Efforts to contain the global AIDS pandemic have dramatically and
urgently increased the need for fundamental information on human
sexuality in all cultures. Unfortunately, this crisis has also revealed
the deplorable poverty of the cross-cultural research record in this
domain. The author focuses on the scientific contributions made by
comparativists to our understanding ofboth same-sex eroticism and
sexual intolerance and argues that social and behavioral scien tists, including cross-culturalists, need to give higher priority to research on controversial subjects on applied problems and on issues
of human rights and social justice, including those related to sexual
orientation.
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