| Officials in London, Paris, and
Amsterdam were shocked
to learn of networks of men who spoke of their forbidden
sexual practices with an unfamiliar subcultural slang and
had secret meeting places and even public taverns where they
met and had sex with each other. Officials in
Amsterdam feared divine retribution, and enthusiastically
prosecuted and executed as many sodomites as they could
find. In England, many prosecutions were instigated by
Puritanical moral improvement societies, but the constables
there were less zealous than their Dutch counterparts.
Even though the French police did not share Dutch and
English religious convictions, Parisian sodomites lived in
fear of prosecution since the police pioneered methods of
psychological torture, entrapment, and blackmail.
Even though the three
subcultures probably had little to do with each other, they
bore remarkable similarities. Cross-dressing and
effeminacy were an important part of subcultural life in all
three cities, and sodomites increasingly came to see
themselves as different from ordinary folk. Before the
emergence of these early modern subcultures, sodomy was
considered a grave sin that any man could commit if his
sexual lust got the better of him. As knowledge of
sodomitical subcultures grew throughout the 18th Century,
sodomites were increasingly perceived as different in kind
from men who found their pleasures with women.
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