Contrary to recent ethnocentric and contemporocentric claims that social categories for homosexual roles did not exist until late 19th-century northern European and North American medical discourse invented some, terms from a range of Islamic societies across a millennium are reviewed. Both age-stratified and gender-stratified sets of terms for male homosexual roles are discussed along with the problem of interpreting absence of evidence of lexemes for egalitarian homosexuality prior to the recent borrowing of "gay."