So, Are the Sambia Gay?

Roman emperor Hadrian and AntinousWell, no...

Sexual desires are biologically based and universal.

Genders are cultural, contextual, historical.

LGBTTQQIAAP...Cis... are current day gender identities in our culture. Most of these are recent. None existed before the later 19th century.

You can only "be" a member of a category that your culture understands as existing.

Next: Additional gender groups

Sexuality, sexual desire, is highly variable on many axes: from low to high desire for sex, from low to high attraction to members of one's own or the opposite sex, to a myriad of things that one may like doing. And all of these are contextual: You may feel high attraction to someone in one situation and low in another. All of these seem to be more or less universal. For example, there is no evidence that a greater percentage of people in one society are attracted to members of their own sex than in another society.

But all of this is different than behavior. People may feel the same universally but some societies offer many more opportunities for sex than other societies. In some societies having a lot of sex is normative and in other societies having little sex is normative. More people may acknowledge and act on same sex desire in some societies than in others, but the percentage of people who feel it is almost certainly the same.

And further, all of this is different from identity. Michel Foucault (and many others) have argued persuasively that in Europe and the US, the idea that sexual behavior defined types of people only emerged in the late 19th century. That is, regardless of what how people behaved and who they had sex with, the idea that there was a type of people called gay people and a type of people called straight people is a recent invention. To ask, for example, was Abraham Lincoln gay* is absurd. Not because it's impossible that Lincoln could have been attracted to men or had sex with men, but rather because the idea of sexuality as defining a type of person, a gay person, didn't exist in Lincoln's world. It's very unlikely that Lincoln defined himself by his sexual desires. The same is true of every other historical figure.

*In 2005, C. A. Tripp, a noted sex researcher, published a book about Lincoln's sexuality and concluded he was gay. Tripp's work is hotly contested but that doesn't matter since the idea of "gay" that existed in Tripp's world in the early 2000s didn't exist in Lincoln's world 150 years earlier.