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Notes -
I remember Naomi Wolf's book that looked into this getting pulped, because she made some embarrassing error, thinking she found many cases of gay people sentenced to death, but it turned out she misunderstood some legal term that meant the sentence was never carried out.
Don't remember if the other part of this was that the sentences that were carried out involved child molestation, but maybe this puts you on the right track.
That's probably what I was thinking of -- the adult-minor sodomy analysis may have been something as ephemeral as a comment somebody made on here (maybe looking at a specific case amongst the ones Wolf tallied), but it seemed well documented at the time.
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Yeah, the second edition of Wolf's book got significant scrutiny because it assumed convictions for sodomy were solely due to sodomy, even where they often revolved around other serious acts (though 'Victorian' England commuted even these crimes to prison sentences in nearly all cases).
There's some risk to overcorrection here -- there were executions for consentual adult sodomy as late as 1835, albeit extremely rare and controversial in their time; there were pressures for people to play up likely-consensual overtures as not when caught; there were social reasons that older men were presumed to be 'converting' and coercing 'youths' and recorded as doing that for young adults -- but it's hard to overstate how much of a mess the scholarship is.
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