🏳️🌈🏺Molly Houses and Mother Clapp
🏳️🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️🌈
300 years ago, on a London Sunday night in 1726, William Griffin came home to a room he rented above a coffeehouse on Field Lane in Holborn, tucked behind a tavern called the Bunch o’ Grapes. Dozens of other men were visiting in the parlor hosted by his landlady Margaret Clap, called affectionately Mother Clap.
Sunday was the busy night, forty men were there including the lodgers, for a night of music, dancing, drinking, some men in gowns & talking in ‘molly’ slang. There were public rooms they called the chapel for getting together. It was a camp paradise, one of many hidden throughout England known as Molly Houses. It was also just a gay bar centuries before they could exist openly.
Mother Clap wasn’t running a brothel, in fact she often kicked out prostitutes. She kept her customers safe, she bailed them out, she lied for them.
But an ‘ex-gay’ new member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners, was hiding in the crowd that night. He reported 30 men “making Love, as they call’d it, in a very indecent Manner.”
Soon after the constables came & arrested more than 40 people, Mother Clap among them.
Sodomy was a hanging offense under the Buggery Act. William Griffin—43, an upholsterer, a father of two—said he’d lodged there over a year & had no idea what kind of house it was. He was hanged by the Old Bailey alongside Gabriel Lawrence & Thomas Wright.
Mother Clap got the pillory at Smithfield. The mob beat her so badly she fainted & was carried back to prison in convulsions. No one ever heard from her again. But her name lives on 300 years later as the Mother of Gay Safe Spaces.
Find your own safe space and look out for each other.
