Hatred Of Us Is A Modern Invention

Believe it or not in the past there was more tolerant of us.

The 200-year-old diary that's rewriting gay history
BBC News
By Sean Coughlan
February 10, 2020

A diary written by a Yorkshire farmer more than 200 years ago is being hailed as providing remarkable evidence of tolerance towards homosexuality in Britain much earlier than previously imagined.

Historians from Oxford University have been taken aback to discover that Matthew Tomlinson's diary from 1810 contains such open-minded views about same-sex attraction being a "natural" human tendency.

The diary challenges preconceptions about what "ordinary people" thought about homosexuality - showing there was a debate about whether someone really should be discriminated against for their sexuality.

"In this exciting new discovery, we see a Yorkshire farmer arguing that homosexuality is innate and something that shouldn't be punished by death," says Oxford researcher Eamonn O'Keeffe.

The historian had been examining Tomlinson's handwritten diaries, which have been stored in Wakefield Library since the 1950s.

But all was not rosy for us.

Tomlinson argued, from a religious perspective, that punishing someone for how they were created was equivalent to saying that there was something wrong with the Creator.

"It must seem strange indeed that God Almighty should make a being with such a nature, or such a defect in nature; and at the same time make a decree that if that being whom he had formed, should at any time follow the dictates of that Nature, with which he was formed, he should be punished with death," he wrote on January 14 1810.

This was the era of the Mollies and the Tommies houses where people dressed on the opposite gender and they were always in fear of being found out, because it was illegal to be gay or lesbians and the houses were a relative safe space. It was kind of like the Stonewall or a speakeasy of its era.

I read the Outlander books and TV shows, in one book Diana Gabaldon writes about the Mollies and the Tommies houses.

Lavender House is a fictional molly-house in London, England. Lord John Grey had visited the House in his youth, and did not return until 1757 in the course of a murder investigation.

History
Located near Lincoln's Inn in Barbican Street, Lavender House is a large, wealthy-looking building, though its exterior is quite unremarkable, with no more than two marble tubs of lavender plants to distinguish it from its neighbors. Velvet curtains conceal the goings-on within, though one can hear voices through the windows. It does not face Barbican Street, but rather backs up to it; the front entrance faces a small private park.

Probably through bribes the authorities left them alone.

Here in the colonies there were trans people back in the 1700s one of the more famous cases was where future president John Quincy Adams was the defense lawyer in the case of Gray vs. Pitts. Assault and Battery. It seems like Mr. Gray fancied himself in a dress and Mr. Pitts was smitten by her and when Mr. Pitts found out she was trans he rapped Mr. Gray on the head with a cane.

I wrote about the case and other earlier trans people here.