Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (41 page)

Enter the Holy Rollers. Starting in the late 1600s and lasting for about four decades, a number of groups labeled, collectively, the Society for the Reformation of Manners financed a series of vigilante police actions against behavior deemed immoral, especially among the lower classes. The society was managed by wealthy prigs and members of Parliament, with one overriding objective: Spend what was necessary, pay anyone off, use any deception, so long as sexual vice was stamped out in the process. To accomplish this, the society paid informants to infiltrate pockets of sin and then further paid constables and magistrates to arrest and charge people with whatever crime might apply. As lawsuits were costly, the society provided the funds to move the cases through court. For at least a time, the strategy bore fruit: About one hundred thousand people were prosecuted.

THE QUACK DOCTOR

From the eighteenth century onward, “science,” of both the legitimate and the quack varieties, exerted a profound influence on sexual mores and law. Here, a doctor is rebuked by a nobleman for failing to cure the venereal disease he gave to a young girl. Often the remedies for syphilis and other sexually transmitted infections were more harmful than the diseases.

©THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

Most victims of society purges were hit with garden-variety charges of lewd and disorderly practices such as street soliciting, indecent exposure, and open-air intercourse. However, the society had a special place in its spleen for male sodomy, which it pursued with intensity. Its first antihomosexual triumph was against Edward Rigby, a navy captain. In 1698, Rigby made the unlucky choice of cruising nineteen-year-old William Minton, who was in the personal service of a member of the society. Rigby approached Minton in St. James’s Park during a crowded fireworks display and pressed his erect penis into the young man’s hand. Minton could not have been too disturbed by Rigby: He promised to meet him a few days later at a tavern. Nevertheless, Minton had second thoughts about the rendezvous. He told his master and soon agreed to work with the society to trap Rigby into an arrest.

Minton met Rigby at the appointed time, in one of the tavern’s back rooms; a constable and four other society members were stationed in the adjoining chamber. Rigby had arrived in a state of high arousal. He told Minton he had already ejaculated in his pants, but was ready for more play. Minton must have seemed hesitant, because Rigby jumped in his lap and begged him for attention, telling him that everyone from Jesus Christ to Peter the Great had had sex with men. Rigby had managed to get inside Minton’s pants and had “put his finger to Minton’s fundament” when Minton grabbed Rigby’s erection and screamed: “I have now discovered your base inclinations!” As the two men scuffled, Minton cried out the signal word “Westminster!” to the officers listening next door. They rushed into the room and took Rigby away.

The captain’s conviction for blasphemy and attempted sodomy was a public relations triumph for the society, though Rigby never served out his prison sentence. (After three stints in the pillory, he escaped England to join the French navy.) For its part, the energized society continued to entrap mollies, eventually pulling off its biggest bust ever against a well-known molly house run by a woman known as “Mother Clap.” Wedged in between an arch and the Bunch o’ Grapes Tavern, Mother Clap’s establishment was a kind of molly fantasyland. Its main room was big enough to accommodate dozens of dancing, singing, and drag-wearing men at one time. One society informant described a Sunday night scene in 1725 accordingly:

I found between 40 and 50 men making Love to one another, as they call’d it. Sometimes they would sit on one another’s Laps, kissing in a lewd Manner, and using their hands indecently. Then they would get up, Dance and make Curtsies, and mimick the voices of Women . . . Then they’d hug, and play, and toy, and go out by Couples into another Room on the same Floor, to be marry’d, as they call’d it.

In addition to a wedding chapel, Mother Clap provided her clientele with a variety of bedrooms. While she did not serve alcohol (technically, the joint was a coffeehouse), the Bunch o’ Grapes did, and the spirits never stopped flowing.

Mother Clap’s club was successful, but not unusual. There were dozens of similar establishments in London, many of which operated in the open without bothering to pay off law enforcement. To the society, the very existence of the molly houses was an outrage, but pulling them down required much more planning than the Rigby operation. Society members needed to secure the cooperation of insiders—hustlers willing to turn in their friends and acquaintances—and gather evidence. Typically, their informers would take constables on fact-finding tours of molly houses.

During one such adventure in 1725, Constable Joseph Sellers accompanied the known sodomite Mark Partridge to several molly houses, where Sellers played the part of Partridge’s “husband.” One stop that night was the Tobacco Rolls alehouse in Drury Lane. There, an orange-monger nicknamed “Orange Deb” approached Sellers and, as Sellers described it to the court, “put his Hands into my Breeches thrust his Tongue into my mouth swore that he’d go 40 Mile [to] enjoy me.” Orange Deb begged Sellers to “go backward and let him,” which could mean that he wanted to either bugger Sellers or simply go with him to a backroom. Sellers refused, in either event. Orange Deb then offered to place himself “bare” on Sellers’s lap, at which point Sellers lost interest in maintaining his cover. He grabbed a red-hot poker out of the fireplace and threatened to “run it into [Orange Deb’s] arse.” In a later trial, three men testified that Orange Deb was a good man with a wife and child and never acted inappropriately. The jury disagreed and sentenced him to stand in the pillory at Bloomsbury Square as well as to prison time.

Partridge also helped the society take down Mother Clap, along with two prostitutes named Thomas Newton and Edward “Ned” Courtney. With their help, the constables had enough evidence to show up on a Sunday night in 1726 and round up about forty people, including Mother Clap herself. No one was caught actually having sex (although some of the men had their pants down), but the abundance of informants made that kind of evidence unnecessary. The first of several trials resulting from the raid sent three men to die simultaneously by hanging on a triangular gallows. As ghoulish as that sight must have been, the executions were outdone by another capital punishment at the same time and place. A woman named Catherine Hayes, convicted of murdering and dismembering her husband, was meant to be strangled just before being set alight, but the flames jumped too high and too fast for the executioner to do his job, and she was left to burn alive. Hayes’s screams were horrifying, as was the sight of her eyes melting away in the heat. Nor was that the only mishap of the day: More than 150 spectators who had paid to watch the executions from viewing stands fell to the ground in a heap when the stands collapsed, and six people died. Mother Clap was convicted in a later trial and sentenced first to the pillory and then to two years in jail. It is unlikely she survived long enough to serve her jail time, though. The newspapers reported that she was treated with so much “severity” by the crowd while in the pillory that she “swooned away twice and was carried off in Convulsion Fits.”

The raids on molly houses stirred their share of public outrage, but so did the underhanded methods used by the society. Its association with lowlife informers such as Newton and Partridge never sat well with many people, nor did the fact that the constables it employed continued to take payoffs, especially from prostitutes. At best, society members were thought of as well-meaning busybodies; at worst, they were reviled as corrupt and vicious. By 1738, the society had lost its luster and was out of business.
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The Netherlands also had a large homosexual subculture, but the state’s methods of dealing with sodomy made even less sense than England’s. In 1730, for the first time in Dutch history, homosexuals suffered heavy state persecutions—a tragedy repeated in 1764 and 1776. In each blast of trials, the confessions of men who were more or less accidentally arrested snowballed into waves of imprisonments and executions, reaching a frenzy toward the end of the century.

In 1764, the drunken Jacobus Hebelaar was drawn to two men urinating in an Amsterdam street. He sidled up, urinated himself, and tried to make a sexual connection with the smarter-dressed of the two. After being told to bugger off, he went to a public toilet under a bridge, where he robbed a man of his money, cufflinks, clothes, and corkscrew. He was arrested shortly afterward by the men at whom he had made a pass earlier in the evening. As luck would have it, they were both in law enforcement. Hebelaar was executed, but not before confessing that for the prior seven years he had committed “the gruesome sin of sodomy” both actively and passively. Moreover, he named his accomplices. Only his robbery was publicly mentioned in connection with the execution, however, most likely to avoid tipping off his sex partners that the police were on their tails. Within one year, seven men were executed, five imprisoned, three exiled, and sixty-four sentenced by default. More than one hundred men had fled the city or committed suicide, all because of Hebelaar’s unsuccessful effort to have sex with a policeman.

It is likely that neither Hebelaar nor his accomplices had the money or influence to arrange special treatment for themselves; power and position generally granted immunity from sodomy laws. In Prussia, protection from prosecution for those with means was almost complete. King Frederick II (whose own sexuality was ambiguous, to say the least) wrote that in his state there was freedom of “conscience and of cock,” but those words did not translate into action for the lower classes. Typical were the multiple acquittals of Baron Ludwig Christian Günther von Appel for sodomizing his farmhands. One of the baron’s accusers was flogged and assessed court costs. Two years later, another farmhand, Jürgen Schlobach, claimed that the baron had “twice stuck his member in his rear and once in his mouth; he’d gotten gooey and had to rinse out his mouth at the fountain.” Schlobach was flogged and banished forever from Prussia. As the whipping began, Schlobach’s father and brother attacked the flogger with pitchforks, which brought them prison sentences of their own. Schlobach’s mother was also jailed after she accused the baron’s wife of trying to buy her silence with a new dress.
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FRANCE, AS USUAL, cut its own path, suffering neither the vigilante purges of England nor Holland’s crazed persecutions. Rather, there was a great deal of police surveillance and record keeping. Sodomy remained a capital offense in France until 1791, and about forty thousand suspected homosexuals were catalogued by special sodomy patrols over the course of the century. However, very few sodomites were executed or even publicly punished. On the contrary, authorities often tried to downplay publicity for fear that spotlighting homosexuality might make it contagious. As elsewhere, those in high places could usually flout the antisodomy laws if they were discreet. The hoi polloi could count on some jail time or even banishment, but even the upper classes were not entirely safe if their sexual adventures were conducted too openly.

One summer night in 1722, among the trees and fountains surrounding the royal palace at Versailles, several young noblemen had sex with each other. The gardens, covering nearly two thousand acres, were certainly big enough for them to find a discreet spot, but they chose instead to have their fun within a stone’s throw of the palace—so close, in fact, that several people heard and saw them going at it. Although accounts differ, it seems there were at least six men involved, almost all of them recently married. In the words of a lawyer at the time, the men were not committed to sex only with their own gender; they simply enjoyed “butt-fuck[ing] each other” under the moonlight and “rather publicly.” When questioned about their escapades, none of them were contrite, nor did they have reason to be scared for their lives. Most of them were “exiled” to their comfortable estates, later to be joined by their wives. Only one was sent to the Bastille.

When the twelve-year-old future king Louis XV asked why some of his courtiers had been sent away, he was told that they had been tearing down fences in the gardens. Just two years later, Louis (who by then had been crowned) became too involved with the young Duc de La Trémoille, dubbed the “first gentleman of the King’s bedchamber.” For making a “Ganymede [i.e., a rear-end receptacle] of his master,” Trémoille was quickly married off and exiled. Louis was sent on a hunting trip to build up his manly tastes and lose his virginity. He seemed to prefer hunting, however, and—at least then—showed little interest in females.

By 1725, many felt that aristocratic homosexual behavior had gotten out of hand. “All of the young noblemen of the court were wildly addicted to it, to the great distress of the ladies of the court,” said Edmond-Jean-François Barbier, a Paris lawyer of the day. Additionally, it was believed that this “aristocratic vice” was spreading to the lower ranks. There “is no order of society, from dukes on down to footmen, that is not infected,” wrote the lawyer B.F.J. Mouffle d’Angerville. This belief was both absurd and late. Paris was already crawling with cruising spots and meeting places that catered to homosexuals from every level of society. No one on the street needed sex instruction from his social betters. Nevertheless, it was decided that the time had come for a bloody example to be made.