(Disclaimer: I'm mainly going to focus on urban communities in Britain and to a much lesser extent America in this answer; other Western countries like France, the Netherlands, and Russia had their own idiosyncratic qualities and cruising-grounds, as did urban communities in Canada and Mexico. Rural communities had their own challenges to navigate. Likewise, I'm not going to talk about female homosexuality, but women with a sexual and romantic affinity for their fellow women also had their own meeting-places and subcultures in the 19th and early 20th centuries.)

One thing a man in search of men might want to do would be to take a walk -- heading out on foot to areas where men seeking sex with men were known to congregate. In some ways this was a corollary of a type of heterosexual solicitation that wasn't uncommon -- heterosexual men likewise sought out and avoided certain streets and neighborhoods depending on their desire for financially-compensated female company. In other ways, solicitation between men was facilitated by the (relatively) free expectations for conduct between men in public relative to conduct between respectable men and women; men simply had more pretenses to approach one another, and more leeway regarding their supposed innocuous intentions. Men met and cruised one another, both openly and clandestinely, in public places -- parks, streets, public transportation, public toilets. An approach might be conveyed in a meaningful look or gesture -- in the reports of a century earlier, there was a rich visual vocabulary through which men signified to one another their interest in having sex, which might have held over in some quarters into the Victorian era, but an encounter culminating in sex might be initiated through a polite conversation or an offer of hospitality, as well as through overt advances carrying less plausible deniability. The identity of such locations was passed along by word of mouth, whether hinted in squeamish language or boldly stated, inferred, or discovered by chance. Law enforcement surveillance and disruption of well-known cruising places and trysting spots was a regular occurrence, but despite this these locations retained their popularity well into the 20th century and beyond. Likewise, men met through bathhouses, brothels, and bars quietly catering to same-sex sexuality -- these gatherings might be segregated by race and class, or might be meeting-places for cross-class and interracial connections. Sexual encounters might take place on establishments' premises, in hotels and private residences, or in other public places. Brothels catering to homosexual clientele existed at a variety of price points and with varying levels of privacy -- from sorry basement dives to establishments in wealthy neighborhoods catering to aristocratic clientele, like the Marylebone residence at the center of the 1889 Cleveland Street scandal.

What else might someone do if he were looking for a discreet liaison? Look for someone of a lower (or higher) social class. Like many aspects of 19th and early 20th century life, the channels through which one sought sex and companionship were determined at least in part by class and money. Like their exclusively-heterosexual counterparts, working-class men who had sex with men might frequent different establishments, assume different social roles, or be understood by middle-class sexual partners as fundamentally different somehow from themselves in terms of sexuality -- regardless of their individual desires, qualities, or attitudes. The middle-class understanding of the qualities of the lower classes, both in terms of intellect and disposition (supposedly limited and emotionally underdeveloped) and in terms of their physical bodies (supposedly powerful and uninhibited) set "rough" working-class men apart as objects of intense desire and intense difference for more respectable men. Sometimes these class differences were endowed with additional levels of significance -- love between men of different classes and races could be exalted as a radical leveler by socialists like Edward Carpenter, or eroticized as rough trade -- and at other times, especially for the lower-class men who engaged in them, the associated expectations of compensated sexual contact and of upper-class homosexual men's wholly or partly unreciprocated emotional attachments to "normal" men of the lower classes were a landscape to be navigated. Were working-class men who had sexual relationships with middle-class men, whether in exchange for money and advantages or otherwise, really as sexually "normal" as their partners might expect them to be? (That is, heterosexual, highly masculine, and otherwise conforming to their socially-prescribed gender roles, only tolerating the attentions of genuine homosexuals due to some other motive -- similar to the twentieth and twenty-first century categories of "trade" or "gay for pay".) Some of them likely were, others likely weren't; for some, money and gifts were a motivating element (just as conspicuous generosity motivated their middle-class partners) and for others money didn't enter into the matter. All these men exhibited a spectrum of emotional and sexual proactiveness regarding their partners of higher social class as well as responsiveness. There were also working-class men and tradesmen who had intimate relationships exclusively with other men of their same class, just as there were middle-class and elite men who preferred intimate relationships with one another; the high-profile instances of inter-class relationships in the 19th and early 20th centuries don't eliminate the existence of such intra-class relationships, which might arise from preexisting friendships as well as from purposeful cruising for sex.

Men sought out others whose occupation was associated with an openness to sex with men, even for a price -- guardsmen and sailors, lift operators, waiters and bartenders, and so on. Were some of these working men (often men in uniform) otherwise-heterosexual, perhaps making the best of a bad situation or tolerating the advances of their social betters in exchange for remuneration? Some of them probably were. Others likely were oriented toward men, and regardless they experienced emotional and sexual attachments that didn't fall neatly into the paradigm of an unemotional arrangement of convenience. Soldiers were known in the late Victorian and early Edwardian years for their readiness to service a male clientele and for the openness with which this was carried out. Military men, in addition to their youth and physical fitness, had in theory an incentive to be discreet and well-behaved -- the risk of institutional punishment -- and in some cases guardsmen introduced their fellows to sex work as a way to make a little money on the side, pay for entertainment, or to garner flattering attention. In his memoirs, the writer John Addington Symonds wrote of a chance encounter he'd had with an attractive man in uniform:

In the spring of 1865 we were living in lodgings in Albion Street, Hyde Park. I had been one evening to the Century Club, which then met near St Martin le Grand in rooms, I think, of the Alpine Club. Walking home before midnight, I took a little passage which led from Trafalgar into Leicester Square, passing some barracks. This passage has since then been suppressed. I was in evening dress. At the entrance of the alley a young grenadier came up and spoke to me. I was too innocent, strange as this may seem, to guess what he meant. But I liked the man's looks, felt drawn toward him, and did not refuse his company. So there I was, the slight nervous man of fashion in my dress clothes, walking side by side with a strapping fellow in scarlet uniform, strongly attracted by his physical magnetism. From a few commonplace remarks he broke abruptly into proposals, mentioned a house we could go to, and made it quite plain for what purpose. I quickened my pace, and hurrying through the passage broke away from him with a passionate mixture of repulsion and fascination.

Some men traveled abroad in the search of cities and climes where soliciting men and boys for sex was a less daunting prospect or where homosexuality was perceived to be endemic -- this was about as loaded with imperial baggage as you'd think, and it drew from centuries of prevailing prejudices about non-Western or even simply non-Anglophone cultures' attitudes regarding the nameless vice of sodomy. The fervent belief that somewhere homosexual activity would be more common and more condoned than in Britain or America, and that somewhere the benefits of being a white man from a dominant global power might counterbalance the hindrance of being homosexual, impacted the way gay men in a position to travel experienced life abroad. This sense of homosexual wanderlust manifested in Paris, Rome, Berlin, in North Africa, Ceylon, and South Africa, and in myriad other destinations. Some of these locations offered a degree of legal protection relative to the waves of prosecution unfolding in British and American urban centers. In addition to tourist destinations, military stations and expat communities both served as real or reputed cruising-grounds.

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