An illustration of this is the case of two men who were prosecuted in 1772 for buggering one another in the toilet of the Red Lion pub in Moorfields. A single sexual encounter often covered a broad range of activity. Another soldier, John Mitchell, who bragged that his penis was nine inches long, said, “When I wanted Money, I took a Walk in the Park, and got 4 or 5 Guineas a-Night of Gentlemen, because they would not be expos’d.”Ĭontrary to the view that gays in the past took strictly “active” or “passive” roles, eighteenth-century trials (our best source for details about sex) show that most gay men took turn and turn about, and enjoyed reciprocal sex. A soldier named James Brown and his brother claimed that they had picked up and then blackmailed five hundred gentlemen in Bird Cage Alley in the late 1750s. There, Guardsmen regularly offered themselves for sex and then blackmailed their tricks. The best area for male prostitution was Bird Cage Alley in St James’s Park. The basic pick-up technique was to stand up against a wall and pretend to be making water, and to wait until someone expressed some interest. The path that ran across the middle of Moorfields, the large fields just north of the City walls, was called the “Sodomites’ Walk”. Public parks and open fields were popular resorts for gay sex. One of these men, whose breeches were down around his ankles, replied “Sirrah! what’s that to you, can’t I make use of my own Body? I have done nothing but what I will do again.” In 1718 a watchman caught sight of two people shagging while leaning against the rails of Covent Garden Church, not an unusual sight, but when he realised they were both men he started calling them filthy sodomites. In 18th-century England, what gay men called “picking up trade” was common in the covered arcades of the Royal Exchange and Covent Garden, where they competed with Women of Pleasure. And in the Temple bog house in 1707 a hole had been deliberately cut in the partition wall between two stalls – making it the first recorded glory hole.
The Savoy bog house was used so regularly by gay men that members of the Society for the Reformation of Manners often posted themselves outside and could be sure of making an arrest there. In 18th-century London, gay men were regularly arrested in the Lincoln’s Inn bog house, on the east side of New Square, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In Amsterdam in the 1760s many sodomites were arrested in the public toilets built next to the city’s numerous bridges favourite toilets were given nicknames, such as The Old Lady and The Long Lady. Dutch gay men in the early 18th century coined the word “kruisen”, and their favourite cruising grounds were the quays along the waterfront. Public latrines and baths or “stews” were good pick-up spots in the late Middle Ages. Some things, like cruising and cottaging, have been popular for centuries.
What sorts of things did gay men get up to in the past, and how much did these differ from what we get up to today? Does gay sex have a history, or do the forms of pleasure remain the same across centuries? Have some tastes declined, and new tastes arisen?