Dangerous Discourse

“Dangerous Discourse: Language and Sex between Men in Eighteenth-Century London” explores the intricate and often overlooked intersection of three distinct discourses on sodomy in early eighteenth-century London. For most authors of the period, whether Grub Street hacks or Neo-Classical practitioners, the “emerging” homosexual sub-culture (a term not used until the nineteenth-century) was a blight that infected both the metropole and the country. They shared with common culture a disgust with the sodomitical underground calling the practice a “disease,” a “plague,” an “unnatural vice,” and the “sin not to be named.” These, and a host of other monikers, clearly reflect the cultural homophobia of the early eighteenth century. Unlike other scholars interested in the sodomitical “problem,” my project is not predominantly sociological. Instead, I investigate the discourse used to condemn sodomites in the legal system, in the mass of botanical erotica in the early half of the century that responded to the sodomitical practices infecting the country, and in the language used to mark out the urban “space” assumed by the sodomite.