Class, Nation, and Sexuality: Discourse of Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain

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The early eighteenth century witnessed the birth of homosexuality as an identity and the emergence of a homosexual subculture in Britain. The homosexual subculture revealed itself through identified walkways and parks, gestures by which men might signal their interests to each other, and meeting places called "molly houses" where homosexuals could gather in relative safety. As early as 1703 the homosexuals seem to have overrun London. Homosexuals in eighteenth-century Britain provides a figure on which a variety of social anxieties could be displaced. Homosexuality is partly sexual transgression; mostly, it represents a variety of class, national, political transgressions. The association of British homosexuality with the fashion for Italian tastes was commonplace, and the growth of homosexuality was regarded as the greatest threat to the glorious Britain by destroying all its masculine virtues. Homosexuality was widely believed to be particularly common among the aristocracy and to be symptomatic of the increasing depravity of that class. The radicals in eighteenth-century Britain did not hesitate to exploit the surge in homophobia. They identified aristocratic patronage as one of the aristocratic practices that encouraged homosexuality and thus stigmatized the sort of male bonding that helped sustain aristocratic hegemony.