical and cultural milieux" (1981, p. 12). In a similar vein, historians looking at eroticism suggest that it is "subject to the forces of culture" (D'Emilio, 1983, p. 3), and thus accessible to historical analysis. The anthropological data on cross-cultural sexual variation provide much of the groundwork for such analyses; yet it has been one of the
failings of anthropology that the field itself has developed no adequate theory regarding the cultural construction of homosexual behavior.
