Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (40 page)

The court saw the stakes as much greater than the personal fortunes of two schoolmarms. For one of the three judges, Lord Meadowbank, the case implicated all well-behaved British women. A world in which women satisfied themselves without need of men was impossible to entertain: “[T]he virtues, the comforts, and the freedom of domestic intercourse, mainly depend on the purity of female manners, and that, again, on the habits of intercourse remaining as they have hitherto been—free from suspicion.” As men carried both the sexual machinery and the urge, it was easy for the court to infer that sex would result whenever a man was in bed with another:

If a man and a woman are in bed together, venereal congress would be presumed. And perhaps, even if a man and a man are in bed together without necessity, an unnatural intention may often be inferred.

But that is where Lord Meadowbank drew a bright line. “A woman being in bed with a woman, cannot even give the probability of such an inference. It is the order of nature and of society in its present state. If a woman embraces a woman, it infers nothing.”

Pirie and Woods admitted that they slept together often, as many people did, and that their “shifts” had been raised in bed, but nevertheless they claimed to have no idea of what Dame Gordon was accusing them of really doing. The court knew, but it refused to go there. In our time, no one would believe that the relationship between Pirie and Woods was asexual. In Lillian Hellman’s 1934 Broadway stage adaptation of the story,
The Children’s Hour
, a physical relationship between the two women (cast as mistresses of a snooty New England boarding school for girls) was strongly implied, so much so that the play was banned in several cities. Hellman stressed the viciousness of the young accuser in making the lesbianism charge, and also had the two women deny any sexual contact, but the intimate nature of the relationship was what drove the drama. Without the strong whiff of lesbianism, the play would have been puerile and unrealistic. (To appease censors, the 1936 Hollywood film based on the play was recast as a heterosexual love triangle, although a 1961 remake featured the lesbian relationship intact.)

Hellman came along more than two hundred years after the fact. The critical point that drove the court’s decision in the Pirie/Woods case was the conviction that women could not have sex with each other
as women
, meaning that some phallus had to be put to use. Without such a device, sex was as likely as “murder by hocus pocus.” “Gross immorality” might result from two females sharing a bed together, even “licentious buffoonery,” but without the involvement of something resembling a male, there was nothing illegal to it. Some women, the court allowed, were “peculiarly organized” as hermaphrodites for quasi-male sex—but that was the kind of thing that occurred in Africa or the exotic East. The historical use of dildos was also examined by the court, but there was no proof of that in this case. Pirie and Woods were not, in any event, the sort to do anything like that, the court felt. “I have no more suspicion of the guilt of [Pirie and Woods],” said another of the judges, “than I have of my own wife.”
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The result of the Pirie/Woods case would have been different had one of them assumed a male role, either by wearing men’s clothing or using a penis substitute. In that case, any judge in England would have found a way to punish them severely. In 1746, Dr. Charles Hamilton was convicted in Somersetshire (now Somerset) on charges of fraud and vagrancy for impersonating a man. As widely reported at the time, Hamilton was in fact a woman named Mary Hamilton. For the offense of deceiving another woman into marrying and having sex with her, Hamilton was publicly whipped until her back was “almost flayed” and then sent to prison for six months.

Her criminal life had begun in her teens, when she fell in love with a neighbor girl. The romance ended when the girl became involved with a man and married him. Inconsolable, Hamilton sought a change of scene and identity. She moved to Dublin, where she set herself up as a male Methodist teacher and courted local women. When she was about eighteen, she won the affections of a sixty-eight-year-old cheese seller’s widow. The couple married, and she continued to play the role of a man “by means,” in the words of one contemporary writer, “which decency forbids me even to mention.” The wife’s discovery that her young husband was a woman caused a predictable row, resulting in Hamilton fleeing town with a pocketful of the woman’s money.

Further adventures landed Hamilton in Wells, Somersetshire, where she assumed the male doctor’s identity and began a romance with Mary Price, a naïve eighteen-year-old girl. A two-day courtship resulted in a two-month marriage. Hamilton apparently used a dildo to satisfy Price, as “he” had likely done with other female bedmates. The marriage was sexually satisfying for Price, and might have gone on indefinitely had Hamilton not been recognized by an old acquaintance and denounced. Price tried to defend her husband’s manliness, but ultimately she had to admit that she had been deceived. Her neighbors laughed at her and pelted her with dirt.

Hamilton may have been a cad—there was word she had deceived fourteen women into marrying her—but English law did not explicitly punish female sodomy. Henry VIII’s buggery statute of 1533 dealt only with sexual relations among men or between men and beasts. Women weren’t mentioned. But gaps in the rules have rarely stopped prosecutors from finding something on which to hang a charge. The authorities went after Hamilton under the vagrancy laws for “having by false and deceitful practices endeavored to impose on some of his Majesty’s subjects.” The case against her was strengthened by the discovery of an object of a “vile, wicked and scandalous nature” found in her trunk. Most likely some kind of dildo, it was used as evidence of the means by which Hamilton “entered” Mary’s body “several times.” Hamilton was given the maximum punishment the vagrancy laws allowed. By assuming a sexually aggressive male identity, she had usurped the male prerogative of penetration, considered the essence of the sex act.
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AROUND THE SAME time the Hamilton scandal was unfolding, a dirty little pamphlet was published about Catherine Vizzani, a female transvestite in Italy. The pamphlet’s English translator was England’s greatest pornographer, John Cleland, who well knew what the public wanted to hear. As Cleland retold the story, Vizzani had also begun donning men’s clothes at an early age, and “incessantly followed the wenches” with “barefaced and insatiable” energy. To affirm her position as an accomplished male rake, Vizzani even sought medical treatment for venereal disorders purportedly caught from “infectious women.”

Taking the name Giovanni Bordoni, she finally won the love of a wellborn young woman and ran off with her to Rome to get married. They were overtaken en route by a chaplain sent by the girl’s uncle to halt the union. Everyone drew their guns, but Vizzani quickly decided it would be safer to give herself up. She was mistaken: The chaplain took Vizzani’s gun and shot her anyway. She ended up in a number of hospitals, where her gunshot wound became infected. As her fever grew, she lost control of her senses and took off the cylindrical “leathern contrivance” she kept strapped “below the abdomen of her detestable imposture.” A few days later, at twenty-five years old, Vizzani died.

The discovery of Vizzani’s “leathern” machine was shocking. Hospital staff members tore the device open. They also examined Vizzani’s body and discovered, to their amazement, that she was not only a woman but a virgin, “the hymen being entire without the slightest laceration.” Soon a formal autopsy was performed, according to Cleland’s account, which resulted in an even more confounding discovery: “The clitoris of this young woman was not pendulous, nor of any extraordinary size . . . on the contrary, hers was so far from the usual magnitude, that it was not to be ranked among the middle-sized, but smaller.” Without any kind of deformity to explain Vizzani’s “unnatural desires,” the surgeon was stumped. The young woman died before legal proceedings could begin, although the local populace’s opinions about her may have led authorities not to charge her at all. A fair number of townspeople thought her protection of her virginity “against the strongest temptations” qualified her to be a saint.
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Early Modern Germany’s sex laws admitted no ambiguity: “Female sodomy” had been an explicit capital crime since 1532. While the law was not often enforced, the threat of the death penalty was real. That was the fate of Catharina Linck, burned in 1721 for living as a man with her young wife, Catharina Mühlhahn.

Before becoming a husband (and an abusive one at that), Linck had been a preacher and a soldier in three armies, among her other personae. Court records from Saxony, where she was tried and executed, reflect the difficulties the judges faced in dealing with a young woman who already assumed no fewer than nine separate male identities.

Linck had grown up in an orphanage, and left it dressed as a young man “in order to lead a life of chastity.” She soon fell in with an ecstatic Christian cult given to hitting their heads against walls and speaking in tongues. For two years, Linck traveled with the group as an itinerant preacher and soothsayer, though her predictions did not always materialize—when she urged two men to walk on water and they sank, she fled. She became a swineherd, and later joined the army of Hannover as a musketeer until her desertion three years later.

Next came a stint in the Polish army. Her regiment was captured by French troops, but she managed to escape imprisonment. Her subsequent hitch with the Hessian army lasted about one year. Linck had by now fashioned a leather penis for herself, to which she appended two stuffed testicles made from a pig’s bladder. The contraption, held in place with a leather strap, served her well: She used it on a string of young girls, widows, and prostitutes.

Tiring of the military life, Linck reinvented herself as a dyer of fine clothes, met Mühlhahn, and married her. During the wedding, someone called out that Linck already had a wife and children, but she produced a document and two witnesses to prove the allegation false. The newlyweds moved in together, and Mühlhahn would later report that their sex life was active and satisfying, despite the pain she sometimes experienced on account of Linck’s large phallus. Their life together out of bed was less successful. Money was always tight, and before long they were begging. Linck also beat Mühlhahn frequently.

One night, as Linck slept, Mühlhahn took a closer look at her husband and discovered the leather truth. Linck awoke and begged Mühlhahn to keep her secret. Mühlhahn agreed, though she demanded that Linck no longer “tickle” her with the device. Finally, Mühlhahn’s mother, who had already suspected that her boorish son-in-law was in fact a woman, could bear the union no longer. With the help of another woman, she attacked Linck, tore off her trousers, and confiscated the ersatz genitals, which ended up in court as critical evidence.

Linck’s defenders did not let her go to her death before making some creative legal arguments. First, they asked, didn’t the Bible only proscribe unnatural acts between women and animals? Moreover, could there be sodomy without semen? But the court was not swayed by such fine distinctions: “The vice is the same for all,” the judges pronounced, even if women only engaged in “bestial rubbing and sexual stimulation of their lewd flesh.” The court ruled that the penalty was death by fire under both divine and secular law, as both male and female sodomites induced God to rain fire and brimstone down upon the earth. Linck was duly executed. The “simple-minded” Mühlhahn was jailed for three years, and then banished.
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MISS MUFF AND INSPECTOR FOUCAULT: MALE HOMOSEXUALITY ON TRIAL

The Linck case was the last lesbian execution in Europe. Male homosexual conduct would still be punished throughout the eighteenth century, sometimes with execution, but few men seemed to feel an immediate threat. Across Europe and the American colonies, a sprawling homosexual subculture emerged, with no apology. Bars, private clubs, and public cruising zones popped up everywhere, making male-male sexual behavior a visible element of town life. Homosexuality was no less ridiculed than before, and it was still illegal, but its presence was grudgingly tolerated by enough people that it remained in the public eye. Given what we have seen of antihomosexual persecutions over the centuries, and the readiness of people to associate homosexuality with heresy and witchcraft, this was a major advance in itself.

In Stockholm, men met for quick sex in urinals and parks. In The Hague, they signaled each other by stepping on each other’s feet, grabbing arms, or waving handkerchiefs. Amsterdam cruisers prowled the city’s town hall. Elsewhere, men underwent elaborate rituals in private sex clubs. A group in Haarlem met at night in a forest to choose a “king,” while an order of Parisians required initiates to kneel, kiss clusters of false diamonds, and swear fidelity to the others. The more elaborate London clubs, called “molly houses,” after the word then used to describe homosexuals, were run by men with names such as Miss Muff, Plump Nelly, and Judith. New members were also given female names, and often married in chapels. The couples would then retire to a nearby chamber and conceive make-believe children, who were then “delivered” in birthing rooms while the group attended with towels and basins of water. In one 1785 raid near the Strand, police found several such “mothers” attending their newborn “children.” So well did one of them play the role that authorities were convinced that he was genuine and left him alone with his child—a large doll. For men who could not find a willing husband, male prostitutes were always available.

None of this went unnoticed by the state. By the mid-1720s, at least twenty known molly houses were under investigation. The problem for authorities, at least in London, was that there were few police available to make raids. The constables and justices who were on hand often took money from criminals and bawds. One magistrate in Wapping rented his own home to prostitutes. During this period the city’s population was also growing very rapidly. The poor migrants clogging the streets provided new fodder for sex-seekers with money. The church courts, once powerful players in morals enforcement, were now weak. Secular authorities, to the extent they cared, were overwhelmed.
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