From the Restoration to the Romantics

Abstract

In the Renaissance texts discussed in the previous chapters, homosexual desire is either expressed within the continuum of public masculine relationships, or located in a privileged space, Barnfield’s green world of pastoral delight or the secret folds of time and space within Shakespeare’s Sonnets? — places fashioned by the private imagination. But in the period between the later seventeenth century and the early nineteenth, a marked shift occurred in the way such desire was represented. A homosexual subculture emerged in London and some other cities, providing a new milieu for the social expression of desire, and prompting outraged comments by hostile observers who represented this increasingly visible way of life as a threat to godly British masculinity. The city took on a new configuration, for its geography now included cruising grounds and specialized clubs, the ‘molly houses’ where men gathered not only to have casual sex but to establish relationships which they celebrated in rituals which parodied those of the world outside. Here were lives which were not aligned with those masculine relationships which society approved, for they transgressed boundaries of class and social orderliness. These desires were no longer invisible by virtue of merging into the language of the orthodox world: instead, they escaped recognition by being hidden away until revealed by the puritanical vigilance of the Society for the Reformation of Manners, which from the 1690s onwards patrolled the city to uncover and publicize behaviour which it considered immoral. A contest for possession of social space was interwoven with a struggle for the power to define sexual behaviour: the men who frequented the molly houses were insisting on having a collectively-determined space in which they could assert their own sexuality, and the map of London now included a network of semi-clandestine places which offered relative security. Meanwhile anxiety about what was happening to masculinity was played out on the public stage, particularly in the comedy of the Restoration and early eighteenth century: here characters who are thought to prefer sex with men increasingly came to be seen as part of a spedalized, identifiable group which had its own social spaces and leisure activities, but also threatened the language and more? of polite society.

How tired I am of keeping a mask on my countenance. How tight it sticks — it makes me sore.

The Journal of William Beckford in Portugal and Spai?, p. 41