History has left us an extraordinary paradox.
We know that men desired other men in medieval England. We know that sexual relationships between men occurred. Church authorities preached against them, penitential literature prescribed punishments for them, courts occasionally investigated them, and scattered surviving records describe individual encounters.
Yet if we walk through the streets of London in 1400 and ask a deceptively simple question—
How did one man who desired another man actually find him?
—the historical record becomes remarkably quiet.
There were no gay bars.
No personal advertisements.
No telephone numbers exchanged discreetly on scraps of paper.
No dating apps.
There was not even a universally recognised social identity corresponding precisely to the modern idea of a gay man.
Nevertheless, men met.
They recognised opportunities.
They took risks.
Some formed relationships.
Others arranged fleeting sexual encounters.
Some exchanged money.
And presumably the overwhelming majority disappeared from history without leaving the slightest trace.
That last point is crucial.
Almost everything we know about male-male sexuality in medieval England comes from occasions when secrecy failed.
Someone was discovered.
Someone confessed.
Someone informed.
Someone was prosecuted.
Someone wrote a moral condemnation.
The successful encounter usually generated no document at all.
Reconstructing how men found one another before Henry VIII’s Buggery Act of 1533 therefore requires something approaching historical detective work.
We cannot simply search for medieval gay bars.
Instead, we must reconstruct the landscape of opportunity.
And that landscape was surprisingly extensive.
First, We Must Lose the Modern Label
Calling medieval men “gay” can be useful shorthand, particularly when writing modern gay history, but it carries a danger.
Our modern understanding of homosexuality generally involves identity.
A man may understand himself as gay regardless of whether he is currently sexually active. Sexual orientation becomes part of who he understands himself to be.
Medieval Europeans generally classified sexuality differently.
They concentrated much more heavily upon acts.
The important theological concept was sodomy, but even that word did not necessarily mean homosexuality in its modern sense. Depending upon the writer and period, sodomia could encompass several sexual practices considered unnatural or non-procreative.
Two men having sex could therefore commit a prohibited act without either possessing anything equivalent to a modern gay identity.
This distinction matters enormously.
A married man with children might also have sex with men.
A priest might have male lovers.
A young apprentice might engage sexually with another apprentice without constructing an identity around the experience.
Someone could participate in same-sex activity at one stage of life and not another.
Medieval sexuality was therefore simultaneously familiar and foreign to us.
The desire is recognisable.
The categories surrounding it often are not.
So How Did They Recognise Each Other?
This is the question historians would dearly love medieval people to have answered.
Unfortunately, nobody left us a useful handbook entitled How to Pick Up Men in Fourteenth-Century London.
Recognition probably depended heavily upon circumstances.
A glance held slightly too long.
A suggestive joke.
Physical familiarity.
Reputation.
Gossip.
Mutual acquaintances.
A proposition disguised sufficiently to permit retreat if it was rejected.
And perhaps most importantly:
gradual testing of boundaries.
Sexual minorities throughout history have repeatedly developed methods of recognising potential partners without explicitly announcing themselves.
But we must be cautious here.
We possess much better evidence for such signalling in later periods—particularly once identifiable Molly House networks developed—than we do for medieval England.
There is no securely documented medieval English equivalent of the later handkerchief code or recognisable gay slang.
The safest historical conclusion is therefore that men usually found one another through social proximity and opportunity rather than membership of a clearly identifiable gay subculture.
Fortunately, medieval society created enormous amounts of social proximity between men.
The Medieval World Was Intensely Homosocial
Modern Western society often assumes that men and women naturally socialise together.
Medieval society was considerably more segregated.
Many environments were overwhelmingly male.
Monasteries.
Universities.
Guilds.
Military companies.
Ships.
Workshops.
Clerical households.
Apprenticeships.
Merchant establishments.
Some forms of domestic service.
Men frequently ate together, worked together, travelled together and slept together.
Physical intimacy between men was also not automatically interpreted sexually.
Men embraced.
Men kissed.
Men shared beds.
Men expressed intense affection towards male friends.
None of these things necessarily indicated a sexual relationship.
Paradoxically, that could provide camouflage.
Two men could possess an emotionally intense friendship without attracting the suspicions that similar behaviour might provoke in later periods obsessed with identifying homosexuality.
The boundary between friendship and erotic relationship could therefore remain invisible to outsiders.
And sometimes, perhaps, deliberately so.
The Shared Bed
One of the most important things to forget when entering medieval England is the modern assumption that sharing a bed implies sexual intimacy.
Beds were expensive.
Space was limited.
Travellers shared beds in inns.
Servants shared sleeping accommodation.
Apprentices might sleep together.
Members of households slept communally.
Even strangers could find themselves sharing sleeping space.
This created an obvious opportunity for sexual encounters.
But again we face the historian’s problem.
If two men shared a bed and nothing happened, nobody recorded it.
If something happened and neither complained, nobody recorded that either.
Only when an encounter produced conflict, accusation or prosecution might the archive suddenly notice.
The surviving record therefore inevitably exaggerates unsuccessful encounters.
History remembers the proposition that went disastrously wrong.
The successful seduction sleeps peacefully through the night.
Inns and Taverns
If we were searching for environments conducive to anonymous encounters, inns would immediately attract attention.
Medieval inns were extraordinary social crossroads.
Merchants met travellers.
Servants encountered strangers.
Pilgrims gathered before journeys.
Sailors drank ashore.
Men arriving in London needed somewhere to sleep.
Alcohol loosened inhibitions.
Sleeping arrangements created opportunities.
Privacy could sometimes be purchased.
And travellers enjoyed one enormous advantage:
anonymity.
A man contemplating a sexual encounter with another man might understandably feel safer away from his own parish, family, employer and neighbours.
The stranger was simultaneously dangerous and attractive.
He might disappear tomorrow.
That was precisely the point.
Southwark
Which brings us straight back to the Stews.
Southwark possessed almost every ingredient required for clandestine sexuality.
Taverns.
Inns.
Brothels.
Bathhouses.
Wharves.
Travellers.
Sailors.
Labourers.
Pilgrims.
Entertainments.
And jurisdictional peculiarities that placed parts of the district beyond the ordinary authority of the City of London.
We cannot responsibly describe medieval Southwark as a gay district.
There is no evidence supporting such a claim.
But it was unquestionably a sexual district.
That distinction is important.
A district containing commercial sex, transient populations, alcohol, rented rooms and weakened community surveillance creates opportunities for many forms of sexuality, including forms authorities did not approve of.
Men seeking men did not require a specifically gay establishment.
They required somewhere where strangers could meet without too many questions being asked.
Southwark provided precisely that environment.
Bathhouses and Stews
Bathhouses deserve particular attention.
Communal bathing had a much more prominent role in medieval European life than later stereotypes about universally filthy medieval people suggest.
Bathhouses provided washing, warmth, food, drink and sociability.
Some also acquired reputations for prostitution.
The association became so strong that the English word “stew”, originally connected with heated bathing, eventually became synonymous with a brothel.
Could men meet sexually in bathhouses?
Almost certainly somewhere in medieval Europe they did.
But specific evidence for organised male homosexual activity in English bathhouses before 1533 is frustratingly sparse.
This is another point where responsible history requires restraint.
The environment made encounters possible.
Possibility is not proof.
That distinction will recur throughout this story.
Apprentices
Now we enter one of medieval England’s most important male social systems.
A boy or adolescent might leave his family and enter the household of a master craftsman.
There he lived, worked and trained alongside other apprentices and male workers.
The household was simultaneously home, workplace and training institution.
Young men spent years together.
Friendships developed.
Rivalries developed.
Sexual curiosity undoubtedly developed.
The overwhelmingly male environment created opportunities for experimentation and relationships.
But apprentices were also intensely supervised.
Masters possessed considerable authority.
Guilds regulated behaviour.
Reputation mattered.
An accusation of sodomy could therefore be devastating.
The very structure that created opportunity also created danger.
Masters, Servants and Power
Not every encounter between men was equal.
This deserves emphasis because romanticising clandestine medieval sexuality would seriously distort the evidence.
Medieval society was hierarchical.
Master over apprentice.
Employer over servant.
Priest over subordinate.
Teacher over pupil.
Older man over younger man.
Wealthy man over poor man.
Some male-male sexual encounters undoubtedly involved mutual desire.
Others involved coercion.
Others occupied uncomfortable territory somewhere between the two.
A servant dependent upon his employer for food and shelter did not possess the bargaining power of his master.
An apprentice could not simply walk away from his contractual obligations.
When examining accusations involving sex between men, historians therefore have to ask not merely:
Did this happen?
but also:
Who possessed the power to refuse?
Monasteries
And now we arrive at an institution almost designed to provoke the imagination of later writers.
Large numbers of unmarried men living together.
Sleeping in communal buildings.
Eating together.
Praying together.
Working together.
Forbidden sexual relationships with women.
Inevitably, medieval religious authorities worried about sexual relationships between monks.
Monastic rules repeatedly addressed sexual temptation.
Penitential literature prescribed punishments for sexual acts between men.
Visitations occasionally produced allegations of sexual misconduct.
But we should resist the equally tempting conclusion that monasteries were medieval gay communities.
They were not.
Most monks presumably lived within the expectations of their vocation most of the time.
Nevertheless, homosexual desire did not disappear when someone entered a monastery.
For some men, religious life may even inadvertently have placed them in the company of precisely the people to whom they were attracted.
The Church knew this possibility existed.
Its regulations demonstrate that knowledge.
The Clergy
The clergy provide some of the richest evidence concerning medieval same-sex sexuality—partly because the Church generated enormous quantities of documentation.
Clerical celibacy created its own contradictions.
Priests were forbidden wives.
Sexual relationships with women occurred nevertheless.
So did relationships with men.
Accusations of sodomy could also become political weapons. Because the charge was so damaging, enemies could deploy it regardless of whether it was true.
Every accusation therefore has to be examined carefully.
A sodomy charge tells us unquestionably that medieval society recognised sex between men.
It does not automatically prove that the accused man actually engaged in it.
Universities
Medieval universities were another extraordinary concentration of young men.
Oxford and Cambridge contained students living away from parental supervision, often grouped in male households and halls.
Alcohol, youth, intellectual independence and communal living created precisely the mixture familiar to universities ever since.
Church and university authorities worried constantly about student behaviour.
Sexual misconduct formed part of those anxieties.
Again, however, homosexual activity appears most clearly when authorities intervened.
The ordinary relationship that attracted no complaint remains invisible.
Sailors and the Waterfront
Ports created another distinctive sexual landscape.
Ships were overwhelmingly male environments.
Men might spend long periods away from wives and families.
Ports brought together sailors from different regions and countries.
Taverns, lodging houses and prostitution clustered around waterfront districts.
London’s Thames therefore produced an enormous floating population of strangers.
Southwark sat directly beside it.
We should be cautious about projecting the much better documented homosexual cultures of later navies backwards into the Middle Ages.
But ships and ports unquestionably created circumstances in which men lived in intense proximity for prolonged periods.
Once ashore, anonymity increased opportunities further.
The waterfront is therefore an important part of our landscape even when direct evidence remains elusive.
Pilgrims and Travellers
Medieval people travelled more than we sometimes imagine.
Merchants travelled.
Clergy travelled.
Students travelled.
Soldiers travelled.
Craftsmen travelled.
Pilgrims travelled.
And pilgrimage produced particularly interesting social conditions.
Groups of strangers could spend days or weeks travelling together before separating permanently.
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales captures something of this extraordinary social mixture.
Southwark itself was a major gathering point for pilgrims heading towards Canterbury.
Travel temporarily loosened ordinary social surveillance.
The neighbour who watched your behaviour at home was miles away.
The stranger walking beside you knew nothing of your reputation.
For someone seeking a clandestine sexual encounter, that anonymity could be liberating.
Parks, Fields and Marginal Spaces
Later evidence shows that men frequently used public or semi-public outdoor spaces for sexual encounters.
Parks.
Fields.
Churchyards.
Alleys.
Riverbanks.
Public privies.
These become clearly identifiable cruising environments in later centuries.
How far can we project that behaviour backwards?
Only cautiously.
Human beings seeking clandestine sex have always required privacy, and urban margins obviously provided it.
But calling a particular medieval field a “gay cruising ground” without evidence would be anachronistic.
Again, we can identify conditions favourable to encounters without pretending we possess documentation that does not exist.
And Then There Is Eleanor Rykener
Suddenly, in 1394, the historical fog briefly lifts.
A person recorded in legal documents as John Rykener, but who used the name Eleanor while presenting as a woman, was arrested in London after being found with a man named John Britby.
The case is extraordinary.
Rykener described having sexual encounters with numerous men, including clergy, while presenting as Eleanor, and also described sexual relationships with women.
Modern historians debate how Rykener should be understood.
Was Eleanor a transgender woman?
A male cross-dressing sex worker?
Someone whose gender identity cannot be adequately expressed using modern categories?
The medieval record simply does not provide enough information to settle the question.
What it does provide is something immensely valuable.
A glimpse of an actual sexual network.
Eleanor described encounters in London and elsewhere, with clerics and laymen, and sometimes received payment.
Here, finally, we see something beyond theological condemnation.
We see people actually arranging sex.
And customers apparently knew how to find Eleanor.
That fact is enormously important.
It demonstrates that sexual information travelled socially.
Some form of reputation, introduction, observation or word of mouth connected potential clients with sexual partners.
The network existed even though its mechanism remains largely invisible.
Word of Mouth
This may ultimately provide our simplest answer.
How did men find men?
Through other men.
Once someone had successfully discovered one potential partner, an informal network could develop.
A friend knew someone.
A servant knew another servant.
A traveller mentioned someone encountered elsewhere.
A tavern keeper knew which customers were tolerant.
A sex worker knew clients with particular interests.
Someone acquired a reputation.
No formal gay community was required.
Human networks did the work.
And because revealing too much was dangerous, those networks were probably based heavily upon trust.
The Importance of Reputation
Medieval communities were intensely concerned with reputation.
People lived among neighbours who often knew enormous amounts about one another.
Sexual reputation could travel quickly.
That could be dangerous.
But it could also help people find each other.
A man suspected of preferring men might attract hostility.
He might also attract another man quietly hoping the rumour was true.
Gossip therefore had two edges.
It could expose.
It could connect.
The same information could produce either persecution or opportunity depending upon who heard it.
Was There a Medieval Gay Subculture?
Here we reach perhaps the most difficult question.
Probably not in the sense that we would recognise from later London.
By the eighteenth century, London’s Molly Houses provide clear evidence of recognisable social networks of men who had sex with men, with particular meeting places, language, rituals, friendships and forms of gender performance.
That is something approaching a subculture.
The evidence before 1533 is much thinner.
We can identify individuals.
We can identify sexual acts.
We can identify environments where encounters could occur.
We can sometimes glimpse networks.
But we cannot yet confidently reconstruct a continuous, organised medieval London gay community comparable with the later Molly House world.
Absence of evidence, however, is not evidence that men lived in complete isolation.
Rykener alone warns us against that assumption.
Networks existed.
We simply cannot see their full shape.
The Law Before 1533
Another misconception needs correcting.
Henry VIII did not invent the idea that sex between men was wrong.
Christian teaching had condemned sodomy for centuries.
Ecclesiastical courts could investigate sexual misconduct.
Penitential traditions prescribed punishments.
Secular authorities could sometimes intervene through other legal mechanisms.
But England lacked a permanent nationwide secular felony statute specifically establishing buggery as the offence created in 1533.
That changed under Henry VIII.
The Buggery Act 1533, passed during the Reformation Parliament, made the “detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery committed with mankind or beast” a felony.
Conviction carried death and forfeiture of property.
The wording itself is revealing.
The statute did not speak of homosexual people.
It criminalised an act.
And its inclusion of sex with animals demonstrates again why simply translating Tudor “buggery” as modern “homosexuality” is historically inaccurate.
Nevertheless, sex between men unquestionably fell within its reach.
A behaviour previously handled through a complicated mixture of religious condemnation and differing jurisdictions had entered English secular felony law in a dramatically explicit way.
Henry’s Motives
We should also resist assuming that Henry VIII suddenly became personally obsessed with homosexuality.
The Act appeared during the enormous redistribution of religious and legal authority produced by the English Reformation.
The Crown was expanding its jurisdiction into areas previously associated heavily with ecclesiastical authority.
Sexual regulation formed part of that transformation.
The statute therefore belongs not merely to gay history but also to the history of the Tudor state.
The government was claiming greater authority over bodies, morality and crime.
And the penalty was terrifying.
Death.
What Changed?
Ironically, everyday behaviour probably changed much less immediately than the statute book suggests.
Men continued desiring men.
They continued finding one another.
They continued taking risks.
The legislation could change punishment.
It could not change human sexuality.
And enforcement was never uniform.
Yet something fundamental had occurred.
The state now possessed an explicit legal weapon.
A private sexual encounter could become a capital felony.
That possibility altered the landscape of risk.
The Invisible Majority
There is something almost haunting about researching these men.
The archive encourages us to remember homosexuality through persecution.
Trials.
Executions.
Scandals.
Arrests.
Church condemnations.
But that cannot have been the whole experience.
There must also have been affection.
Flirtation.
Sexual curiosity.
Friendship becoming something else.
Awkward propositions.
Successful propositions.
Jealousy.
Heartbreak.
One-night encounters.
Long relationships disguised as friendship.
Men who married women while continuing relationships with men.
Men who never married.
Men who understood their desires perfectly well even though they possessed none of our modern vocabulary for describing them.
Almost none left records.
And perhaps that is because many succeeded at the thing upon which their survival depended.
They kept their private lives private.
Finding Each Other
So how did men who desired men find one another before the Buggery Act?
There was probably no single answer.
They found each other in inns and taverns.
In workshops and households.
Among apprentices.
Among clergy.
Within monasteries.
At universities.
On journeys.
Around docks and ships.
In rented rooms.
Perhaps in bathhouses.
Perhaps in marginal outdoor spaces.
Through reputation.
Through gossip.
Through mutual friends.
Through prostitution.
Through chance.
And through the oldest method of sexual communication humanity possesses:
one person taking the risk of signalling desire and waiting to discover whether another person responded.
There were no rainbow flags marking safe premises.
There was no recognised gay quarter.
There was no Grindr announcing that somebody was 200 yards away.
But there were eyes across crowded taverns.
There were shared beds at inns.
There were whispered reputations.
There were introductions.
There were strangers passing through town.
And there were undoubtedly moments when one man realised that another man was looking back.
The terminology has changed.
The legal landscape has changed enormously.
The meeting places have changed.
The fundamental human experience has not.
Long before Molly Houses, long before Oscar Wilde, long before modern gay liberation—and long before Henry VIII decided that Parliament should concern itself with what men did together in private—men who desired men had already been finding one another for centuries.
Most managed to do so without leaving their names behind.
Their anonymity should not be mistaken for their absence.
Tim Alderman ©️2026
Sources and Further Reading
Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, Routledge. An important study of medieval sexuality and the danger of imposing modern sexual identities upon medieval people.
Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England, Oxford University Press. Particularly useful for prostitution, sexual regulation and the social world surrounding medieval commercial sex.
David Lorenzo Boyd and Ruth Mazo Karras, “The Interrogation of a Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London,” in Premodern Sexualities, edited by Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero. A major scholarly discussion and translation of the Rykener case.
Robert Mills, Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages, University of Chicago Press. An important examination of medieval understandings and representations of sodomy.
Tom Linkinen, Same-Sex Sexuality in Later Medieval English Culture, Amsterdam University Press. Especially valuable for attitudes towards male-male sexuality in later medieval England.
Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, Columbia University Press. A foundational study, especially valuable for understanding the transition from medieval concepts of sodomy towards the better-documented sexual cultures of early modern England.
The National Archives (UK), material concerning sexuality, crime and the historical development of laws regulating same-sex activity.
UK Parliament, historical material concerning the Buggery Act of 1533 and subsequent development of British laws governing sex between men.
The surviving 1394 interrogation of John/Eleanor Rykener, London Metropolitan Archives; translations and scholarly editions reproduce this exceptionally rare record of medieval sex work, gender presentation and sexual encounters.
Historical note: The words gay, homosexual, transgender and sex worker are modern categories. They can make medieval history understandable to modern readers, but none maps perfectly onto medieval identities. Where they are used here, they describe behaviours or provide modern points of comparison rather than claiming that medieval people necessarily understood themselves in those terms.
