This is a blog post about molly houses, which were coffee houses or taverns in which gay men could meet and socialise. It focuses on what items in The British Newspaper Archive can tell us about these places.
This article explores the shifting perceptions of masculinity and male sexuality throughout the eighteenth century. It uses objects from the V&A collection to examine changing attitudes toward effeminacy and homosexuality in popular culture, fashion, theatre, and art.
This is a collection of primary sources (including trial transcripts, poems, and newspaper articles) about homosexuality in 18th century England. They provide a powerful insight into ideas and attitudes concerning homosexuality in this period.
This article looks at the Leendert Hasenbosch, a Dutch East India Company soldier who was marooned on Ascension Island as punishment for sodomy in 1725.
"This project, based on thousands of police records located in several Parisian repositories, involves the creation of an interactive database that will allow students and scholars to analyze patterns and changes in same-sex relations from the 1720s to the 1780s."
This article explores the insight that trial records from the 18th and 19th centuries can give us about gay and lesbian communities in London at that time. It includes a list of key terms that are useful when searching for material on homosexuality in this period.
"In eighteenth-century Europe, medical writers rejected the existence of human hermaphrodites as contrary to reason. This paper examines the underlying logic of this “rationalization” through textual analysis of James Parsons’ 1741 'Mechanical and Critical Enquiry Into the Nature of Hermaphrodites'."
