V

I don't know of any male theatre actors off the top of my head, but cavalier serventes were what you called male courtesans in this era of France, and they were absolutely A Thing (in fact, funnily enough, the poet, Lord Byron was one to Teresa, Contessa Guiccioli in Italy, so you could reasonably posit that some cavalier serventes were heavily entangled with the arts). In that sense, we do know a bit more about the cavalier serventes who were kept by aristocratic women than the ones who were kept by aristocratic men, and in fact the only ones we know of were really high ranking ones like the boys King Henry III kept as his 'mignons' (although that was the 1500s, not the 1700s).

Homosexuality was illegal in this era of France's history, although it was actually decriminalised during the French Revolution in 1789, and as it was punishable by death, there was a lot more secrecy around it so we do have less information about male sex work generally, although historians all agree there was a lot of it in Paris. Here's a quote from Sex in Eighteenth Century Paris:

Paris was home to a diverse permissive sexual culture. It was comprised of a portion of the financial, social, political, and intellectual elite, often identified as libertines, for whom sex outside marriage was both widespread and widely accepted. It also included men who had sex with each other as part of Paris’s extensive sodomitical subculture, though there is little evidence of a modern homosexual identity. Prostitution was endemic in Paris, encompassing numerous forms of transactional sex that translated into a sort of hierarchy, with women kept as mistresses by men of the elite at the top and those catering to marginal men at the bottom.

As a result, we know there were male sex workers operating at every level of the sex work hierarchy (street walkers, brothel workers, courtesans/cavalier serventes), but the records of it are harder to unpick than it is with women who were kept more publicly. In fact, one of the best records we have of how many gay brothels there were (and again, it seems like there was a lot) was because Marquis de Sade wrote about them and his sexual exploits in them in between his stays in prison.

Regardless though, I actually kind of think it's irrelevant in the context of talking about TVL? Anne wasn't writing historical non-fiction, she was writing the female gothic which was a very established subgenre of literature by the time she wrote it, and while looking at the historical context is really important in understanding what she was doing, especially with a writer as knowledgeable and well-researched as Anne, that historical context isn't applied on a 1:1 level.

As an author of the female gothic, Anne's writing prioritises female terrors and anxiety - that's what the genre is - but she does that through writing male characters experiencing traumas most often associated with women - rape, domestic violence, gaslighting, forced sex work, forced pregnancy, abduction, etc. Lestat, Louis and Armand's respective experiences and victimisation don't make them female characters, but their victimisation is relatable to women readers and accessible to Anne as an author because they're most often associated as female terrors. The characters are tools for exploring themes, just as real history is, gosh, just as vampirism is. I believe Anne knew about the relationship between sex work and acting in this chapter of history, she probably did understand it to be something that mostly affected women, and she thought 'what if it happened to Lestat?' anyway.

there's also this from "homosexuality in french history and culture" by jeffrey merrick and michael sibalis: