Levitt EE, Klassen AD. Public attitudes toward homosexuality: part of the 1970 national survey by the Institute for Sex Research. J Homosex. 1974;1:29–43. https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v01n01_03. In Alexander Brome’s (1620 – 1666) poem A Wife the speaker doesn’t want a wife to live too long and in fact would rather not have a wife at all : Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts with in the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender.[152] Kurdek LA. Differences between partners from heterosexual, gay, and lesbian cohabiting couples. J Marriage Fam. 2006;68(2):509–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2006.00268.x. It is exciting to find an erotic poem where the speaker is a woman writing about her desire for another woman. However, more daring and directly erotic are the poems where Behn takes the role of the male libertine poet. In these poems Behn has no need for the trope of the hermaphrodite to negotiate same-sex desires, and although the poems appear heterosexual she writes persistently with a ‘male gaze on women.’[184] Moreover, it is in these poems that where we see Behn reflecting Judith Butler’s ‘performative’ position. When Behn takes on the persona of a man she articulates the instability of gender and as such argues against a heterosexist culture that assumes she should conform and identify herself as woman. Poems Upon Several Occasions with a Voyage to the Island of Love (1684) is a large collection of some forty-five pastoral poems, prefaced by nine poems by men, that Stapleton suggests: ‘provide Behn with a masculine escort if not an apology.’[185] In addition to Poems Upon Several Occasions Behn used the pastoral form in Miscellany Poems (1685), Lycidus or, The Lover in Fashion (1688) as well as in other collections and in her plays. Representative of an idyllic country lifestyle, some critics have suggested that Behn feminizes the pastoral form; for example, Heidi Laudien suggests that Behn used ‘a subversive form of the pastoral ….. “pastorelle” for its femocentrism.’[186] However, Jessica Munns argues that the pastoral: ‘was already a strongly feminized form’ and ‘for Behn as for other practitioners of the mode, its charm and utility lay in its traditions of gender ambiguity.’[187] The Golden Age that Behn, like others, calls upon in her pastoral poetry is a belief, shared by both classical and Christian cultures, of a time of human perfection when man lived a physically and morally perfect existence, in harmony with nature.[188] It was a TIME WHEN place where the land was fertile, crops were lavish, there was eternal peace and stability, people were perpetually young and life was simple. Additionally, as Judith Kegan Gardiner states: ‘[o]ne advantage of the pastoral is that it reformulates social class. Supposedly set in the lowest class of rural society [………] the pastoral masks the real class imbalances of the contemporary urban scene.’[189] For Behn working in the London theatre the opportunity to reformulate social class would have been important. The trade off for a woman like Behn entering the privileged London theatre scene was sexual respectability.

Vansintejan J, Janssen J, Van De Vijver E, Vandevoorde J, Devroey D. The gay men sex studies: prevalence of sexual dysfunctions in Belgian HIV+ gay men. HIV/AIDS. 2013;5:89. https://doi.org/10.2147/HIV.S43962. Unable or unwilling to fulfil the social expectations of her time by marrying and bearing children Collins’s work enables her to redefine and rethink what it is to be a woman. The subversion in Collins’s work comes from the fact that she finds complete satisfaction by withdrawing from the world through her writing, and in her relationship with Christ, rather than advocating that women should be obedient to their fathers or lost within the identity of their husbands: I’d come out when I was 17 and been disowned by my parents. I’d moved to London and been in and out relationships and casual flings. She was 40 and had been married for 10 years, with three children under the age of 10. The agency we worked for also represented her husband, an esteemed writer, so I knew I absolutely couldn’t go there.Drumright LN, Strathdee SA, Little SJ, Araneta MRG, Slymen DJ, Malcarne VL, et al. Unprotected anal intercourse and substance use before and after HIV diagnosis among recently HIV-infected men who have sex with men. Sex Transm Dis. 2007;34(6):401–7. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.olq.0000245959.18612.a1.

Regarding levels of sexual desire, studies on the subject draw disparate conclusions. Lippa [ 52] and Welling [ 53] reported that MSM had lower level of sexual desire compared to heterosexual men; conversely, Holmberg and Blair [ 30] showed that gay men scored moderately higher than heterosexual men and women on different expressions of desire (solitary, inside the couple and for an attractive person). In a recent Portuguese study [ 54], gay men reported higher solitary (masturbation) and attractive person-related sexual desire compared to heterosexual men. The two groups did not differ on partner-related sexual desire within the couple. In this case, the partner-related sexual desire was the main predictor for sexual satisfaction, whereas solitary and attractive person-related sexual desire negatively predicted satisfaction.William Wycherley (1641 – 1715) would clearly prefer a ‘one night stand’ to the commitment of marriage: While the lovers in On a Juniper-Tree appear to find mutual enjoyment in their pastoral paradise, Behn does suggest that Cloris hasn’t give her full consent to their lovemaking: ‘Nor would the shepherd be deny’d/Impatient he waits no consent’[222] and she refers to being ‘conquered’ by the shepherd: ‘Yeilds to the Conqueror all her Charmes.’[223] Moreover, Cloris has to subdue her shame ‘With love and Shame her Soul Subdu’d.’[224] Similarly in the poem The Willing Mistr While Spenser uses the hermaphroditic form to describe the sexual union of Amoret and Scudamour, he is also describing ‘a golden mean between masculine and feminine forms of dominance and the consummation of an ideal Christian marriage.’[143] The idea of the hermaphrodite representing equality between men and women is something that would have undoubtedly appealed to Behn.