LGBT History in The United Kingdom - 18th Century

18th Century

• 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."

• 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.

• 1736 Stephen Fox PC a British peer and Member of Parliament had been living in a homosexual relationship with lover Lord Hervey for a period of ten years, from 1726 to 1736. Love letters (The Gay Love Letters of John, Lord Hervey to Stephen Fox) between Stephen and John testify their love.

• 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 to homosexuality and the human rights of men who were homosexual. Jones was acquitted and received a pardon on condition that he left the country. He ended up living in grandeur with his footman at Lyon, in the South of France.

• 1785 Jeremy Bentham becomes one of the first people to argue for the decriminalisation of sodomy in England, which was punishable by hanging. The essay written about 1785, Offences Against One's Self, argued for the liberalisation of laws prohibiting homosexual sex. He argued that homosexual acts did not weaken men nor threaten population nor marriage.