IN AN ESSAY titled “The Autumn in Florence,” Henry James reflected on the physical changes in the city that had been, for a brief period in the 1860’s, the capital of the newly formed Italian state.

AMONG THE GREAT "GAY" QUOTES is one attributed to the English dramatist-poet-spy, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), but it is probably apocryphal: "All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools." Yet to stress the quotation’s unreliability-it was given in testimony by a government informer-is to miss the more important queer textual evidence in Marlowe’s remarkable Edward the Second (ca.1592).

FROM 1615 TO 1625, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham was the favorite and “sweet wife” of King James I. Villiers parlayed his homosexuality-not to mention his other talents, including a standout gift for horsemanship-into vast wealth and political power.

… Male homosexuality-which traditionally in Cuba means sexually passive homosexuality-and cross-gender behavior are not only tolerated in santería but form an essential part of its mythology, philosophy, and practice. As paradoxical as it may sound, religion provides a unique space for homosexual identity and expression in a society with no official “gay scene” and with a history of machismo and state-induced homophobia. …

… Strict followers of the tenets of Michel Foucault-if fewer and less adamant of late-argue that prior to the articulation of modern notions of homosexuality (one which used contemporary terms such as “the homosexual,” for instance), neither “homosexuality” nor “the [male] homosexual” can be said to have existed. …

The comments made in 2005 by Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, about the “innate inability” of women to do math, aroused a firestorm among female scientists. As a lesbian, I feel the same way about the increasing number of publications contrasting the “homosexual” brain with the “heterosexual” brain.

“We are a Separate People, with, in several measurable respects, a rather different window on the world, a different consciousness which may be triggered into being by our lovely sexuality.”

Harry Hay, 1983

THE “NATURE-NURTURE” DEBATE has always been more about politics than about science. Notwithstanding the appealing alliteration, the two terms of this opposition go back to an ancient debate between biology and social learning. When applied to the problem of the etiology of homosexuality, the debate as it’s carried on today easily morphs into a conflict between genes and “choice,” …