The five are: solitary masturbation; bestiality, which violates the human species; same-sex copulation, male-male and female-female; cross-sex anal intercourse; and intercourse with the woman on top, because this hinders conception.

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He also is a sodomite who pollutes himself between the thighs or buttocks of a male or a woman; who inserts his member into a woman's natural vessel, but ejaculates outside in order to avoid conception; who inserts his member in the woman's anus for the more intense pleasure of this act but then withdraws and ejaculates in the proper vessel; or he who puts his member into the mouth of a boy or a woman, "a practice," he remarks, "very common in antiquity, as we learn from Martial, Juvenal, and Suetonius."

Although the mainstream view of sodomy remained the narrow one of the high scholastics, the elision of the categories "sodomy" and "sin against nature" spawned a multiplication of acts labeled sodomitical. Sex with animals was called sodomy by some. American legislators after 1900 included oral sex in their sodomy statutes.

Other authorities were foolishly extravagant: sodomites might include males who provoke an orgasm by looking at a picture or touching a statue, have sex with a Muslim or a Jew, an incubus or succubus, or a woman's corpse, or who spill their seed in a hole in the ground. This will help explain why Michel Foucault famously found sodomy a confused category.

Perhaps no other book has been more influential--for better or worse--in determining the construction of gay and lesbian identity in the modern world, as well as social attitudes toward homosexuality, than the Bible.

Although historical sources are comparatively scanty, they do indicate that homosexual behavior occurred throughout the period, and they give insight into its forms and the varying attitudes toward it.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Inquisitions of Aragon and Portugal prosecuted almost 1500 trials for sodomy of various kinds.

Natural law--the reading into nature laws that are not merely descriptive, but prescriptive--actually depends on circular reasoning; it discovers in nature what its adherents already believe is the intention of the Christian God.

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

Sodom is a city mentioned in the bible as having been destroyed by god in a rain of brimstone and fire for the "sin" of its inhabitants, traditionally thought to have been male homosexual intercourse.

Sodomy laws, which provided the legal basis for police harassment of sexual minorities, were conclusively overturned by the United States Supreme Court in 2003, after more than half a century of efforts at reform.

Two of the most significant Supreme Court decisions regarding constitutional liberty for glbtq people are Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) and Lawrence v. Texas (2003).

One of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, Foucault has had an enormous influence on our understanding of the lesbian and gay literary heritage and the cultural forces surrounding it.

Patristic Writers, also known as the Church Fathers, appropriated currents of hostility to homoeroticism in pagan thought and used them to strengthen the prohibitions of Leviticus and Paul, while also expressing their own hostile interpretations.