In fifteenth-century Florence, it seems that a man could simply go out into the streets in the evening to find a boy who might be coerceable, or persuadable, or positively willing. There was some shared knowledge of rather basic behavioural codes—the most distinctive behaviour involving grabbing a boy’s hat and demanding sex as the price for its return. There were also known venues, such as the fields just outside the city gates, for performing the sexual act. Certain streets and districts, containing notorious taverns, feature prominently in the evidence; and inns and taverns could also be used as places for sex. But we should remember that much of this activity mapped, behaviourally and spatially, onto existing patterns of male-female sex: those districts contained brothels, the inns could also host female prostitutes, and even the hat-grabbing game may have been derived from those prostitutes’ regular practice.... So if we are to call this set of social practices a subculture, it will be in only a very rudimentary sense of the term. It involved no sense of membership, and what made it distinctive, beyond the fact that not every man engaged in it, was simply the fact that the sexual act itself transgressed religious and legal norms—which meant that tactics of concealment would sometimes be required. In some Italian and Iberian cities there were certainly male prostitutes and procurers, and therefore also clients of their services. If we were looking only at female prostitutes in the same societies, we might hesitate to say that the men who made use of them belonged to a special prostitution subculture; the claim may seem a little more plausible where male prostitutes were concerned, but the men who formed the clientele might not have felt that the difference between the two cases was a large one.