doctrines of society in Western Europe. A particular interest in the Classical era of Greece and Rome "as a model for contemporary life" put the Greek appreciation of nudity, the male form and male friendship (and the inevitable homoerotic overtones) into art and literature. It was common for gay authors at this time to include allusions to Greek mythological characters as a code that homosexual readers would recognize. Gay men of the period "commonly understood ancient Greece and Rome to be societies where homosexual relationships were tolerated and even encouraged", and references to those cultures might identify an author or book's sympathy with gay readers and gay themes but probably be overlooked by straight readers. Despite the "increased visibility of queer behavior" and prospering networks of male prostitution in cities like Paris and London, homosexual activity had been outlawed in England (and by extension, the United States) as early as the Buggery Act 1533. Across much of Europe in the 1700s and 1800s, the legal punishment for sodomy was death, making it dangerous to publish or distribute anything with overt gay themes. James Jenkins of Valancourt Books noted: Many early Gothic fiction authors, like Matthew Lewis, William Thomas Beckford and Francis Lathom, were homosexual, and would sublimate these themes and express them in more acceptable forms, using transgressive genres like Gothic and horror fiction. The title character of Lewis's The Monk (1796) falls in love with young novice Rosario, and though Rosario is later revealed to be a woman named Matilda, the gay subtext is clear. A similar situation occurs in Charles Maturin's The Fatal Revenge (1807) when the valet Cyprian asks his master, Ippolito, to kiss him as though he were Ippolito's lover; later Cyprian is also revealed to be a woman. In Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), the close friendship between a young monk and a new novice is scrutinized as potentially "too like love". Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla (1872) was the first lesbian vampire story, and influenced Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Stoker's novel has its own homoerotic aspects, as when Count Dracula warns off the female vampires and claims Jonathan Harker, saying "This man belongs to me!" A Year in Arcadia: Kyllenion (1805) by Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg is "the earliest known novel that centers on an explicitly male-male love affair". Set in ancient Greece, the German novel features several couples—including a homosexual one—falling in love,