One of the most annoying "historical firewalls" in researching queer history is getting past the notion that the rise of the sexologists in the late 19th century was the most defining event in queer history. If you start by looking backward from the present day, it's all too easy to run into Ellis and Kraft-Ebbing and swallow the idea that they invented homosexuality and that everything before that is a "dark age". It's even more annoying when you look at the ways they shoehorned disparate concepts of gender and sexuality into an oversimplified mold and then mangled the self-image of generations to come on the basis of those theories.
But this chapter isn't so much about the sexologists as how the diversity of human experience managed to find a way out despite them.
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