Engaging with a wide range of interdisciplinary work in anthropology, trans studies, queer theory, porn and media studies, and sociology, the panelists interrogate what sex did, historically, across a wide range of sites in twentieth century Europe and the United States. Ben Miller uses two case studies from 1980s California exploring ‘divine androgyny’ and more masculinist leather subcultures to track how white gay male identity and its political and erotic imaginary emerged through a “primitivist homomythopoetics.” Zavier Nunn historicizes legal sex change in Weimar and Nazi Germany as a process through which sex, as a legal substance and function of civil regulation, was both made and unmade, reflecting wider political and social vectors of power and troubling both liberal and conservative historical interpretations of trans temporality. João Florêncio explores the role that gay porn magazines played in the lives of Spanish and Portuguese men as a force in consolidating notions of European identity and peripheral backwardness in the post-World War II period. Nikita Shepard analyzes the uncomfortable role that sex between men in public toilets played in the US homophile, gay liberation, and gay rights movements, as activists attempted to detach notions of sexual citizenship from actual erotic behavior. Together, these papers insist on the materiality of sex as a practice of doing, offering a provocative challenge to historiographical conventions in the study of the queer and trans past.