While in some countries homosexuality is not punishable, in the United States the law on homosexuality is all comprised in the statutes under the term of Sodomy.
This comprises not only homosexuality, but also bestiality.
The Penal Code of the State of New York, par. 303, says:
Crimes against Nature.
A person who carnally knows in any manner any animal or bird; or carnally knows any male or female person by the anus or by or with the mouth; or voluntarily submits to such carnal knowledge; or attempts sexual intercourse with a dead body is guilty of sodomy and is punishable with imprisonment for not more than twenty years.
Par. 304:
Penetration sufficient.
Any sexual penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the crime specified in the last section.
Our discussion has nothing to do with bestiality or sexual violation of the dead or unnatural practices between persons of different sex.
And here I wish to state that homosexuality between females, or so-called Lesbian or Sapphic love, has, to my knowledge, never been punished in the United States, although the statute seems broad enough to cover certain sexual practices, as for example cunnilingus, between females, while tribadism, in which there is no penetration, and whose devotees according to Yanez, are called in Spain vulgarly “tortilleras,” according to the New York Code can not be punished, as there is no penetration. Yanez, in his Medicina Legal, published in Madrid in 1884, gives an excellent description of homosexuality and describes also the general appearance of those male homosexualists whose ways and manners resemble those of the female sex, and who in common parlance in the United States are called “Fairies.”