EDITOR'S NOTE

Globalization has had a pervasive if not pernicious impact on the culture, politics, economics, and education of most societies. And United States’ hegemony has played an enormous role in every aspect, including human sexuality. Although modernist research into homosexualities and the movement for homosexual emancipation had its origins in German positivism (most notably through the work of Hirschfeld), the epicenter for its dissemination and commodification–from Mattachine and Stonewall, Boys in the Band and Queer Eye for a Straight Guy, Olivia Cruises and Advocate Man–is the United States. Postmodernist critiques of sexual essentialism notwithstanding, too many educators retain a flat earth view of human sexual diversity: We counsel youth to “come out” to whom they have always been and will be forever more; the hjiras of India, kathoey of Thailand, the bakla or agi of the Philippines, the khawal of Turkey, the wintke of the Navaho, and the mukhannath of the Arab Ummayad era are recategorized into our gender and language system; bisexuals such as Angelina Weld Grimke and Richard Bruce Nugent are historicized as lesbian or gay while those claiming some aspect of a trans identity are accessorized into an ever lengthening alphabet soup of linguistic convolutions–lgbtqi . . .