The History of Sex

What if Queen Elizabeth had been a man? We dive into this bizarre idea in today’s showcase episode, courtesy of Sebastian Major of Our Fake History. Our Fake History is a podcast that explores myths people think are history and history that might be ...

My city is on fire today. This is day four of the riots in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police. And everyone around me is saying, “I’m angry too, but why destroy your own community? It doesn’t make sense.” But is there anoth...

Why didn't the Nazis make an exception for bisexuals? They could have helped raise the birth rate as much as anyone else, yet they were persecuted alongside homosexuals without distinction. Was this an early form of bisexual erasure? And what is bise...

Pages upon pages of photos of Nazi soldiers... in drag - that's what's in Martin Dammann's book Soldier Studies: Cross-dressing in der Wermacht. Were the Nazis more diverse than we ever thought? Or is there something more insidious lurking here? Toda...

Of course lesbian sex is "real" sex! Why wouldn't it be? Yet the rabidly homophobic Nazis declined to prosecute lesbian sodomy charges, apparently on the grounds that it wasn't. Moreover, most of Western history agreed: without penetration, lesbian s...

Were there really gays in the Nazi party, even though they sent thousands of homosexuals to concentration camps or worse? Yes. In fact, Ernst Röhm, the second most powerful man in the party in the early years, was gay - and a close friend of Hitler's...

What if you got the birds and the bees talk from Aztec parents? How different would it be? Answer: quite different indeed. Among the other things needed to make a baby besides "loving each other very much", are ritual, sacrifice, and sweeping. How do...

What can we really learn about a culture from its artistic depictions of sex? To look at the pottery of the Moche from the north coast of Peru, you would think that these people must have been obsessed with blowjobs. And backdoor stuff. And, well, a ...

Hey, did you catch the ultimate fighting match last week, you know the one where they gouged each other’s eyes out? Um, no, you probably didn’t, because that doesn’t happen today. But it did happen in the 19th century. What did it mean to be a man in...

In 1629, in colonial Virginia, there came before the courts one Thomas Hall. Or was it Thomasine Hall? That was the question. This was the first recorded intersex person in America - that is, apart from Native American traditions, of course (which we...