Giovanni Dall’Orto demonstrates how, after the Restoration of 1815, Europe was a divided continent: countries that, following Napoleonic France, no longer criminalized sodomy and countries that continued to prosecute it (Un altra 433–44). The former included France and Italy; the latter, Great Britain and Germany. (Upon independence, the United States adopted the British statutes minus the death penalty.) Criminalizing homosexual behavior between males, Germany’s notorious Paragraph 175 dated from 1871 and was not fully rescinded in the former West Germany until the end of the twentieth century. The British statute dated from 1533; it was only with the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967 that consensual homosexual acts between men of twenty-one and older were legalized. The United States retained sodomy laws in some states until 2003. Dall’Orto reminds us that homosexuality was punishable by death in England until 1861, and as late as 1835, men were hanged (Dall’Orto Un’altra 434; see also Robb 23). In this chapter, I take a broader perspective on the relationship broached in my introduction between male same-sex desire and economic development. Offering some speculations concerning political and economic hegemony and the policing of homosexuality and prostitution, I then provide a summary of the history of anti-sodomy legislation in Germany, the United States, and Great Britain, as well as discuss how Italy and France policed male same-sex eroticism.