Male Varlets

Female prostitution wasn't the only game in town. Early-modern London had "a thriving trade" of "[m]ale-male prostitution," according to Valerie Traub in The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (167). Traub points us to a 1597 text called The Theatre of Gods Judgement, written by a Puritan, Thomas Beard, who "tightly link[s] the erotic deviation of sodomy to the gender deviation of effeminacy" (167).