Examples of civilisations that had same sex marriage.
The Arapaho: Alfred L. Kroeber, The Arapaho, 18 Bull. Am. Museum Nat. Hist. 1, 19 (1902)
The Navajo: W.W. Hill, The Status of the Hermaphrodite and Transvestite in Navajo Culture, 37 Am. Anthropologist 273 (1935)
The Mohave: George Devereux, Institutionalized Homosexuality of the Mohave Indians, 9 Hum.
Biology 498 (1937)
Winnebago: Nancy 0. Lurie, Winnebago Berdache, 55 Am. Anthropologist 708 (1953)
The Pima: W.W. Hill, Note on the Pima Berdache, 40 Am. Anthropologist 338 (1938)
Zuni: Elsie C. Parsons, The Zuni La’Mana, 18 Am. Anthropologist 521 (1916)
Matilda C. Stevenson, The Zuni Indians, The Twenty-Third Ann. Rep. Bureau Am. Ethnology 3 (1904)
Will Roscoe, The Zuni Man-Woman 29-52 (1991)
Tahiti: Robert I. Levy, The Community Function of Tahitian Male Transvestitism, 44 Anthropological Q. 12 (1971)
Charles Callender & Lee M. Kochems, The North American Berdache, 24 Current Anthropology 443 (1983)
James S. Thayer, The Berdache of the Northern Plains, 36 J. Anthropological Res. 287 (1980)
Donald G. Forgey, The Institution of Berdache Among the North American Plains Indians, 11 J. Sex Res. 1 (1975)
Francisco Guerra, The Pre-Columbian Mind (1971) :
Cites many contemporary reports of same sex marriage, for example:
Francisco Lopez de Gomara, History of the Indies (1552)
Alvar Cabeza de Vaca , Narrative of the Expeditions and Shipwrecks of Cabeza de Vaca (1542)
Juan de Torquemada, Monarchia Indiana (1615)
Pedro de Magdlhaes, The Histories of Brazil (1576)
Siberia:
David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality(1988)
Among the Paleo-Siberians (Chukchee, Koryak, Kamchadal, Asiatic Eskimo), male shamans were ordered by a female spirit to dress as women. As the spirit often became a supernatural spouse who was jealous of earthly women, many of the shamans acquired male sexual partners who had intercourse with them anally, and most of them married other men.’
Waldemar Bogoras, The Jesup North Pacific Expedition: The Chukchee 451 (Franz Boas ed., 1904-1909)
The marriage [between a soft man and his husband] is performed with the usual rites, and I must say that it forms a quite solid union, which often lasts till the death of one of the parties. The couple live much in the same way as do other people.
Similar traditions in Vietnam, India, Burma, Korea, Nepal, the Austral Islands, New Zealand, and the Cook Islands
Africa:
Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society 48-49 (1987)
E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Sexual Inversion Among the Azande, 72 Am. Anthropologist 1428-34 (1970)
David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality(1988)
The mugawe, a powerful religious leader of the Kenyan Meru, is considered a complement to the male political leaders and consequently must exemplify feminine qualities: he wears women’s clothing and adopts women’s hairstyles; he is often homosexual, and sometimes marries a man.
Melville J. Herskovits, A Note on “Woman Marriage” in Dahomey, 10 Africa 335 (1937)
Eileen J. Krige, Note on the Phalaborwa and Their Morula Complex, 11 Bantu Stud. 357 (1937).
E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer 108-09 (1951):
What seems to us, but not at all to Nuer, a somewhat strange union is that in which a woman marries another woman and counts as the pater [father] of the children born of the wife. Such marriages are by no means uncommon in Nuerland, and they must be regarded as a form of simple legal marriage, for the woman-husband marries her wife in exactly the same way as a man marries a woman
Denise O’Brien, Female Husbands in Southern Bantu Societies, in Sexual Stratification: A Cross-Cultural View 109 (Alice Schlegel ed., 1977)
The term female husband … refers to a woman who takes on the legal and social roles of husband and father by marrying another woman according to the approved rules and ceremonies of her society. She may belong to any one of over 30 African populations
Egypt:
Sifra Aharei Mot 8:8–9]
What did they do? A man married a man, and a woman married a woman, a man would marry a woman and her daughter, and a woman married two men.
(Supported by burials of male same sex couples with stela depicting them in intimate poses. Including one king, Akhenaten)
See also the Siwa Oasis where same sex marriage traditions persisted into the modern era.
Walter Cline, Notes of the People of Siwah and el Garah in the Libyan Desert (Leslie Spier ed., 1936)
Edmund Leach, Marriage, Legitimacy, Alliance, in Social Anthropology 176, 210 (1982)
Hittite code of law covering male same sex couples:
Ephraim Neufeld, The Hittite Laws 8-11 (1951)
Rome:
Martial, Juvenal and Cicero all mention same sex (male) marriages taking place with the same rites and under the same laws as opposite sex marriages.
