Tommies and Sapphists in the English 18th Century

There's a lot of meat to chew on in this article, and I think that Trumbach's exploration of shifts in how same-sex desire was understood and classified during the "long 18th century" is both fascinating and valuable. But at the same time, I see a lot (and I mean, A LOT) of flaws and weaknesses in how he frames and presents the data and his conclusions. Which I have commented on at great length interspersed with my summary of the article. To some extent, he seems aware of these flaws, for he uses a lot of "hedging language" like "seemed," "likely," "probably." But if I didn't have a fairly extensive existing familiarity with the data (and--I'll admit--a very different personal engagement with the data and its interpretation) I might have taken his conclusions more at face value. To be somewhat fair, the article was published in 1991 which was at the leading edge of the deep work in gender/sexuality history that we can now take for granted. But articles like this (and a critical reading of them) are a useful lesson in the importance of questioning not only the data but its interpretation.