a lecture by Dr. Megan Rhodes Victor

One of my current research projects focuses on homosexuality and the 18th-century taverns which were known as molly houses in England and English Colonial North America. These molly houses served as clandestine locations for gay men and cross-dressers to interact, to socialize with others ‘like them’, to engage in more intimate relations, and to perform in elaborate gendered performances of marriage and birth. Taverns were largely male drinking spaces in the 18th century, and yet these were also one of the few places where women – especially unmarried or widowed women – could not only work but manage the business affairs. It is striking that these locations were the ones chosen for molly houses, rather than other, more gender-ambiguous locations. Currently, no archaeologists have excavated a known molly house or identified a tavern assemblage as possibly being connected to mollies – those homosexual males who frequented the molly houses.