molly house

Etymology

Definitions

1. 1

   A tavern or other establishment in 18th and 19th century England where homosexuals could…

   A tavern or other establishment in 18th and 19th century England where homosexuals could meet for various activities, such as cross-dressing and sexual encounters.

   • Just west of Charing Cross (where a molly named Tolson kept a brandy shop in the late 1720s, and where Whale and Horner were pilloried for keeping a molly house), we come to St James's Square and Pall Mall, ...
   • In a vivid illustration of the dynamics created by sexual deviance, molly houses were a defense against the pressures of prejudice, but their visibility inspired new hostility.
   • One visitor to a molly house in the Old Bailey observed “men calling one another 'my dear' and hugging, kissing, and tickling each other as if they were a mixture of wanton males and females, and assuming effeminate voices and airs.
2. 2

   Alternative form of molly house.

   • 'Molly Houses' — places where homosexual men gather— may have been around as early as 1700: this is where the historian Rictor Norton in fact locates the origins of a gay subculture in England (Norton 1992).
   • [I]n a Bow Street Runners raid on a Molly House called the White Swan, twenty-seven men were arrested for sodomy and attempted sodomy.

The neighborhood