By the 1770s, at the latest, queer women were often called ‘tommies’. It was the female equivalent of ‘molly’. It is mentioned in The Adulteress (1773) that ‘Unnatural crimes like these my satire vex / I know a thousand Tommies amongst the sex’. And in 1777 the anonymous author of A Sappick Epistle noted of Sappho herself that ‘she was the first Tommy the world has upon record; but to do her justice, though there have been many Tommies since, yet we have never had but one Sappho’.
Another female who mounted the stage in male clothes was Margaret or Peg Woffington who also specialised in breeches parts. She was a well-known ‘beauty’ whose charms appealed to both sexes equally, as a contemporary squib makes clear:
That excellent Peg
Who showed such a leg,
When lately she dressed in men’s clothes.
A creature uncommon
Who’s both man and woman
And chief of the belles and the beaux.
She was the only woman member of the Beefsteak Club, which included Garrick and Hogarth, and eventually became its president. The interest in female actors playing male parts had subsided by the end of the eighteenth century, but was revived at a later date in Victorian music-hall acts. It might be suggested that the breeches parts became unfashionable precisely at the time when the public consciousness of lesbianism reached a high level, but the connection cannot be proven.
In 1746 a prostitute, Ann Ellingworth, persuaded a man and wife to join her for a pot of ale in the Castle at Seven Dials. At her subsequent trial for robbing the husband, Ann testified that Mrs King had attempted to seduce her. She delared that ‘Terence King’s wife went to put her hands up my petticoats and I did not like it from a woman’s hands. I had never known such doings from our own sex … Mrs King and I had some words. As I stood at the door she clapp’d her hands up my coats: I said I was never used so by a woman, I don’t know what you mean by it! And with that the husband went to strike me.’ The jury believed Ann’s account, and she was acquitted. It was perhaps not very unusual for one woman to proposition another.
Hester Thrale, the quondam companion and confidante of Samuel Johnson, was beady-eyed on the subject of queer women and monitored what was for her an increasingly gruesome situation from the 1770s to 1793. From Turkey to Twickenham the signs could be found, the latter area in particular being known for its accomplished sapphists. Here, for example, lived Lady Mary Wortley Montagu whose travels in Turkey, and sojourns among Turkish women, led her into curious and unfamiliar habits. It was said that she had established her own harem of young women.
Thrale noted with an early entry in her diary that ‘this horrible vice has a Greek name now and is called Sapphism … it is now grown common to suspect impossibilities (such I think them) whenever two ladies live too much together’. She mentioned that ‘that house of Miss Rathbone’s is now supposed to have been but a cage of unclean birds, living in a sinful celibàt. Mercy on us!’ The danger came ever closer. The actress Mrs Siddons even warned Mrs Thrale that her ‘sister was in personal danger once from a female friend of this sort’. It was everywhere, and Hester Thrale fell into a moral panic. ‘Why was Miss Weston so averse to any marriage I am thinking … Colonel Barry had a good escape of Miss Trefusis if all be true.’ Nobody was safe from the tommy. Thrale was also on the alert for queer males whom she called ‘finger twirlers’. One was known as ‘the It’ for his exotic ways. London had become a ‘sink’ for all sins, and she lamented the frequency of that ‘unnatural vice among men (now so modish)’.
A German traveller, Johann von Archenholz, published a book of his travels in 1787 in which he commented that in London ‘there are females who avoid all intimate intercourse with the opposite sex, confining themselves to their own sex. These females are called lesbians. They have small societies, known as Anandrinic Societies, of which Mrs Y, formerly a famous London actress, was one of the presidents.’ Mrs Y was Mary Anne Yates, a tragedy actress at the Drury Lane theatre, about whom strange rumours circulated. She was considered to be stately, haughty and hard.
More news was published in December 1792. The Bon Ton Magazine disclosed the presence in London of a female whipping club that met on Thursday evening in Jermyn Street. It was comprised of ‘female flagellists’ who had ‘grown weary of wedlock in all its accustomed forms’ and wanted to add spice to their encounters with one another; they wished also ‘to keep their propensities, for such we may fairly call them, profoundly secret’. They were not altogether secret, however, because the correspondent of Bon Ton remarked that they choose their positions, stooping down or standing up, by lot. The chairwoman of the little gathering began the session with a lecture and then a practical demonstration; it was she who decided whether the ‘engine of duty’ should be applied to the thighs, the buttocks or the ‘cave of Cupid’. It sounds remarkably like a male fantasy, as exemplified in the semi-pornographic novellas of the period, but the fact that it could be conceived at all is an indication of the sexual possibilities of the city. What could be imagined could also be performed.
One of the most famous female queers of the late eighteenth century was Anne Damer. She was considered to be ‘singular’ – ‘she wears a man’s hat and shoes – and a jacket also like a man’s – as she walks about the fields with a hooking stick’. Hester Thrale, ever on the watch for ‘singularity’, noted in her diary of 17 June 1790: ‘Mrs Damer, a lady much suspected to liking her own sex in a criminal way.’ It was considered to be ‘a joke in London now to say such a one visits Mrs Damer’. She was partial to actresses or perhaps actresses were partial to her.
Female marriages were still part of the early-nineteenth-century world. In 1827, Mary Shelley assisted Mary Diana Dods to elope to Paris with her lover, Isabella Robinson. Dods eventually took the name of Walter Sholto Douglas, who just happened to be the husband of Isabella Robinson. Under another assumed name, David Lyndsay, she wrote books and articles; the only biography of her, by Betty T. Bennett, is entitled Mary Diana Dods: A Gentleman and a Scholar. Another interesting example came to light in the Edinburgh Annual Register of 1815 when a black woman of twenty successfully posed as the captain on the foretop of a ship. She then came to London as a prizefighter, for which she gained great plaudits, and it was reported that ‘in her manner she exhibits all the traits of a British tar, and takes her grog with her late messmates with the greatest gaiety … She declared her intention of again entering the service as a volunteer.’
14
Tiddy dolls
Mr Fribble has emerged in an earlier chapter as the model of a mid-eighteenth-century queer. He was the creation of David Garrick who introduced him to the stage in a farce of 1747, Miss in Her Teens. ‘We drink tea, hear the chat of the day, invent fashions for the ladies, make models of ’em, and cut out patterns in paper.’ If eventually Mr Fribble should marry ‘the domestic business will be taken off her hands; I shall make the tea, comb the dogs, and dress the children myself … But my dear creature, who put on your cap to-day? They have made a fright of you, and it’s as yellow as old Lady Crowfoot’s neck … What shall I do? I shall certainly catch my death! Where’s my cambric handkerchief, and my salts? I shall certainly have my hysterics!’
In the same year Nathaniel Lancaster’s The Pretty Gentleman asked the reader to ‘observe that fine complexion! Examine that smooth, that velvety skin! View this pallor which spreads itself over his countenance. Hark, with what a feminine softness his accents steal their way through his half-opened lips!’ He might be known as a fribble or a whiffle, a jemmy or a macaroni, with names such as Lord Dimple and Marjorie Pattypan.
Waterloo Sedley, in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), announced himself with the words ‘I am a dressy man’. It was remarked that ‘though rather uneasy if the ladies looked at him … and though he blushed and turned away alarmed at their glances, it was chiefly from dread lest they should make love to him’. Yet when posted to Calcutta ‘he gave the best bachelor dinners’.
The effe
minate male has been parodied or satirised for the best part of a thousand years and continues in the pantomime dames of the day before yesterday. This in turn leads to the question at the heart of this book. What is the connection between queerness and the city? It is not confined to the city, but it is identified with it. It is no accident that the two great urban centres of classical antiquity, Athens and Rome, were well known for their homosexual ambience.
The atmosphere of London, too, floats over the familiar claims of the family and of traditional loyalties; London is by its nature subversive, suborning previously tight bonds. That is why it symbolised abstract space and abstract justice instead of the claims of kinship. Other forms of community emerged, entirely estranged from the family or blood kinship. These were the communities formed by those of similar tastes and habits; they could be part of the culture of the streets or of the taverns, or they might be communities of strangers associated with a certain public footpath or bog house. Some of them were the anonymous wanderers of London, linked briefly by furtive sex in a dark corner. Some of them claimed the city night as their own. The city was the home and haven of anonymity.
Queer men and women were able in the multifarious city to adopt different personae, with changes of dress and behaviour, being a serious citizen at one time and a screaming molly at another. The women could change into men’s clothes in a moment and disport themselves in the tavern or the coffee shop. In a society which relied upon ostensible gradations of rank and dress, the rule-benders of eighteenth-century London had a distinct advantage. They could be anyone.
Urban types, as popularised by the essayists and playwrights, might also be the pillars of the gay world; the confirmed bachelor, the actor, the theatregoer, the dandy or macaroni, the milliner and the delivery boy, all were ambiguous. They had only to play to stereotype to be an intrinsic part of London.
The crowds, the spaces, the alleys, the incomprehensible babble of voices, induced in some a creeping sense of chaos and confusion where all boundaries were ignored. The crowd itself could be a sexual experience. You could see, and be seen by, many others, with the delight of the gaze or the shared look. Anyone might become available. The queer could enter the markets or the assembly rooms, the taverns or the bog houses, and observe the restless waves of Londoners bent upon excitement and the unexpected. The city was known to be both a jungle and a labyrinth where gay life could flourish, each street leading to another and then another; there was no end to the possibilities or to the adventures. It provoked the restless need to explore.
As Italo Calvino put it in Invisible Cities, ‘cities, like dreams, are made up of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspective deceitful, and everything conceals something else’. The city was a phantasmagoria or a dreamscape, therefore, upon which the queer man or woman could project the most illicit longings. It was the most open and public place but also the most private and furtive space.
The migrants who moved to London were entering a world entirely different from anything they had known before. Even if it could be deadly it was undoubtedly exciting. Sexual experimentation, and sexual excess, were thereby encouraged. The new sense of anonymity also warmed the atmosphere; here were men and women packed together, practically living in each other’s chambers. The city sexualised everything and everybody within its ambit. That is why the masquerades and the pleasure gardens, the tavern grounds and the bagnios were hives of illicit activity.
In London was situated the largest sexual market in the country, rivalling the meat market of Smithfield. In London we can locate the various prostitutes of both sexes – the soldiers who acted as hustlers in St James’s Park and elsewhere, the young boys who had been trained in service, the effeminate men, the men dressed as women, the women dressed as men, the street boys who congregated at certain corners or by certain public monuments, the inhabitants of brothels who rarely saw the light of day, all of these were part of London trade. More rich men lived in London than in any other part of England; the city therefore acted as a powerful draw to those who wished to earn their living in a certain way. Great clerics and great courtiers had their houses or palaces in the city. It was perhaps not entirely foolish of the London crowd of the sixteenth century, for example, to conclude that sodomy was the particular vice of ‘the church and the court’.
The city was also a great stage upon which men and women saw themselves. It offered the arena for theatrical self-definition and the proclamation of difference. Some were applauded, and others condemned, according to the taste of the moment. But in a sense the city itself seemed to shape their sexuality; it may have emboldened and inspired them to create a new identity at the same time as they struggled with the novel complexities of their lives.
Being queer almost became the fashion of the mid eighteenth century. In 1746 Charles Churchill wrote: ‘Go where we will at every time and place, / Sodom confronts, and stares us in the face.’
Tobias Smollett caricatured the queer man in Roderick Random (1748). Captain Whiffle of the Royal Navy had flowing long hair ‘in ringlets, tied behind with a ribbon’; he wore a white hat topped by a feather, a pink silk coat, a white satin waistcoat embroidered with gold while his ‘crimson velvet breeches scarcely descended so low as to meet his silk stockings’. Life in the forces was not necessarily kind for the sodomite. One soldier earned five hundred lashes for the act in 1747, while in 1749 it was decreed that sodomy deserved a court martial and could be punished with death by hanging. Nevertheless one character in Roderick Random remarks that ‘in our own country it gains ground apace, and in all probability will become in a short time a more fashionable vice than simple fornication’. It was also given a walk-on part in John Cleland’s Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), in which the heroine watches with mounting interest the antics of two young men. It has been suggested that Cleland himself was queer, transmogrifying adventures between men into ones between men and women. Ever the pornographer, he also includes the excitements between two women until the moment when Fanny eventually withdraws her hand ‘wet and clammy’. From these books alone one might conclude that gay sex, for both males and females, was one of the readily available pleasures of the night.
But it was not necessarily free and easy. There were still many noblemen and gentlemen who fled to the Continent in order to avoid prosecution or obloquy; occasional panics over prosecution prompted many journeys over the sea, especially to Italy or to France. Edward Onslow went into exile at Clermont-Ferrand in 1781, for example, following an indiscretion at the Royal Academy with a London gentleman by the name of Phelim Macarty. The twin perils of disgrace and loneliness led many queers towards melancholy or despair. One such was Thomas Gray, the author of ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1750), whose naturally nervous disposition gave way to morbidity and anxious fear. He was well known for the flowers in his window boxes and the potpourri in his china vases, for the refinement of his dress and the delicacy of his manners, but nothing could ever be said about his secret. The sin, if such it was, lay deeply buried within him. It was for him a source of misery, as it must also have been for many of his contemporaries. Horace Walpole, one of Gray’s dear friends, was also prey to fear and trembling. He wrote that ‘I believe the state of my mind has contributed to a very weak and decaying body’ and ‘my present disorders’.
William Beckford was a dilettante and littérateur of a slightly later date whose romance Vathek (1782) had the added distinction of being composed in French. He began an affair with a sixteen-year-old, William Courtenay, and such was Beckford’s distinction that it soon reached the public prints. The Morning Herald of 27 November 1784 commented that ‘the rumour concerning a grammatical mistake of Mr B____ and the Hon. Mr C_____ in regard to the genders, we hope for the honour of nature originates in calumny!’ The blanks in place of names of course fooled nobody in a city where everyone knew everyone else and where sexual preferences were endlessly
discussed. Beckford left the country.
Another dilettante published a learned treatise on the subject of the erect penis. Richard Payne Knight’s Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and its Connection with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients (1786) was in large part an enquiry into the fertility rites of pagans and Christians, together with diversions on such subjects as hermaphroditism and phallus worship. Christianity got the worst of it in arguments and learned footnotes. The book had been sponsored by the Society of Dilettanti but it was covertly a paean to same-sex activities.
Images of the phallus itself, as the holy grail of pagan ritual, were not to eighteenth-century taste. The book was attacked as ‘containing all the ordure and filth, all the antique pictures and all the representations of generative organs in their most odious and degrading protrusion’. It was the kind of criticism, however, that might attract readers. Knight himself was banished from the clubs of London, and gained a perhaps unmerited reputation as a satyr in Georgian dress.
Another fashionable figure was the object of much vexed enquiry in the same period. The Chevalier d’Eon had lived as a male in France in his youth and early twenties but was then sent as a female spy to St Petersburg. On his return from Russia he began his military career as a captain of the dragoons before being sent to London in 1762 as Minister Plenipotentiary. He had professed himself mortified to be mistaken for a female, but then he confided to Beaumarchais that he was indeed a woman trapped in male clothes to serve the French state. He dressed as a female, and she dressed as a male. This was confusion incarnate. Within two months he appeared in the uniform of a captain of the French cavalry but at a later date emerged ‘dressed in an elegant sack, her head-dress adorned with diamonds and bedecked with all the paraphernalia of her sex’. It was said that as a male he was petulant and somewhat irritable, but as a woman he was aggressive and boisterous. Casanova, the great connoisseur of sexuality, declared that ‘I had not been a quarter of an hour in her company before I knew her for a woman’.
Queer City Page 13