Greg, post what you will. Chances are theyre in the database, anyway.

You may be thinking of the many sea-type songs that include a verse similar to:

                The cabin boy, the cabin boy,
                The dirty little nipper;
                He filled his ass with broken glass,
                And circumcised the Skipper!

(In Good Ship Venus, Christopher Columbo, North Atlantic Squadron, anyway)

and

Columbo had a second mate he loved just like a brother,
And every night below the decks they bung-holed one another.

As above indicated, though, serious occurances in ballad is pretty rare. I've always thought the possibility in Bessie Bell was a real one but other explanations are equally or more logical.

Immediately, the one that jumps to mind is the oblique reference in "The Tailor's Breeches."

While not _about_ homosexuality, it shows a common knowledge of it &
enough comfort with the topic to (implicitly) mock homosexuals. Tailors are considered fair game to mock. They are comical just by virtue of their professions. Much of the jest, however, is that the tailor might be thought a homosexual because he is forced to go home wearing the tavern-maid's skirts. (Clearly, cross-dresser = gay in the song.)

       Oh, how shall I get home again?
       They'll call me `Garden Flower,'
       And if ever I get my breeches back
       I'll never dance no more.

Several sailors' songs have the same comic ending of the sailor slinking off down the street in dresses - Fireship, eg, and also The Merchant's Son.

"Bessie Bell and Mary Gray" (Child #201, dating at least back to 1646)
in some of the older texts shows a much expanded story over MacColl's
two verses or the nursery rhyme versions. They've clearly committed
some grevious sin, probably along with the young man from the village.
(Megage a trois?) Bad enough, anyway that it kept them from burial in
consecrated ground. Not suicide & extramarital sex alone wouldn't be
enough.

Child says the action occurs in Lednock, Scotland and that tradition
there specifically locates their graves and carries the extra-textual
information that the two were both daughters of local lairds, very
attractive and that "an intimate friendship subsisted between them."

McClintock's fairly serious bawdy version of his The Big Rock Candy Mountain, "The Appleknocker" is certainly about male-on-boy sexual predation. So the acts are lined out clearly but it's not any sense of "same-sex love."

There are two tunes by Scott Skinner, in memory of General Sir Hector Macdonald, who committed suicide when on his way to face court-martial for homosexual activity. At the time Macdonald was Scotland's national hero; his army career had included winning the battle of Omdurman (despite his superior, Kitchener) and rescuing the Boer War campaign from the disastrous mess Kitchener had made of that (in pipe music terms, see "The 91st at the Modder River" or "The Highland Brigade at Magersfontein", both marking these defeats; Macdonald had been wounded at Magersfontein).

Another "if only" verse is in

WILLIE O' WINSBURY:
But when he came before the king
He was clad all in the red silk
His hair was like the strands of gold
His skin was as white as the milk

"It is no wonder," said the king
"That my daughter's love you did win
For if I was a woman, as I am a man
My bedfellow you would have been"


So, such references are pretty rare and oblique or comic when they do come up. I checked keyword @homosexual (an actual existing keyword) in DigTrad and there are no references for it.

There are probably more specific references to buggering sheep then there are to any form of inter-human "unnatural sexual acts" in English language traditional song. OTOH, moving to Greek, Turkish, native American, etc tradition where the notion is more institutionalized and you'd likely find lots of stuff.