A database under construction at Colorado College, which may contain as many as 10,000 names in the end, will allow us to analyze age, status, origins and addresses, proclivities, and activities more systematically in the future than has been possible in the past. We are processing surprises and revising conclusions as we proceed.
Other historians, more in this country than in France, have continued this research.* We are currently digesting abundant but incomplete information about the profiles and networks of men the police called “sodomites” (from the name of the city destroyed by fire in Genesis 19) before 1750 and “pederasts” (from the Greek words for love of boys) after that year. Michel Rey (1953-93) explored some of the sources in a series of articles published decades ago. The answers to these questions lie in several archival collections that include thousands of relevant documents from the years 1715 to 1765 and hundreds more from the 1780s.
