ABSTRACT
Lay people and scientists alike subscribed to a model of human sexuality stipulating that human sexuality normally has little diversity in it. Among progressive people around the world, homosexuality can be considered an ordinary, non-pathological type of sexuality; in the movement’s political terms it is “different but equal”. The political situation has changed so dramatically that a 2006 petition entitled “For the Universal Decriminalization of Homosexuality” was launched in the hope of getting the United Nations to favour abrogating the anti-gay laws of the seventy-five countries in the world where homosexuality is a crime. At the turn of the twenty-first century, sexual minorities were politically grouped as not just LGB but LBGT, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. Historical and historiographical study has freed contemporary scientists to look at human sexuality and the stories that have been told about it with much greater objectivity, and it has also provided the foundations for study of prejudice itself.
