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Online encyclopedias are in the air lately, with the phenomenal rise of Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org)-- the reader-written, anyone-can-edit compendium that, with occasional warts and thin spots, outdoes, size-wise, even behemoth Britannica. Wikipedia has surprising depth in gay topics, but an even better online resource for enquiring homosexuals is the incredible GLBTQ "an encyclopedia of gay lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture" (www.glbtq.com)-- which is a "traditional" edited encyclopedia, overseen by University of Michigan professors emeriti Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth.

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GLBTQ serves up a trove of articles that are concise, well-written, and info-packed-- not to mention smartly and handsomely organized and presented. If you haven't gotten the encyclopedia habit yet, you'll find yourself wanting to browse.

Care to know about the history of gay mystery writers, the life of pioneering gay activist Karl Ulrichs or the queer side of occultist Aleister Crowley? You've come to the right place, with articles written by experts in their fields. It's like speed-reading through the graduate library at Sodomy U.

There's always something new to learn.

The American empire is often compared to Rome in its sprawl and decadence. But it's yet to develop this:

"Imagine a wild festival in honor of Magna Mater or the Syrian goddess, 'our all-powerful universal mother.' Young men possessed by a divine madness cast off their clothing, slash their testicles with broken flints, run down the street carrying their genitals in their hands, and toss them through an open door. The women of the household care for him, dress him in women's clothes, and preserve his testicles in a special receptacle, similar in size to a pyx, the little box used by Christians to store consecrated eucharistic wafers."

That's from the entry on homosexuality in ancient Rome. In another article, on "Patristic Writers," (all right, maybe you weren't itching to look that one up) Columbia University historian Eugene Rice explains how the homosex-friendly ancient world morphed into the homo-obsessing Judeo-Christian one. The culprit, Rice argues: Judaic philosophers, reaching, ironically, back to Plato's authoritarian Laws in an effort to distinguish themselves from dominant Hellenistic trends. These writers (among them, Philo, who lived around the time of Jesus) made for the first time, the association of homosex and abuse-- an equation that echoes down through the centuries into headlines today.

GLBTQ encyclopedia isn't just a reference book. If hot beverages near your computer aren't verboten, dip in over morning coffee, and it may change the way your desires fit you in to the world.