The past is rarely as we imagine it.
As a medieval scholar I can confirm this us 100% accurate and 1000% adorable
“Back in the day” frequently doesn’t mean what the people who say “back in the day” would like it to mean…
idk if anyone cares but i can say how this was translated in British law and how attitudes changed to the modern day?
so basically in 1533 Henry VIII is trying to get this thing called the dissolution of the monasteries through and he thinks ahha! all those monks are having it on with each other, if i pass An Acte For the Punishment of the Vice of Buggerie then i can get all those pesky monks hanged. but tbh it didn’t really make that much difference (for reasons as seen above) and so the law was dropped after a bit (1553-Queen Mary was awesome) and then it was enacted again after a bit (1563-wow thnx Lizzie I).
the actual punishment for ‘buggery’ was death but tbh it was really hard to get a conviction, you needed like 2 witnesses and actual evidence of anal penetration. there were very few recorded cases and those that there were were often part of a much wider sex scandal. in fact there were only two recorded cases of someone being hanged for buggery alone and both of these were politically motivated.
in the 17th century attitudes towards homosexuality can be neatly illustrated in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night where you have the pirate Antonio who is super head over heals for Sebastian. a gay character being shown on stage openly wasn’t an issue at all and Antonio’s love is seen as being quite pure. this said, Antonio doesn’t get the happy loving ending that most of the other characters get and this isn’t really seen as much of an issue. it wasn’t until the very end of the 18th century that ‘mollys’ were then stoned in pillaries.
the death penalty for buggery was reduced to a life sentence in 1861 in the Offences Against the Person Act and it wasn’t until 1885 that loving m/m relationships were criminalised under the particulalry loose term ‘gross indecency between males’ in the Labouchere Ammendment where love letters and the like were suddenly incriminating. This became known as ‘the Blackmailer’s Charter’ and though it was repealed in 1961 (with a HUGE amount of restrictions), gross indecency between males only ceased to be on the statute books in 2003.
interestingly (and also pretty crappily), because of the crazy way British law works, An Acte For the Punishment of the Vice of Buggerie remains on the statue books to this day, though it has been made ineffectual by these subsequent laws.
tldr; homosexuality wasn’t particularly an issue and then it was