Most historians of prostitution have concentrated on the lives of female prostitutes. Alain Corbin's Women for Hire (1978; trans. 1990) and my own Sex and the Gender Revolution, vol. 1 (1998) are exceptional in attempting to study the male clients as well as the women themselves. The history of male prostitution before the twentieth century has similarly gone unstudied. There are two pioneering books on the Cleveland Street male brothel in the late nineteenth century and an essay by Jeffrey Weeks; more recently Rafael Carrasco published an exceptional study of boy prostitutes drawn from the records of the Inquisition; and in 2010 Barry Reay published a book on twentieth-century hustlers in New York City. The present article argues that the forms and changes in the organization of male prostitution provide one of the most revealing guides as to whether a particular society has moved from a traditional to a modern sexual system. This essay therefore contrasts male prostitution in eighteenth-century London with what had preceded it before 1700. The essay argues that in the traditional sexual system, all adult males were attracted both to women and to adolescent males. But in a modern sexual system adult males were divided into a heterosexual majority attracted only to women, and a homosexual minority attracted only to males, either adults or adolescents. That is, at any rate, the theory.

The history of sodomy in the eighteenth century is not simply the history of repression. It encapsulates the history of all of society. It can provide a key to unlock the mysteries of the history of gender, sexuality, individual identity, human society's relationship to the physical world, and even (it has been claimed) the mysteries of the rise of modern capitalism. It remains however, a history that has just begun to be written, centering, so far, on three themes: the nature of governmental repression, the organization of sodomitical life, and the meaning for gender of the presence or absence of a specific sodomitical role.

The first articles dealing with the history of sodomy appeared in standard historical journals a mere ten years ago. They have come out of at least three intellectual milieus. Some historians who set out to study crime, deviance, and witchcraft have collected and tried to interpret the sodomy trials they found among their materials. Others began with the history of the family and then turned to the history of sexuality, and so of homosexuality. Some historians, as participants in the Gay Liberation movement, have gone looking for their roots. And increasingly, and perhaps most promisingly, the historians of gender have begun to see the importance of the topic. Some of us, of course, have taken up the topic for a combination of reasons.