A journal of law, history, health, and culture
Est. as a law archive · rebuilt as a journal
It has been outlawed, footnoted, frescoed, and whispered. Empires feared it, religions catalogued it, and health pamphlets walked around it. This is the word as it actually works — crime, history, body — with the shame stripped off and the citations left on.
The journal
Sodomy is not one topic. It is a legal category that got confused with a sex act, a theological weapon that got confused with a city, and a health conversation that got confused with a joke. Pick a door.
Definition
A legal category, a theological insult, a medical footnote, and an ordinary human act. Start with the word.
Law
Statutes that said more about fear than bedrooms. Lawrence, 377, Paragraph 175, and the laws that refused to die.
History
Praised, punished, renamed, and litigated. The act is old. The panic is usually new.
Culture
How art, religion, and pop kept using one word as a mirror for whatever they could not say out loud.
Health
Safety without the sermon. What the pamphlets got wrong, and what a clinician would actually tell you.
Tracker
A living table of notable jurisdictions. Sixty-five UN members still do, as of mid-2026. The map is not done.
This domain once hosted a state-by-state compilation of U.S. sodomy statutes (v1.0, January 28, 1998) that Wikipedia editors actually cited. The new site keeps that job — a public desk for the law — and adds the history, culture, and health the old pages never had room for.
The syllabus
Affiliate links to books and films we would put on a syllabus. The hosting bill is real; the dating ads are not invited.
history
How a medieval coinage picked up more moral freight than a freight train. Saints, penitentials, and the occasional bonfire — the book to read if you want to know why the word still makes legislators twitch.
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The book that made medievalists argue at dinner parties. National Book Award winner, still fiercely cited, and the doorway into the archive — even when later scholars spend chapters arguing with it.
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A Houston bedroom, a questionable raid, and the 2003 opinion that retired the American sodomy statute. Carpenter interviewed nearly everyone and still writes like a detective novel with footnotes.
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