This article reassesses the sailing Royal Navy’s treatment of homoerotic crimes. Historians have argued that same-gender sexual contact was rare and loathed on naval vessels, and that trials were consequently uncommon but produced exceedingly harsh outcomes. Drawing on new archival research, this paper reveals that naval actors had more varied and complex attitudes towards the homoerotic and that courts treated these crimes more moderately on average than has long been assumed. Court martial trials also represented only one – extreme – outcome of an elaborate system that naval actors used to ‘resolve’ detected sex crimes. Summary punishment, flight, dismissal and a range of other routes served as common non-judicial alternatives. Detailed exploration of a protracted late-Georgian dismissal case, that of Lt. Arthur Walter Adair, shows that it is essential to attend to the full range of naval reactions to the homoerotic if we are to fully understand its place in naval history.

本文重新评估了航行中的皇家海军对同性犯罪的处理方式。历史学家认为，同性别的性接触很少见，并且讨厌在海军舰船上进行，因此审判很少见，但结果却极为严酷。借助新的档案研究，本文揭示了海军演员对同性恋的态度更加多样化和复杂，并且法院对这些罪行的平均对待程度比长期以来的预期要高。法庭军事审判也仅代表一种复杂的系统（极端结果），该系统是海军行为者用来“解决”发现的性犯罪的一种系统。简易处罚，逃跑，解雇和其他一系列路线是常见的非司法选择。详细探讨了旷日持久的乔治亚州解雇案，阿瑟·沃尔特·阿黛尔中校，