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36 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
stopped speaking as husbands, fathers, gentlemen, and laborers, and pretended to
speak as women: the mollies, he wrote,
are so far degenerated from all Masculine Deportment or Manly exercises
that they rather fancy themselves Women, imitating all the little Vanities
that Custom has reconcil’d to the Female sex, affecting to speak, walk,
tattle, curtsy, cry, scold, & mimick all manner of Effeminacy…every one
was to talk of their Husbands & Children, one estolling [sic] the Virtues of
her Husband, another the genius & wit of their Children; whilst a Third
would express himself sorrowfully under the character of a Widow.
(c. 1709:28)
As described by Ward, both the molly houses and the virtuosi clubs were
hermaphroditical, obscuring all those social distinctions upon which
identifications depend. The molly houses and the virtuosi clubs did not enclose,
reflect, or reproduce stable identifications; they were border spaces where the
necessity of primary (gender, class, occupational, etc.) identifications was
exchanged for improvisation and experimentation. Indeed, as these descriptions
of the molly houses as collapsing social distinctions suggest, occupying a
nonidentity as a sodomite required a prior un-speaking, or unidentification of
“proper” identifications; that is, molly parodies enabled not a misrecognition as
“womanly,” but an unidentification from the self-knowledges mandated by
critics like Shaftesbury.
In suggesting above that the mollies were proud, I meant that they had been
described, not just as practicing sodomy (the bisexual Restoration rakes had done
this), but as occupying a place (the “I” as a place from which to speak) as a
sodomite. This, finally, is what bothered the writers who disclosed molly house
practices following the prosecutions—not that they took it up the ass, but that
they spoke while doing so: “the perpetration of the abominable act, however
offensive, was infinitely more tolerable than the shocking conversation that
accompanied the perpetration; some of which…was so odious, that [his source]
could not either write, or verbally relate” (Phoenix of Sodom 11).
Ward recorded an example of such shocking conversation:
Not long since they had cushioned up one of their Brethren, or rather
Sisters, according to Female Dialect, disguising him in a Woman’s Night
Gown, Sarsanet Hood, & Night-rail who when the Company were men
[met?], was to mimick a woman, produce a jointed Baby they had
provided, which wooden Offspring was to be afterwards Christened, whilst
one in a High Crown’d Hat, I am old Beldam’s Pinner, representing[ed] a
Country Midwife, & another dizen’d up in a Huswife’s Coif for a Nurse &
all the rest of an impertinent Decorum of a Christening. (c. 1709:28)