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All sexual acts between men were illegal in most countries, and sexual intercourse between men (usually called buggery or sodomy in the 19th century) was often a capital crime. Dutch law allowed the execution of convicted homosexuals in 1800, and twenty-two trials had taken place for the crime in 1798, but imprisonment or banishment was the usual punishment. There were seventeen convictions for homosexuality at Amsterdam in the decade 1801-10, and none resulted in an execution. Sexual intercourse between men remained a capital crime in Britain until 1861, and one or two men were hanged for it annually in the early 19th century. Gay men thus faced extreme dangers from blackmailers, as happened to Lord Castlereagh; the pressure led to his suicide in 1822. Others, such as the notoriously bisexual Lord Byron, fled the country.

The nineteenth-century reforms of sexual statutes typically perpetuated the criminalization of homosexuality but reduced the penalties. The penal code of the German Empire forbade "unnatural vice" between men, but sentences ranged from one day to five years. British law remained more severe. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 allowed life imprisonment for homosexuality, but it also created the lesser crime of "gross indecency," for which men could be sentenced to two years of hard labor. When that statute was reformed in 1912, it permitted the flogging of homosexuals without a jury trial. These statutes remained in force until 1967. Such statutes did not even mention lesbianism, an unthinkable subject to most Victorian legislators.

The criminalization of homosexuality led to dramatic scandals and trials at the turn of the twentieth century. The most famous trial involved a celebrated Irish writer, Oscar Wilde. Wilde was arrested following an acrimonious and public battle with the marquess of Queensbury (a bully chiefly remembered for formulating the rules of boxing), the father of his lover. Wilde was convicted in 1895 and imprisoned until 1897, an experience that he related in Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). The government could have indicted many other prominent homosexuals--such as the members of the Bloomsbury set (named for a district of London), which included the economist John Maynard Keynes, the biographer Lytton Strachey, and the novelist E. M. Forster--but the government would have been obliged to arrest several of its own members.

A larger scandal over homosexuality occurred in Germany, where the central figures were not intellectuals but the commanders of the German army, members of the imperial government, and close associates of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The policy of the German army was to court-martial homosexuals if they had been publicly identified. That policy led to two dramatic trials in 1903-06, at which several officers were named, including the commander of the royal guard who was a member of the royal family. This led to the public admission that Prince Friedrich Heinrich of Prussia was gay. The German press then began a flamboyant investigation of homosexuality in the army and the government. The press soon focused on the Kaiser's closest friend, Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg, an ambassador and a member of the House of Lords. When a police investigation began, the Berlin vice squad quickly identified several hundred prominent aristocrats, officers, and officials as known homosexuals, including General Kuno Count von Moltke, the military commandant of Berlin. The result was another wave of courts-martial in 1907-09. The German public soon received admissions of homosexuality from a long list of public figures, ranging from the director of the state theater to the royal equerry. As the number of homosexuals in royal and military circles became clear, one segment of the German press turned to homophobic attacks, using the affectionate nicknames that lovers revealed at trials. At the peak of this scandal, a prominent general died of a heart attack while dressed in a ballerina's tutu, to the cruel delight of political cartoonists.

The German scandals had tragic results for the individuals involved and dangerous implications for society. Kaiser Wilhelm II blamed the entire experience neither on the criminalization of homosexuality nor on the men who had broken his laws, but on the machinations of "international Jewry." He reached this bizarre and ominous conclusion because the journalist who had exposed Eulenburg was Jewish. It was equally ominous that the scandals, and the homophobic attacks, encouraged aggressive militarism, as a proof of masculinity, in Germany. . .

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