Queer City

by Peter Ackroyd

  As a result of the work of the society’s secret agents, several men were convicted, among them a foot soldier named Thomas Lane. He is supposed to have come up to Mr Hemmings, no doubt a good-looking decoy, and ‘pulling out his nakedness offer’d to put it into his hand, and withal unbutton’d the evidence’s [witness’s] breeches’. In his defence Lane stated that ‘he had been at St Thomas’s Hospital, and coming over the bridge, he went to make water, and that the evidence’s hand slipped upon his nakedness’. Other men were caught on similar charges, some of whom committed suicide while detained in prison.

  There are several cases where a man’s ‘naked yard’ is displayed and put in the hands of another, while on certain occasions there were forcible attempts to enter the breeches of the supposed victim. There was little subtlety about it, but rather a great deal of assertion and aggressiveness which may give some indication of the general state of sexuality in eighteenth-century London. It was not a period of extended foreplay or romance. Such forcible practices may often have been successful; perhaps the perpetrator did not believe that his victim would go to a magistrate, where the risk of a counter-charge might have been great; but it had always been the manner of the London streets, where violence was endemic. William Oliver, for example, wrestled William Sidall to the ground before he thrust his hand into Oliver’s breeches and pulled out his sensitive parts. John Blair encountered Samuel Beakley in Sudney’s Alley late at night but then assaulted him when Beakley could not be coerced to entertain Blair’s ‘sodomitical practices’.

  The consequences of public disclosure, however, were very severe. The parish clerk of St Dunstan’s in the East committed suicide by cutting his own throat after being accused of an ‘unnatural crime’. Henry Thorp hanged himself from a tree in St George’s Fields after being confronted by blackmailers. It was wise to be cautious. Men no longer kissed one another in the old fashion, the embrace gradually being replaced by the more formal handshake. The intimacy of lips was now considered to be the preserve of foreigners. ‘I love to kiss a man,’ a character says in Colley Cibber’s Love Makes a Man; or, The Fop’s Fortune (1700). ‘In Paris, we kiss nothing else.’ To shake hands was to create an informal contract, much more agreeable to the mercantile middle class than false fondness.

  Yet even though kissing was now generally regarded as the first station of Sodom, some fops or rakes persisted. ‘Ah, my Georgy! Kiss!’ Lord Wronglove exclaims to Sir George Brilliant in Cibber’s The Lady’s Last Stake (1707). ‘And kiss and kiss again, my dear,’ Brilliant replies. ‘By Ganymede here’s nectar on thy lips. O the pleasure of a friend to tell the joy. O Wronglove! Such hopes!’ So such matters were aired on the stage to general amusement. The ‘camp’ comedian, to use a relatively modern phrase, is almost as old as the city itself. A gay harlequinade was staged as early as 1702 when the ‘Mard Brothers’ performed a ‘night piece’. ‘What ridiculous postures and grimaces,’ one contemporary wrote, ‘and seeming in labour with a monstrous birth, at last my counterfeit male lady is delivered of her two puppets, Harlequin and Scaramouch.’ No doubt those ‘postures and grimaces’ were performed in the best possible taste.

  There were dangers other than those of arrest and punishment. In John Marten’s A Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease, in both Sexes (1709), it was revealed that ‘the distemper’ may be contracted ‘by a man’s putting his erected penis into another person’s (man’s or woman’s) mouth using friction etcetera between the lips’. One of Marten’s informants told him that ‘it was with great pleasure that he ejected it into the person’s mouth he had to do with, who willingly received it, and assisted, as he said, in this foul act, by sucking his penis’. At a slightly later date it was known as ‘gamahuching’, from the French. Marten also described in some detail other venereal infections, such as gonorrhoea, which had spread through queer London.

  This was also the period when the ‘molly houses’ came fully into public view. Clubs for queer men were not unusual in any period of London’s history, but at the beginning of the eighteenth century they became the object of sensational pamphlets and periodicals. Before that date they had generally been tolerated or ignored, part of the great forgetfulness of London; they might even have been admired by those citizens who followed the London radical tradition of paying tribute to rebels and insurgents of any description. Now all was changed. In 1702 a pamphlet was issued under the title of The Sodomites’ Shame and Doom: Laid Before Them with Great Grief and Compassion by a Minister of the Church of England. The ‘compassion’ was in short supply; the ‘minister’ – representative as he was of the Church of England – warned that ‘your names and places of abode are known’ and were at risk of ‘being visited by such as may bring your crimes to just punishment’. The punishment in question was ‘the gallows, which our laws have justly appointed to your sin’.

  The increased interest provided a welcome opportunity for the blackmailer who could now fall into the company of an unsuspecting gentleman before accusing him of attempted buggery. Sometimes this worked, and sometimes it did not. Soldiers became expert blackmailers; they seemed to be readily available, but they could easily be rough. Groups of them were known to haunt St James’s Park, a well-known spot for the military, and they were ready to come to one another’s aid at the call of ‘Stop, sodomite!’ Any man, blameless or otherwise, might find himself helpless in the face of their demands; money, and clothes, and valuables, passed from hand to hand. Birdcage Walk was considered to be unusually dangerous.

  The victim might be fortunate, however. In a trial of February 1708 at the Old Bailey, it was revealed that William Hollis, while walking along the Strand, had asked George Skelthorp the way to King Street. Skelthorp agreed to take him there ‘but instead of that conducted him to a private place, where was a horse-pond but dried up, and there took him by the collar, demanding satisfaction. Saying he was a sodomite, and drawing his bayonet offered it at his breast, took from him four shillings and sixpence, pulled off his coat, and was endeavouring to get off his rings, but was prevented by some people coming up, who hearing him [Hollis] beg for his life, came to his assistance, and seized the prisoner with the coat and money upon him.’

  Skelthorp was a practised blackmailer. At his subsequent trial he confessed that he knew the times and places ‘where some sodomites were resorting about Covent Garden, he went to stand in their way, and when any of them would (as they often did) carry him to a by-place thereabouts to commit their foul acts with him, he went with them; and then he, taking hold of them, threatened them, that he would presently bring them before a justice, unless they gave him satisfaction’. So they gave him money, rings and watches ‘or what else they had then about them’.

  In 1707 a ‘sodomites’ club’ in the City was raided, while a number of known trysting places such as London Bridge and the arcades of the Royal Exchange were systematically invaded. A favourite spot was Pope’s Head Alley just by the Exchange. One agent, Thomas Vauhan, loitered in the Strand and Covent Garden in search of victims he might entrap. One man who was caught, a porter, William Huggins, said after his arrest that ‘he had heard there were such sort of persons in the world, and he had a mind to try’. Another man was arrested for ‘frigging’, or masturbating.

  The net had been set by the Society for the Reformation of Manners. In earlier years there had only been one or two individual cases, generally involving a breach of the peace rather than any particular accusation. A pamphlet of 1707, John Dunton’s The He-Strumpets: A Satire on the Sodomite Club, could now boast that there had been forty arrests and three suicides; those who had killed themselves were a merchant, a draper and a curate, two of them hanging themselves in Newgate prison. Dunton even wrote their epitaph for them:

  Men worse than goats

  Who dress themselves in petticoats.

  The Woman Hater’s Lamentation, also of 1707, stated that over one hundred had been arrested for ‘intriguing with one another’.

&n
bsp; The hack journalist Ned Ward produced a sensational exposé of the molly houses in scandal-sheet terms with A Complete and Humorous Account of the Remarkable Clubs and Societies in the Cities of London and Westminster (1709). He revealed the presence of ‘a particular gang of sodomitical wretches in this town who call themselves the Mollies’ and who affect ‘to speak, walk, tattle, curtsy, cry, scold’ in the manner of ‘lewd women’. They called each other ‘sisters’. They talked about their ‘husbands’ and their children. According to Ward they went so far as to imitate pregnancy and birth, when one of them, dressed in nightgown and hood, was chosen ‘to mimic the wry faces of a groaning woman’ to be delivered of a wooden doll. After the ceremony they fell to their food and drink, provided by the tavern in which they met, and then engaged in ‘filthy scandalous revels’ and ‘beastly obscenities’. How much is true, how much invention, is impossible to guess.

  In the same year, however, a ‘notorious gang of sodomites’ was arrested in a brandy shop along Jermyn Street of which the owner was one of their number. Among them, also, was the foot-boy to the Duke of Ormonde. In London there emerged a pattern of activity. Even the boxes of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, were little ‘nests’ of male prostitutes and others.

  Close encounters were not reserved for men. Certain female bagnios were open only to other women, such as Frances Bradshaw’s establishment in Bow Street; rumours persisted of a rendezvous for female flagellants in Jermyn Street. The vogue for female players, inaugurated by the Restoration, included a fashion for apparently lesbian actresses. One familiar motif on the eighteenth-century stage was that of a woman, dressed as a man, who courts another woman. It was tantalising; it was sexy; it was loved by other women. Such scenes were often played on ‘ladies’ nights’ when the audience was comprised of one sex only.

  Female love was also one of the dominant motifs of the reign of Queen Anne, when a quarrel between two of her ladies became public knowledge. Sarah Jennings had known the queen since childhood; now she was Sarah Churchill, after her marriage to John Churchill, later to become Duke of Marlborough. In the course of sixteen years, before assuming the throne, Anne endured seventeen pregnancies of which twelve were stillborn and the rest died at an early age. The attentions of a male partner had almost destroyed her. No doubt these calamities intensified the bond between Anne and Sarah, already firmly planted in their mutual hatred of William III. But after she became monarch, Anne began to prefer a different lady.

  Abigail Masham, her nurse and hairdresser, received signal tokens of the queen’s favour. Sarah was incensed. She was a gossip and something of a termagant whose tirades rendered the queen more and more uncomfortable. Sarah’s advisers and allies mounted an offensive against Abigail that took as its focus the question of queer sex. In one squib it is made explicit:

  Her secretary she was not,

  Because she could not write,

  But had the conduct and care

  Of some dark deeds at night.

  It suggests the suspicion by which monarchs may be surrounded. Sarah wondered aloud how the queen could discourse among her women on the theme of reputation ‘after having discovered so great a passion for such a woman, for sure there can be no great reputation in a thing so strange and unaccountable, to say no more of it?’

  Anne was an invalid, with gout and related diseases, and can hardly be considered in the position of a sportive lover; but the succession of disastrous and painful pregnancies might justifiably explain her preference for female company. It had, in any case, become London news. One town hack, Arthur Maynwaring, wrote a pamphlet, The Rival Duchess or the Court Incendiary (1708), in which Abigail confesses to being ‘rather addicted to another sort of passion, of having too great a regard for my own sex’. She is asked by a French lady of the court whether ‘that female vice, which is the most detestable in nature, reigns among you, as it does with us in France?’ She replies that ‘we are arrived to as great perfection in sinning that way as you can pretend to’.

  In the same year Delarivier Manley wrote a novel, The New Atalantis, in which she describes a cabal of lesbian lovers, alluding to ‘rites’ and to ‘unaccountable intimacies’ in which ‘things may be strained a little too far’. Some couples go out to the theatres and public gardens in order to pick up female prostitutes and have sex with them. Other women dress as men. In case any reader missed the implications of this fantasy, a ‘key’ was appended in which the caballers were identified as ladies of the court. The novel may have been inaccurate and prurient but it met the expectations of the time.

  A notice in the Female Tatler of September 1709 referred to ‘the young lady in the parish of St Laurence, near Guildhall, that lately went to the coffee-house in man’s clothes with the two ’prentices, called for a dish of Bohee [tea], smoked her pipe, and gave herself abundance of straddling masculine airs’.

  A volume of 1718, Giles Jacob’s A Treatise of Hermaphrodites, was principally comprised of female examples. But male ones could also be found. In Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1734) Alexander Pope descants upon Lord Hervey, an eighteenth-century courtier whose ambiguous persona excited comment.

  Now high, now low, now master up, now miss,

  And he himself one vile antithesis.

  Amphibious thing! that acting either part,

  The trifling head, or the corrupted heart!

  Fop at the toilet, flatt’rer at the board,

  Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord.

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu remarked that ‘this world consists of men, women and Herveys’. Lord Hervey himself was the model for Miss Fanny in Henry Fielding’s Shamela (1741). One of his political opponents, William Pulteney, addressed him as ‘pretty sir’ in a pamphlet and added that he ‘was such a delicate hermaphrodite … you know that he is a lady himself; or at least such a nice composition of the two sexes, that it is difficult to distinguish which is more predominant’. Then he added an ambiguous observation. ‘There is a certain, unnatural, reigning vice (indecent and almost shocking to mention) … it is well known that there must be two parties in this crime, the pathic and the agent; both equally guilty. I need not explain these any further.’ Hervey immediately challenged Pulteney to a duel, from which they both escaped with only a scratch or two. But the damage had been done, and Hervey would ever after be associated with queerness.

  Dildoes were now as fashionable as they were indispensable. A French traveller, Georges-Louis Lesage, noted in 1713 that certain women walked in St James’s Park with baskets of dolls that attracted the attention of many young women. These dolls were in fact used to camouflage cylinders covered with cloth that were six inches long and one inch wide. This cylinder was celebrated in Monsieur Thing’s Origin (1722):

  The engine does come up so near to nature,

  Can spout so pleasing, betwixt wind and water,

  Warm mild, or any other liquid softer,

  Slow as they please, or, if they please, much faster.

  Theodora and Amaryllis, in A Treatise of Hermaphrodites, engage with one another until their strength ebbs; the woman on top ‘withdrew and, taking another instrument in her hand, she used it on her companion with an injection of moisture which, with the rubbing, occasioned such a tickling, as to force a discharge of matter and facilitate the pleasure’. Jacob added that ‘many lascivious females divert themselves one with another at this time in the city’.

  Dildoes were inevitably associated with female masturbation. A much circulated treatise touches upon that theme. The anonymous Onania; Or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution with all its Frightful Consequences was published in the early eighteenth century. It is essentially pornography disguised as a moral treatise.

  I began, sir, the folly at eleven years of age; was taught it by my mother’s chamber maid … we took all opportunities of committing it, and invented all the ways which were capable to heighten the titillation … We, in short, shamefully pleasured one another, as well as each ourselves … for above half year past
I have had a swelling that thrust out from my body, as big and almost as hard and as long or longer than my thumb. Which inclined me to excessive lustful desires, and from it there issues a moisture or slipperiness to that degree that I am almost continually wet.

  The dildoes might be made out of ivory or glass, or on occasion of India rubber, and came in all sizes; the glass vessels were often filled with a milky liquid that could be pumped out at an appropriate moment. Some were manipulated by hand while others were strapped on so that the woman could mimic the use of the male member; they were readily available, and one shop in Leicester Fields sold nothing else.

  12

  Good golly Miss Molly

  No real sense of privacy existed in eighteenth-century London; the private body easily became the public body. On a Sunday night in February 1726 a number of constables and law officers converged upon Mother Clap’s in Field Lane, Holborn; the streets and exits were blocked and forty ‘notorious sodomites’ were hauled to Newgate. The unusually large raid seized the public imagination, with suggestions that the accused should be castrated in open court or that ‘the hangman seal up his scrotum with a hot iron’. Three of them were literally strung up at Tyburn.

  Mother Clap’s was a molly house, its clientele known as mollies. Molly is already a familiar term in this history. The word may simply be a corruption of Mary, an old term of endearment, but it might be derived from the Latin for woman, mulier, or soft, mollis. In the eighth century Alcuin had written ‘molles sunt effeminati’, mollies are effeminate males. The thirteenth-century patriarch, Theodore, used the word in the same sense. So it is deeply rooted.