When I started practicing in '97, the way sodomy laws worked is the the cops--who you might've thought would be investigating murders, robberies, rapes, and such--would go down to Airline Ave. in street clothes and pick up hookers by the dozen and charge them with Soliciting Crime Against Nature.

70s in the UK you'd get undercover police going to gay clubs, flirting with people there and then arresting them when they responded.

Since CAN was a Class I felony in NC, Soliciting CAN was a Class 1 misdemeanor, so if you were a fresh young PD you had a bazillion of these in your inbox, and they were pretty much all plea and time served, unfortunately. You maybe could've tried them, but it would've been worse for the clients.

Thanks to the underappreciated Willie Brown, California rewrote its law on sodomy, in ~1975, making consensual encounters between adults legal.