I mean Henry 8 was the first to criminalize it and use it against his opponents Stalin-style, and it was very strict compared to the Continent (where enforcement was more de facto, 1799 France even had an "out" co-president who was gay in the modern sense) since the Tudor state was more centralized and could catch who it wanted (no parlement or Hansa city could have a carve-out from nationwide laws); just watch Les rois maudits (which GRRM enthusiastically admits to ripping off) for that sort of backstabbing politics; and seamen have always had a well-earned ... reputation

but that just shows this is just imposing modern definitions onto the past, in the clumsiest manner--the biggest sin historians can think of after outright forgery; ditto "Two-Spirit," they just kludged together some Cree and Navajo categories and declared it "Pan-Indian trans" when the were semi-outcasts who had to sit in flints ever month to bleed (and, no, they didn't see them as men who BECAME women); 21st-c. categories and ideas about aren't eternal, objective observations but just as trendy and coincidental as anything else, and that's gonna sting

the desperate scramble to make themselves relevant, to "change the world rather than just describe it," (and "trigger the chuds" like Ghostbusters 2016) often drives smaller departments like anthro, geography, Anglo-Saxon Old English studies to "stand on your head and spin" levels of crazy fantasizing to "radically reinterpret" the dusty old fields: Marija Gimbutas and Margaret Murray invented a matriarchal Goddess-worshipping Paleolithic Europe out of whole cloth and a handful of artifacts, and most people still really believe in it (even if implicitly)

you can even see the desperation by what they're "queering"--a mirror? a fuckin' MIRROR?! they wrote a run-on "queered interpretation" full of polysyllabic academese buzzwords for a mirror jammed behind a post when the ship sank