history of sex

You might not think there have been many LGBTQ rulers in world history.  But you would be wrong!  From Alexander the Great’s Macedonia to Mad Ludwig’s Bavaria and beyond, there have been rulers (and members of ruling families) with many different sexualities and gender identities throughout world history.  And a number of them, unsurprisingly, have...Read More

Penises in art are a bigger theme than you might think.  After all, what is the number one question people ask in the Greek and Roman collection of any museum?  There is no competition:  why the penises in Classical art are smaller than real-life average adult penises.  And the second is:  whether Christians really broke...Read More

Over the last few years, several museums in Europe have organized an LGBT trail, i.e. a self-guided trail following LGBT themes through the museums’ collections.  The British Museum and the Prado are both prominent examples.  No museum in the US has ever put together such a trail until now, when the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford...Read More

The world’s art museums are full of Gay Secrets. These two gorgeous objects from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston are a great example. They are the kind of things you would just glance at in a museum—and then you’d move on to something you knew more about. But hold on a minute! Both belonged...Read More

When Oscar Wilde Tours designs gay history tours, we always try to show people the gay side of famous places.  We do for instance “gay secrets” tours of Westminster Abbey, the Louvre, and the Vatican.  But we also try to take people to some places that are important in gay history and that they might...Read More

People often ask how I went from doing gay secrets tours to shady ladies. How did a gay historian get interested in the history of female prostitution? First of all, a gay historian works on the history of sexuality, so the history of heterosexuality is not very far away from his topic, intellectually speaking. But...Read More