Since homosexuality and 'buggery' laws existed, it presumably wasn't safe to go around asking the cute same-sex individual on a date or to hook up if you didn't already know where to find the community. I know there were gay clubs and the like, but how did one find out where to go, safely, without every gay club getting busted in short order?
Not to discourage any further answers but you'll probably find the FAQ on gender and sexuality. These posts are particularly relevant
I hope that's helpful!
Follow-up question: how fair is John Boswell's treatment of Christianity's role in the growth of anti-homoeroticism in his book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality?
He reviews many passages from the Bible that seem to advocate punishing men who have sex with men, but he argues that those passages were largely ignored by the majority of Christians and had no effect on the growth of anti-homoeroticism (which made me skeptical of how fairly he was treating the evidence). Boswell's hypothesis is that the growth of the anti-homosexual sentiment that emerged around the eleventh century CE was primarily the result of the destruction of Roman urban centers (he also holds that Christian leaders absorbed and reflected anti-homoerotic attitudes from the majority of the population rather than having been responsible for the creation of those attitudes). On the other hand, Michael Goodich's The Unmentionable Vice goes into detail about how clergy members started a purification movement that resulted in the oppression of people suspected of partaking in homoerotic sexual acts, which makes the Catholic Church seem a significantly more potent determinant than Boswell lets on.