During the Dutch sodomite persecutions of 1730, Zacharias Wilsma was regarded as the 'chief sodomite' and compelled to testify against dozens of men he himself had named in his interrogations. What began as an unforeseen local clean-up in Utrecht became, through Wilsma's statements and an overzealous court, a nationwide manhunt and a wave of hysteria. In Zacharias, the Frisian Stallion, we plunge deep into Zacharias's life.

Drawing on Zacharias's own statements, interrogations and testimonies, given before the courts of Leeuwarden, Amsterdam, The Hague, Delft, Leiden, Haarlem and Utrecht, author Gerrit Jan Wielinga has pieced together the love and sex life of Zacharias Wilsma and held it up to the light. Richly filling in the background and the gaps in the story, he draws a psychologically coherent portrait of 'the simple servant who turned the Dutch Republic on its head'. Brace yourself for homosexual life in the first half of the eighteenth century.