This dissertation is a victim-centered history of sexuality and sexual violence between men. Based on research from thirteen archives in the United Kingdom and United States, it is a study of men and boys’ experiences of sexual assault as described before English common law and naval courts. This study finds that early modern historians have ignored or downplayed—and thus, perhaps inadvertently, silenced—testimonies of same-gender sexual coercion or violence in their archives. Historians who treat testimonies of violation as analytically equivalent to legal evidence of consensual sex acts trivialize and demean victims’ experiences. The approach adopted in this dissertation insists on taking victims’ testimonies seriously, not only because they contain stories worth telling, but also because these testimonies, and the courts’ responses to them, elucidate the nature of legal sexual victimhood in early modern England. At the center of this work is a legal conundrum. Early modern English sodomy laws did not distinguish between consensual and non-consensual acts of sodomy, and rape law defined only women as possible victims. This legal conceptualization of sodomy rendered both parties—whether consenting or not—as culpable and therefore punishable, even to the point of capital punishment. Despite this, the present dissertation shows that men and boys frequently chanced self-incrimination and, before common law and naval courts, charged assailants of coercively sodomizing them. In so doing, they argued for the recognition of their victimhood by legal practitioners despite the lethal constraints of English sodomy laws. Moments of violence also reveal how legal practices were socially informed: outcomes in sodomy trials were influenced not only by the ages and social statuses of victims and defendants, but also by the complex discretionary practices that defined early modern legal history and courtroom culture. A major theme throughout is gender and masculinity. This dissertation problematizes the third-gender hypothesis, which posits that in the eighteenth century “the sodomite” was conceptualized as an effeminate gender category distinct from man and woman. This research includes findings that undermine the idea that eighteenth-century sodomites became socially recognizable as gendered Others. Rather, male survivors reported assailants as looking and behaving in normatively masculine ways: neither their gender presentation nor social behavior read as obviously effeminate or sodomitical. Effeminacy was linked to the sexually violent act itself in surprising ways since the penetrating aggressor retained a proximity to dominant masculinity. Sexual violence undermined the manhood of victims in embodied ways by rendering them physically, sexually and socially womanlike. While sodomy was linked to gender crisis in the eighteenth century, this dissertation emphasizes the destabilized gender of the victims of sexual violence.