Sodomy, in modern English, is a legal and moral label that has been applied — inconsistently, over centuries — to anal sex, to oral sex, to same-sex intimacy, and sometimes to almost any sex a legislature disliked. It is not a precise anatomical term. It is a category. That is why it still shows up in statutes, sermons, and search bars long after most people stopped using it at the dinner table.
The everyday medical and vernacular phrase for the act most people mean is anal sex (or anal intercourse). Clinicians will talk about anal sex, receptive or insertive, with partners of any sex. They do not write “sodomy” on a chart unless they are quoting a patient, a statute, or a very old textbook.
Where the word comes from
English borrowed sodomy from Latin sodomia, which medieval theologians built from the city of Sodom in Genesis 19. What Sodom’s “sin” was, in the Hebrew text, is a fight among interpreters: violence and inhospitality are the plainest narrative; later tradition piled on sexual meaning until the city became a verb. Mark D. Jordan’s The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology is the book that tracks how the noun was assembled — not discovered.
By the later Middle Ages, peccatum sodomiticum could mean a cluster of non-procreative sex acts, not one choreography. Early modern English law then narrowed, widened, and confused the term again. The result is a word that sounds specific and behaves like a junk drawer.
Cousins in the statute book
If you are reading a criminal code, you will rarely meet only one name:
- Buggery — the English common-law cousin, from the same moral panic with a French accent. The Buggery Act 1533 (25 Hen. 8 c. 6) made “the detestable and abominable vice of buggery committed with mankind or beast” a felony. That pairing of people and animals in one clause is not a coincidence; it is the theology.
- Crime against nature — American statutory poetry. It usually covered oral and anal sex, sometimes only between men, sometimes everyone. Nature, in this usage, meant a legislator’s idea of reproduction.
- Section 377 — the colonial export. Macaulay’s Indian Penal Code (1860) punished “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” Versions still operate, or recently operated, from the Caribbean to Singapore.
- Paragraph 175 — the German number that became a proper noun. The Nazis used it; West Germany kept a version of it into the 1960s and 1990s.
The law was never describing a bedroom. It was describing a boundary, and then pretending the boundary had always been there.
What it is not
It is not a synonym for homosexuality. Straight married couples were prosecuted under sodomy and crime-against-nature statutes; gay people were simply easier to find in a raid. It is not a synonym for assault. Non-consensual acts are rape or sexual assault in any competent modern code — dragging them under “sodomy” was how older law treated the victim as a participant in a vice. It is not a medical diagnosis.
It is also not only “gay sex,” despite a century of police practice. The Texas statute in Lawrence was written as “homosexual conduct.” Plenty of older American statutes were facially neutral and selectively enforced. Both facts can be true.
How to read this site
Law is the spine — cases, leftover U.S. codes, and a tracker of notable jurisdictions. History is the long argument. Culture is how the word went to church, to the novel, and to the movies. Health is consent, anatomy, and myths, written so a search engine will not confuse us with a porn tube. If you need a clinician or a lawyer, hire one. We are a desk, not a clinic.
Educational material, not a diagnosis, prescription, or legal opinion. Consenting adults only. Laws change; check primary sources and a licensed professional in your jurisdiction. If you are in danger, local emergency services come first.