Sexual Subcultures: Caught In The Act

"I still look upon this group of people as a group with which I have a cultural affinity. As a gay man I think you can look upon this material and you find evidence that doesn't surprise you at all.
"You find nelly queens, you find rough trade, you find men who are defiant, you find men who are ashamed of themselves and commit suicide, you find men who join the club every evening and resign from the club every morning - very much the same as today
"I really do recognise them as gay men, in the modern sense of the word gay. I really do think you have to reclaim your past before you can fight for the good gay future."

Rictor Norton, Voices From the Old Bailey: Sexual Subcultures, BBC Radio 4.

The don of gay historians, Rictor Norton, was speaking on this brilliant programe that looked at three 18th century court cases recored at London's Old Bailey;
Gabriel Lawrence, a milkman arrested at a molly house (a gay pub/club/brothel) - and later hanged.
The Brown brothers who blackmailed sodomites they caught cruising St James's Park
And Princess Seraphina, who fought back and took to court a man who'd tried to rob her of her drag.
She won, too.

Old Bailey accounts like these are pretty much the only way we can know anything about the lives of ordinary gay men at the time.
You can read those featured on this programme on the BBC website.
I find things like this endlessly fascinating and I hope you do, too.
If so, and haven't had the pleasure already, visit Rictor Norton's astounding gay history website.
Rictor also does a quite devastating demolition job on those Foucauldian fools who argue that "the homosexual" is a modern invention - as did one of his co-contributors on the programme.
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful stuff.
Right, I think that's enough superlatives for one post, don't you?

• The version broadcast this evening is edited - and misses a third of the material, so you'll miss much. Not least of the which is the bawdy Georgian song 'Bumography'!

Johnnie Shand Kydd: Born Again

In the Telegraph, photographer Johnnie Shand Kydd tells the story behind a picture of a rather queer ritual he once witnessed in Naples.
"One of the most fascinating pictures in the book, I think, is the one of the transsexual giving birth to a doll. I met the old boy a year ago and discovered that he was one of the last practitioners of this strange ritual.
He goes through the whole process of giving birth, so his waters break, and then he rushes to the window and shouts down to the street “help me, help me!”
"The next door neighbours rush up to find him and help him give birth. He’s given birth about 13 times. It’s a profundity ritual. I got access to it to photograph it, and then I read a book called ‘The Skin’ by Curzio Malaparte and there’s a chapter in that called ‘The Son of Adam’ which describes exactly the same ritual, in 1947. I then found out that this bizarre ritual goes back thousands of years."
Wow.
This reminded Fagburn of an account of another mock birth unearthed by the gay historian, Rictor Norton.
300 years ago, Ned Ward witnessed just such a ritual at a Molly House in London.
"Not long since, upon one of their Festival Nights, they had cusheon'd up the Belly of one of their Sodomitical Brethren, or rather Sisters, as they commonly call'd themselves, disguising him in a Womans Night-Gown, Sarsnet-Hod, and Nightrale, who, when the Company were met, was to mimick the wry Faces of a groaning Woman, to be deliver'd of a joynted Babie they had provided for that Purpose, and to undergo all the Formalities of a Lying in. The Wooden Off-spring to be afterwards Christen'd, and the holy Sacrament of Baptism to be impudently Prophan'd, for the Diversion of the Profligates, who, when their infamous Society were assembl'd in a Body, put their wicked Contrivance accordingly into practice..."
Isn't it strange the way some things survive?