From a review of a book called Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform by Charles Upchurch:

Previous historical accounts have made the unwarranted assumption that there was little public discussion or public awareness of same-sex activities in Victorian England until late in the century, when a series of notorious cases involving queers culminated in the prosecution and conviction of Oscar Wilde.

But Upchurch, after a decade of meticulous research, demonstrates that this assumption is palpably false. Earlier examinations of the press in early-and-mid Victorian England relied on indexes and databases built on key words that missed many published reports on same-sex conduct and legal action. But by minutely examining the files of three newspapers with different class audiences between 1827 and 1870, and cross-checking them with court records, official documents, and correspondence, Upchurch has shown that not only was there broad public awareness in these years of sex between men, but that male homosexual conduct was a matter of considerable public discussion.

I haven’t read Upchurch’s book, so I can’t verify the claims made in the review. But if the claims are true, then this story is an excellent illustration of the importance of proper indexing. The indexes and databases that previous researchers used ought to have covered the news stories and other documents that Upchurch discovered in the course of his research, regardless of the language used in those documents to describe homosexuality. That’s the whole point of creating subject indexes. In this case, inadequate indexing may have helped to obfuscate the already obscure history of homosexuality in the West.