When I first started thinking about the fact that there were LGBTQIA+ people in the late eighteenth century, I imagined that this was something so far from the comprehension of people at the time that they were not even aware that these other identities existed. I imagined that eighteenth century Americans, cis-het or otherwise, had no way to conceptualize it. Little did I know that they were not only aware of it, they actually talked about it. The eighteenth century may not have had a great understanding of LGBTQIA+ identities, but these terms show they had a start.

Bugger

In eleventh century France, a new religious group emerged called the Cathars. Though the group had their roots in traditional Chrisitanity, they rejected some aspects of it and added some beliefs of their own, which quickly resulted in the persecution of them by the Catholic church. At the center of the Cathar belief system was the idea that the physical world is evil and the spiritual world good. One of the rules that resulted from this was that their members were not allowed to procreate, as conceiving children was seen as trapping a free soul in a physical body. They were still allowed to have sex, as long as it was not reproductive.¹ This led to speculation by outsiders that the Cathars frequently had oral sex or (they would have thought more likely) anal sex, “commiting sodomy,” as it would have been said at the time. Because of these rumors, one of the words frequently used by outsiders to refer to the Cathars, “bougre” (French for Bulgarian) became a slang term for a man who had anal sex.² The word spread to England, where it became “bugger”, and then eventually to England’s colonies.³

By the late eighteenth century, bugger was both a noun and a verb, and was synanomous with “sodomy” or “sodomite.” This is evident from many dictionaries of the time, such as The New Royal and Universal Dictionary, published in London in 1763, which gave for the definition of sodomy “SODOMY, the unnatural crime of buggery…”⁴ Bugger seems to have achieved this legal definition in the United States as well, for when Thomas Jefferson was attempting to revise Virginia’s criminal law in 1776 he suggested to a friend that the state punish “Rape, buggery, &c” by castration.⁵ Buggery may also have refered in some cases to beasiality, as in his official proposal for new laws Jefferson notes “Buggery is the Genus, of which Sodomy and Bestiality are the species.”⁶ Bugger likely found its way into the American legal vocabulary as the result of the overlap in the legal systems between England and its colonies.

From there the word found its way into casual American speech. It was likely seen as a more useful alternative to “sodomite”, which had religious implications and evokes an image of hellfire and brimstone. It seems to have been one of the words most often thrown out when same-sex relations between men came up in conversation, such as when John Adams noted in his diary in 1760 that a man had been “rambling all the Town over, lodging with this and that Boy and Attempting at least the Crime of Buggery.”⁷ It is worth noting however that Adams was a lawyer, and so more likely to use legal terms in his diary than the average American.

As the use of bugger became more widespread, it started to lose its original definition. Though it could still definetly be used to refer to a gay/bi man or a man suspected of same-sex sexual activity, in the late eighteenth century bugger was also often used as a general term for any man that a person disliked, including in a memorable piece of hatemail written to Thomas Jefferson.⁸ Bugger is used this way in British dialect to this day. The evolution of “bugger” is similar to other evolutions of terms, such as when the word “f-g” is used to describe a disliked man without the user necessarily meaning to imply that the man is LGBTQIA+.

Fop

If the word bugger started out meaning gay man and evolved to something much more general, the evolution of the word fop may have been the reverse. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, fop originated in the fourteen hundreds as a word that meant “a foolish or silly person.”⁹ By the late eighteenth century it had come to refer more specifically to an effeminate man.¹⁰ It was used frequently in this way, both as a noun and a verb (the verb meaning to act effeminate). It appears several times in the correspondence of James Madison, representative of which is an instance where Madison told a friend “Pray do not suffer those impertinent fops that abound in every City to divert you from your business and philosophical amusements.”¹¹ Abigail Adams apparently saw a sort of disparaging utility in such qualities, once telling a relative “to be a Gallant a man must have a little of the Fop.”¹²

I began this research believing that “fop” could be clearly defined as a man interested in men, but it does not seem to be that clear cut. Though a gay or bi man (or a man perceived as such) would certainly have fallen under the term, it may also have been applied to someone assigned male at birth, who we would now recognize to be a transgender woman, or to non-binary people, agender people, or even gender-transgressive cisgender people. In short, fop could be applied to any man who defied eighteenth century gender norms. Whether fop gained the connotation of homosexuality, and how strong this association was if it did exist, is unclear.

Molly

Molly originated as a British slang term for a female prostitute, but sometime around the late sixteen or early seventeen hundreds people started to use it as a derrogatory term for LGBT+ men.¹³ Before long this was the main, if not the only, way that the term was used. Eventually gay and bi men were using the term to refer to themselves, as a journalist named Ned Ward discovered when he went undercover in a club for LGBT+ men (referred to as “molly houses”).¹⁴ 

Americans were likely exposed to the term, due to their eager consumption of novels, true crime, and news from England about homosexuality.¹⁵ I was surprised therefore that it only appeared once in my initial searches, when James Ronaldson complained to Thomas Jefferson in 1811 that the type of hat United States soldiers were wearing “may be very well for reviews and please Miss molly folks, but it is ill calculated for preserving the health and activity of a man obliged to be out at all hours and exposed to every sort of weather.”¹⁶ 

This relative lack of use of the term initially made me think that it never caught on in America, but it quickly occured to me that the documents I was looking through may have been too formal. It was then that someone reminded me that Deborah Sampson, a woman who pretended to be a man in order to enlist during the Revolution, was teasingly called “molly” by her fellow soldiers. Sampson’s first biography recounts that “The soldiers were in the habit of calling her “Molly,” in playful allusion to her want [lack] of a beard; but not one of them ever dreamed that the gallant youth fighting by their side was in reality a female.”¹⁷ The term definitely had effeminate connotations, so it would make sense for them to call Sampson (Robert Shurtliff, as they knew her) molly to make fun of her lack of certain masculine qualities. It has been suggested that when the soldiers called Sampson/Shurtliff “molly” they were not intending to use the term molly meaning homosexual, but rather were nicknaming her after Molly Pitcher, a famed Revolutionary War heroine, but this is most likely not true.¹⁸ The legend of Molly Pitcher is the story of a woman who took her husband’s place operating a canon after he was wounded, during the Battle of Monmouth. This is a legend now believed to have been based on the true story of several different women who helped their husbands during combat. These separate stories were combined into one myth after the war, and it was only then that the mythic heroine was given the name “Molly Pitcher.”¹⁹ Therefore the soldiers would probably not have called Sampson “molly” in reference to that story. Additionally, it makes more sense for them to have been using a term which meant an effeminate man than one which meant a woman who took a man’s place in the war, as Sampson’s biography says they were making a joke about her somewhat feminine appearance, not jokingly accusing her of being a woman.

Assuming the soldiers were using the term molly meaning a homosexual male, this shines interesting light on the use of the term in America. It suggests that the word was in use by average people and in casual situations. It also suggests that the term was used even when someone was not accusing the person they called molly of actually being gay. That does not mean that molly meant effeminate instead of homosexual, but rather that it had begun to be overused, like when someone today says that something “seems pretty gay.” 

What neither of these quotes reveals is whether LGBT+ men in America had reclaimed the word like men in England had. This for now remains a mystery.

Though LGBTQIA+ identities were treated as a taboo in late eighteenth century America, that does not mean people were not talking about them. The fact that Americans of that time had language to talk about them means that they had a framework for thinking about and conceptualizing these different identities, and that fundamentally changes our notion of what it meant to be LGBTQIA+ in late eighteenth century America.

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Sources

1. “The Medieval Cathari: Religious Sect Wiped out in the Albigensian Crusade”, Matthew A. McIntosh, https://brewminate.com/the-medieval-cathari-religious-sect-wiped-out-in-the-albigensian-crusade/, and “Lecture on New Piety, New Orders, Heresies and Persecutions”, Dr. Emily Tabuteau
2. Ibid.
3. “Bugger”, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bugger 
4. The New Royal and Universal English Dictionary, By J. Johnson, via Rictor Norton (Ed.), “Homosexual Terms in 18th-century Dictionaries”, Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook, 13 May 2008, updated 15 July 2013 <http://www.rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/diction.htm>. 
5. Thomas Jefferson to Edmund Pendleton, 26 August 1776, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0210  
6. “A Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments in Cases Heretofore Capital”, Thomas Jefferson, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-02-02-0132-0004-0064
7. “1760 Decr. 18th. Thurdsday”, The Diary of John Adams, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/01-01-02-0005-0008-0007
8. Anonymous to Thomas Jefferson, 13 June 1804, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-43-02-0473
9. “Fop”, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fop 
10. Examples of “fop” meaning effeminate man: “Poor Richard Improved”, Benjamin Franklin, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-03-02-0176, and “15 Monday”, The Diary of John Adams, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/01-01-02-0002-0003-0015
11. James Madison to William Bradford, 9 November 1772, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-01-02-0015
12. Abigail Smith Adams to William Smith Shaw, 2 February 1799, https://www.founders.archives.gov/?q=fop&s=1111311121&sa=&r=19&sr= 
13. “Researchers Notebook: Queer Cases: The ‘He-She’ Ladies and Mother Clap’s Molly House”, The Still Point Journal, https://thestillpointjournal.com/2017/07/07/researchers-notebook-queer-cases-the-he-she-ladies-and-mother-claps-molly-house/ 
14. “Of the Mollies Club”, Satyrical Reflections on Clubs, Edward Ward, via Rictor Norton, Ed., “The Mollies Club, 1709-10”, Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook. 1 Dec. 1999, updated 16 June 2008 <http://www.rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/nedward.htm>. 
15. “Mapping an Atlantic Sexual Culture: Homoeroticism in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia”, Clare A. Lyons, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3491498?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A95b148cd9b58043b5983501892fd98fb&seq=13#metadata_info_tab_contents 
16. James Ronaldson to Thomas Jefferson, 26 December 1811, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-04-02-0275
17. The Female Review: Life of Deborah Sampson, the Female Soldier in the War of the Revolution, Herman Mann, John Adams Vinton, https://archive.org/details/femalereviewherm00mannrich/page/122/ 
18. Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier, Alfred F. Mann

19. “Did Revolutionary War Heroine Molly Pitcher Really Exist?”, Elizabeth Nix, https://www.history.com/news/who-was-molly-pitcher