After a long engagement, Burton married Isabel Arundel in 1861. Marrying a Roman Catholic afforded Burton yet another opportunity to affront English sensibilities, as did his publication of exotic sexual manuals and how-to books. Burton's marriage seems to have been happy, and his wife seems to have supported his scholarly works, including the famous translations.

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Throughout his career, Burton collected literature in its original language and translated it into English. It is through his efforts that The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (1883), Ananga Ranga or the Hindu Art of Love (1885), The Perfumed Garden of Cheikh Nefzaoui: A Manual of Arabian Erotology (1886), and The Arabian Nights (1885-1888) made their way to Victorian readers. In addition, he translated salacious Roman classics, such as The Carmina of Gaius Valerius Catullus (1894-posthumous), and Priapeia, or the Sportive Epigrams of Divers Poets on Priapus (1890). By publishing such scurrilous works, he flirted with violation of the Obscenity Acts.

In the "Terminal Essay" of The Arabian Nights, published in 1885, Burton announced his theory of a "Sotadic Zone" where homosexuality allegedly flourished. Burton averred that homosexuality was "geographical and climatic, not racial." The Sotadic Zone encompassed most of the Mediterranean countries, the Middle East, China, Japan, and the islands of the South Seas. This theory was not widely adopted, but it may have confirmed the opinion of many British readers that homosexuality was essentially a foreign vice.

Burton died October 20, 1890 in Trieste. His wife ordered a marble monument for him shaped like a tent, where he lived so much of his life.

From its beginning, the nineteenth century in England had a purposeful homosexual literature of considerable bulk, both male and female, though it was fettered by oppression.

Beginning in the 1960s increasing numbers of ethnographers have conducted research on glbtq issues, spurred by the premise that studies of diverse sexualities are crucial to understanding human behavior and culture.

The earliest etiologies--or theories of causation--of homosexuality date from European antiquity, but the search for a universal etiology has intensified as homosexual behavior has come under the scrutiny of science.

The expression of male homoerotic sentiment is one of the dominant themes in classical Arabic literature from the ninth century to the nineteenth.

The gay tradition in literature from ancient times to the present is primarily a tradition not of prose but of verse.

Roman writers on homosexual or bisexual themes generally followed Greek models; but unlike the Greeks, Romans condoned sex with slaves.

Although the treatment of homosexuality is rare in South Asian literatures in the contemporary period, the South Asian diaspora has recently produced a number of both gay and lesbian writers.

The relative popularity of the term "third sex" to refer to homosexuals is closely connected to its use by some of the most prominent representatives of the early homosexual rights movement in Germany.

The Roman poet Catullus incorporated homoerotic themes in his verse, both reflecting the passionate character of same-sex friendships and describing several of his own homosexual adventures.

There has been renewed interest in the life and work of American adventurer and travel writer Richard Halliburton at least in part because of his homosexuality.

Italian rhetorician and philosopher Antonio Rocco is author of an early classic of pederastic literature, L'Alcibiade fanciullo a scola (Alcibiades the schoolboy), which was written in 1630 and published anonymously in 1652.