The medical construction of homosexuality and its relation to the law in nineteenth-century England.

as illegal.2 "Unnatural practices" were regarded as a felony in England following Henry VIII's 1533 decree that the "offenders being hereof convict by verdict confession or outlawry shall suffer such paynes ofdeath and losses and penalties oftheir goods chattles debts lands tenaments and hereditaments as felons being accustomed to do accordynge to the order of the Common Lawes of this Realme".3 In 1967, under advice from the Wolfenden Report that the law was not preventing same-sex activity, male homosexual practices carried out in private were decriminalized.4 A great deal of historical attention has been directed towards the law, and especially to the many existing court records, in