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PERFORMING “AKIMBO” 35
Randolph Trumbach has written of the mollies: “All stood to lose a great deal
if their actions were discovered. There was daily contempt for the obvious
sodomite, and for all there were the possibilities of ostracism or blackmail, the
pillory or hanging” (1977:15). That the mollies were willing to be visible in the
face of raids and prosecutions by the Society for the Reformation of Manners
(and despite media attention by hack writers like Ward) indicates that they
benefited from the new sodomite identity strongly enough to be willing to risk
all to occupy it. But just what sort of identity were the mollies occupying? Not
only was sodomy understood to be a nonidentification, a loss of self; as a
symptom of pride like aristocracy, it was also understood to be a willing or
excessive flaunting of difference from the social structures of self. Sodomy, that
is, had become an effeminate’s occupation, both a sitting-in a place that was
nowhere (knackered) and a trade (knick-knackery). I want to suggest that what
the mollies felt was not so much a coming into view of a “new kind of self,” but
an (un)identification with the normative models of self mandated by the
increasingly dominant bourgeoisie, by philosophers like Locke and critics like
Shaftesbury, and by political machines like the Society for the Reformation of
Manners.
Molly identification happened with entry into certain spaces (molly houses,
cruising grounds, and so on) where desire to have sex with other men became
simultaneously perceivable as an occupation of a marginal identity. To occupy
these spaces was to “be” a molly: these occupations were therefore transitory and
enacted at the expense of other identifications. Indeed, as the author of The
Phoenix of Sodom suggested, the occupation of a molly identity, within the
special molly house or meeting place, made it possible to unidentify oneself from
all other everyday identifications:
It seems the greater part of these reptiles assume feigned names, though
not very appropriate to their calling in life: for instance, Kitty Cambric is a
Coal Merchant; Miss Selina, a Runner at a Police office; Black-eyed
Leonora, a Drummer; Pretty Harriet, a Butcher; Lady Godina, a Waiter; the
Dutchess of Gloucester, a gentleman’s servant; Duchess of Devonshire, a
Blacksmith; and Miss Sweet Lips, a Country Grocer.
(12–13)
One of the most threatening aspects of molly (un)identifications was that they
collapsed or suspended other social identifications: the Phoenix of Sodom
recorded that “Men of rank, and respectable situations in life, might be seen
wallowing either in or on the beds with wretches of the lowest description” (11).
The same complaint had been made by Ward against virtuosi clubs “compos’d of
such an odd mixture of Mankind, That,…here sat a nice Beau next to a dirty
Blacksmith;…yonder a half-witted Whim of Quality, next to a ragged
Mathematician” and so on (1710:18). In the molly houses, fumed Ward, men