ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses upon homosexual behaviour, mostly between males. It begins by considering how homosexual behaviour was understood and experienced in the late nineteenth century and examines how these things changed, resulting in new identities and practices. Same-sex behaviours were neither conceptualised as a unified order, nor did they occur within a separate sub-culture. Rather, available evidence suggests that they were integrated with the institutions of everyday life. The construction of a homosexual identity produced an elaboration of homosexual sub-culture, organised around sexual preference. Briefly, from the late nineteenth century there occurred a reordering of sexual meaning and experience. Medical science connected sexual intimacies between women, mutual masturbation between men and sodomy as related aspects of homosexual behaviour and identity, in opposition to heterosexuality. Changes in law and policing procedure sharpened the process for men, producing new forms of sexual identity and association.
