Some History Of Gay Rights & Wrongs In The UK And Molly Houses...

💕LIVE AND LET LIVE...💕

18th century...

• 1711 – Anne, Queen of Great Britain ended a long-lasting intimate friendship with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. The "Queen's Favourite" hoped to wield power equal to that of a government minister. When their relationship soured, she blackmailed Anne with letters revealing their intimacy, and accused her of perverting the course of national affairs by keeping lesbian favourites. Anne and Sarah had invented pet names for themselves during their youths which they continued to use after Anne became queen: Mrs Freeman (Sarah) and Mrs Morley (Anne). Effectively a business manager, Sarah had control over the queen's position, from her finances to people admitted to the royal presence.
• 1722 – John Quincy writes about lesbianism in his second edition of the Lexicon Physico Medicum. Acc
• 1724 – Margaret Clap, better known as Mother Clap, ran a coffee house from 1724 to 1726 in Holborn, London. The coffee house served as a Molly House for the underground gay community. Her house was popular, being well known within the gay community. She cared for her customers, and catered especially to the gay men who frequented it. She was known to have provided "beds in every room of the house" and commonly had "thirty or forty of such Kind of Chaps every Night, but more especially on Sunday Nights".

18th century illustration of a "Molly" (contemporary term for an effeminate homosexual)

• 1726 – Three men (Gabriel Lawrence, William Griffin, and Thomas Wright) were hanged at Tyburn for sodomy following a raid of Margaret Clap's Molly House.
• 1727 – Charles Hitchen, a London Under City Marshal, was convicted of attempted sodomy at a Molly House. Hitchen had abused his position of power to extort bribes from brothels and pickpockets to prevent arrest, and he particularly leaned on the thieves to make them fence their goods through him. Hitchen had frequently picked up soldiers for sex, but had eluded prosecution by the Society for the Reformation of Manners.
• 1728 –18th century London Molly House, Julius Caesar Taylor's, Tottenham Court Road, Jenny Greensleeves' Molly House, Durham Yard, off The Strand, The Golden Ball, Bond's Stables, off Chancery Lane, Royal Oak Molly House, Giltspur Street, Smithfield and Three Tobacco Rolls Covent Garden were operating in London.
• 1730 – The term "lesbian" to describe same sex relationships between women comes into use around the 1730s.
• 1735 – Conyers Place wrote "Reason Insufficient Guide to Conduct Mankind in Religion".
• 1736 – Love letters from Lord John Hervey to Stephen Fox PC, a British peer and Member of Parliament, show that they had been living in a homosexual relationship for a period of ten years, from 1726 to 1736.
• 1749 – Thomas Cannon wrote "Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplified".
• 1772 – The first public debate about homosexuality began during the trial of Captain Robert Jones who was convicted of the capital offence of sodomizing a thirteen-year-old boy. The debate during the case and with the background of the 1772 Macaroni prosecutions considered Christian intolerance of homosexuality and the human rights of men who were homosexual. Jones was acquitted and received a pardon on condition that he leave the country. He ended up living in grandeur with his footman at Lyon, in the South of France.
• 1773 – Charles Crawford wrote "A Dissertation on the Phaedon of Plato".
• 1776 –18th century London gay bar, Harlequin (Nag's Head Court, Covent Garden) was operating.
• 1778 - Eleanor Butler & Sarah Ponsonby, known as The Ladies of Llangollen, were two upper-class Irish women whose relationship scandalized and fascinated their contemporaries during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The pair moved to a Gothic house in Llangollen, North Wales, in 1780 after leaving Ireland to escape the social pressures of conventional marriages. Over the years, numerous distinguished visitors called upon them. Guests included Shelley, Byron, Wellington and Wordsworth, who wrote a sonnet about them.
• 1785 – Jeremy Bentham becomes one of the first people to argue for the decriminalization of homosexuality in England, which was punishable by hanging. The essay Offences Against One's Self, written about 1785, argued for the liberalization of laws prohibiting homosexual sex. He argued that homosexual acts did not weaken men, nor threaten population or marriage. The essay was never published in his lifetime.
• 1797 – The Encyclopedia Britannica published a brief mention of homosexuality in the article about Greece.

19th century...

William Blake's Lot and His Daughters, Huntington Library, c. 1800

• 1800 – William Blake paints "Lot and His Daughters". The Book of Genesis in chapters 11–14 and 18–19 describes Lot and his family, living through the fire and brimstone sent against Sodom and Gomorrah apparently for either rape, transgression of the laws of hospitality, or homosexuality. "Lot and His Daughters" however portrays the part of the story that involves incest, not homosexuality: the story in Genesis describes how the daughters of Lot, along the road as they fled from Sodom and Gomorrah, got their father drunk so that after he fell asleep they could have sex with him and in this way get children from him.
• 1806 – Yorkshire gentlewoman Anne Lister starts writing love letters to and from Eliza Raine. Lister actively participated in and wrote about her lesbian relationships in an encrypted diary. Although she did not use the word lesbian, at age thirty, she wrote, "I love and only love the fairer sex and thus, beloved by them in turn my heart revolts from any other love but theirs.
• 1810 – The nineteenth century began with a wave of prosecutions against homosexual men. On 14 January, a farmer in West Yorkshire wrote in his diary that capital punishment seemed an unacceptably cruel response to a sexual behavior that nature or God had ordained in an individual. (The diary entry was discovered in 2020.) On 8 July, the Bow Street Runners raided The White Swan, a tumbledown pub of Tudor origin near Drury Lane. Twenty-seven men were arrested on suspicion of sodomy and attempted sodomy.
• 1811 – The Scottish court case Woods and Pirie vs Dame Cumming Gordon showed two teachers are accused of having a lesbian relationship by a pupil, claiming they had indecent sexual relationships. However, one judge found that sex between women was "equally imaginary with witchcraft, sorcery or carnal copulation with the devil", illustrating notions at the time that tied sexuality with masculinity.
• 1812 – James Miranda Barry graduated from the Medical School of Edinburgh University as a doctor. Barry went on to serve as an army surgeon working overseas. Barry lived as a man but was found to be female-bodied upon his death in 1865.
• 1828 – The Buggery Act 1533 was repealed and replaced by the Offences against the Person Act 1828. Buggery remained punishable by death.
• 1833 – 24-year old actor Eliza Edwards is found dead. The corpse was taken to Guys Hospital for an autopsy, where it is discovered that they were 'a perfect man'.
• 1835 – The last two men to be executed in Britain for buggery, James Pratt and John Smith, were arrested on 29 August in London after being spied upon while having sex in a private room; they were hanged on 27 November.
• 1838 – Harry Stokes was a master bricklayer, beerhouse manager and special constable in Manchester. He was assigned a female gender at birth but lived as a man. Harry had two long-term relationships with women, both of which lasted over 20 years. In 1838 and 1859 his gender variance became the subject of local and national newspaper articles in which he was described as a 'man-woman' and a 'female husband'.
• 1852 – John Martin paints The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorah. Sodom was (supposedly) destroyed for the sin of sodomy, although a strong case has been made that violence against persons and transgression of the laws of hospitality, including a demand that he hand over his houseguests (who happened to be angels) to the ruffian citizens of the town, were more important at the time of the composition of the story in Genesis, chapter 19.
• 1861 – The death penalty for buggery was abolished when the Offences Against the Person Act 1828 was replaced with the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. A total of 8921 men had been prosecuted since 1806 for sodomy with 404 sentenced to death and 56 executed. Homosexuality remained illegal until 1967 in England and Wales and 1980 in Scotland.
• 1866 – Marriage was defined as being between a man and a woman (preventing future same-sex marriages). In the case of Hyde v. Hyde and Woodmansee (a case of polygamy), Lord Penzance's judgment began "Marriage as understood in Christendom is the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others."
• 1871 – Ernest 'Stella' Boulton and Frederick 'Fanny' Park, two Victorian transvestites and suspected homosexuals, appeared as defendants in the celebrated Boulton and Park trial in London, charged "with conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offence". The indictment was against Lord Arthur Clinton, Ernest Boulton, Frederic Park, Louis Hurt, John Fiske, Martin Cumming, William Sommerville and C. H. Thompson. The prosecution was unable to prove either that they had committed any homosexual offence or that men wearing women's clothing was an offence in English law. Lord Arthur Clinton killed himself before his trial.

Fanny and Stella (Park & Boulton) on stage

• 1872 – Sheridan Le Fanu publishes the novella Carmilla, which depicts the tale of a lesbian vampire luring young women for her mother to sacrifice.
• 1883 – John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes of Tilton, CB FBA was born. Openly homosexual, Keynes a British economist whose ideas have profoundly affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, as well as the economic policies of governments. He diarized his homosexual encounters and records that he had 65 encounters in 1909, 26 in 1910, 39 in 1911.
• 1885 – The British Parliament enacted Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, section 11 of which, known as the Labouchere Amendment, prohibited gross indecency between males. It thus became possible to prosecute homosexuals for engaging in sexual acts where it could not be proven.
• 1885 – A collection of the poems of Sappho were translated and published in English by Henry Thornton Wharton as Sappho: Memoir, Text, and Selected Renderings. Wharton maintained a homosexual interpretation of "Ode to Aphrodite".
• 1889 – The Cleveland Street scandal occurred, when a homosexual male brothel in Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia, London, was raided by police after they discovered telegraph boys had been working there as rent boys. A number of aristocratic clients were discovered, including Lord Arthur Somerset, equerry to the Prince of Wales. The Prince of Wales's son Prince Albert Victor and Lord Euston were also implicated.
• Scotland became the last jurisdiction in Europe to abolish the death penalty for same-sex sexual intercourse, which reduced the penalty to life imprisonment in a ^{penitentiary.} 
• 1895 – Oscar Wilde, tried for gross indecency over a relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, was sentenced to two years in prison with hard labor.
• The gay English poet A. E. Housman writes a poem about the trial of Oscar Wilde. Due to its content, it was not published until after Housman's death.
• Winston Churchill was accused of having committed "acts of gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type" while a cadet at Sandhurst. Churchill sued the accuser for defamation and was awarded £400 in damages. Throughout his life, Churchill showed little interest in women other than his wife, enjoyed the company of homosexuals, and was deeply attached to male friends and his long-standing secretary Edward Marsh.
• 1897 – George Cecil Ives organizes the first homosexual rights group in England, the Order of Chaeronea. Dr Helen Boyle and her partner, Mabel Jones, set up the first women-run general practice in Brighton, including offering free therapy for poor women. Helen Boyle also founded the National Council for Mental Hygiene (which subsequently became MIND) in 1922. Havelock Ellis publishes Sexual Inversion, the first volume in an intended series called Studies in the Psychology of Sex. He argues that homosexuality is not a disease but natural, occurring throughout human and animal history, and should be accepted, not treated. The book was banned in England for being obscene; the subsequent volumes in the series published in the US and not sold in England until 1936.
• 1898 – George Bedborough is convicted of obscenity, for selling a copy of Havelock Ellis's book Studies in the Psychology of Sex Vol. 2, on the topic of homosexuality.

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