Molly house

Molly-house was a term used in 18th and 19th century England for a meeting place for homosexual men. These meeting places were generally taverns, public houses, coffeehouses or even private rooms where men could either socialize or meet possible sexual partners.

Even if these clubs tended to display a heavy sexual connotation, some critics are reluctant to classify them as brothels. Rictor Norton, for example, argues that the regular customers could have been in fact mutual friends, at least at the beginning, since consistent evidence concerning male prostitution seems to be insufficient until the 1780s. At that time homosexual sexual activities were illegal and were heavily prosecuted; they remained capital offences until 1861. In this context, particularly during the 1720s, molly-houses came to be the scenes of raids and arrests, and their customers the ideal target for blackmailers.

Molly-houses can be considered a precursor to some types of contemporary meeting places for the gay community.

The word molly (also spelt as molley, mollie, mally) is a pet-form of the female forename Mary, and had two main connotations in 18th century English. The first one is close to the word moll, designing a lower-class girl or woman, occasionally a prostitute. The second one is classified as slang, defining an effeminate, usually homosexual, male. Along with the possible perception of intrinsic female features deriving from the association with the name Mary, another possible origin of this denomination for a homosexual man could be found in the Latin form mollis, indicating the supposed passive-effeminate partner in male homosexual relationships. In a 1762 Swedish/English dictionary by Jacob Serenius and in a 1767 French/English dictionary by Thomas Nugent the word was present, but simply defined a sodomite, without effeminate connotations.

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