This section of Boswell's work points up some of the structural flaws of his study, in my opinion. "Structural flaws" does not necessarily mean "incorrect data and evidence" but rather that the large-scale conclusions are shaped by the ways in which that evidence is interpreted. And in his quest to find evidence for the existence of a postive gay subculture, there are times when he is deliberately credulous (such as taking politically-motivated accusations of sodomy as descriptive fact) or fails to consider the meaning of the asymmetries in the data. (If you find few examples of women writing texts expressing same-sex love in a clerical context, does that mean that there was no culture of same-sex love among women? Or does it mean that structural gender inequities affected how and by whom that love was expressed? Or perhaps how those expressions were filtered out of the historic record?). It is inescapable that Boswell simply wasn't very interested in women. And yet rather than presenting his conclusions as being restricted to men, he adds in just enough female examples to pretend that his conclusions are universal.
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