In On Holy Ground, Silas Sinnott has, as one of his most cherished possessions, a banned book. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is its proper title, but the novel is more popularly known by the name of its main character: Fanny Hill.
Despite the use of her name “Fanny” as a modern slang term for vagina or ass (depending which side of the pond you’re on), this wasn’t the case back then, and so her name is not intended to be a pun. Still ironic that it ended up that way.
This novel landed its writer in jail and might make Ao3 fans blush. It’s extremely explicit, without using any crude terms. Think reading the most over-the-top, ridiculous fanfiction euphemisms, except you know it’s written by a grown man older than your grandma. On and off throughout history, it’s been banned for obscenity. It’s also disturbing today, albeit for perhaps different reasons than it would be back then: less about its lascivious nature and more about the fact that Fanny is a teenager for most of her story. Sadly, this was normal for the time, but still.
Fanny Hill tells the story of a young girl named Fanny who is tricked into joining a brothel. She has sex with another female prostitute, is trapped in debts, and just as things seem hopeless and it’s certain she’ll have to have sex with customers for money, she meets Charles.
He falls in love with her at first sight and helps her escape. They then have sex, but after several months of bliss, Charles is taken away on a ship. Fanny suffers a miscarriage and has little choice than to resort to sex work. Still, she enjoys it and becomes highly successful. Eventually Charles returns, but he’s been shipwrecked and is left penniless. Believing he might not want to be with her after all she has done, Fanny offers him her money without condition. Charles insists that they marry because he loves her, and acknowledges the unfortunate reality that she actually didn’t have many other options. They wed, have children, and live happily ever after.
Hey, at least she gets a happy ending.
While Fanny Hill portrays, in lurid detail, sex between women, it doesn’t seem to consider this truly sex (which may be typical for the time period, where the lack of a penis meant that it wasn’t actually sex). However, it also contains another detailed scene wherein Fanny watches two men have sex. She is shocked and repulsed, and plans to report them. Typical straight man writing, you might think.
But… there’s actually a fair chance and a strong scholarly argument that the author of this book, John Cleland, was gay, or at least, not straight.
Let’s back up. John Cleland was born in 1709 and seems to never have had a steady job. In 1748, he was confined to Fleet Prison for debt, and hence he chose to publish his novel in two parts, one in fall 1748 and one in February 1749. He was released the month after the final volume was published, but not for long. Fanny Hill sold well, and by November 1749, a mere eight months after his release, he was arrested again–this time, for the content of his novel.
The book’s publishers were also arrested, and the novel was banned for indecency. Cleland disavowed the novel (whether he really felt that way or simply wanted to avoid more jail time, well, you be the judge), and said he wished he’d never written it. Yet he still edited the novel to make it more appropriate… only the edited version got banned too. However, the edited version was eventually allowed to be sold. Notably, it keeps the wlw action but not the mlm… which is again ironic nowadays because the wlw scene actually has serious grooming and consent issues, while the mlm scene does not and reads as quite romantic.
However, the unedited, original version was where the real popularity lay, and that was sold on the black market. (It’s the unedited version Silas has.) It was only allowed to be legally sold again in, I kid you not, 1970, over 200 years after its publication. At least in the UK. The US allowed it in 1963. Yay freedom of speech?
So why do people think Cleland might have been gay?
Well, basically, a lot of his contemporaries thought he was. For example, Josiah Beckwith commented once that it was “no wonder” people thought Cleland was “a sodomite.” But more convincingly, there was Cleland’s bitter, toxic relationship with Thomas Cannon, a lawyer and the son of the Dean of Lincoln (a clergyman).
Cannon and Cleland started off as great friends with numerous correspondences. Yet, their relationship soured to the point of revenge. It was Cleland’s debt to Cannon that got Cleland thrown in jail in the first place. Furious at his old friend, Cleland accused Cannon of being an “execrable, white-faced rotten catamite: His name is Molly Cannon.” (Molly being, of course, a reference to molly-houses, or taverns where gay men would congregate.) Keep in mind that sex between two men was a potentially capital offense in those days.
Cannon, however, took this accusation in stride. Three weeks after Cleland’s claim, Cannon released Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify’d. This text is widely considered to be the first English-language argument in favor of homosexuality.
(I also want to qualify the use of the word “pederasty” – it’s not necessarily referring to what we would use the term for today: i.e. child abuse, but instead reflecting the linguistic norms and understandings of the time, wherein all sorts of MM sex was all assumed to be the same thing, when… it’s not. Not even close. The pamphlet’s argument, to its detriment, does seem to conflate the two in regard to one of its tales in particular, that of Eumolpus and his teenage student. However, the other particular cases of male love it describes–at times graphically–are not cases of this, and its philosophical arguments are not either.)
The pamphlet also has its own interesting, banned-book history. It was actually completely destroyed and believed lost for centuries, until a replication of most of it was discovered in 2003, in another legal document related to Cannon’s indictment. Here’s a sample:
Wherefore since fashion discountenances, law punishes, God forbids, the detested Love, we may sure discuss it with freedom and the most philosophical exactness. Every dabbler knows by his classics that it was pursued and praised with the height of liberty, boy love ever was the top refinement of most enlightened ages.
Naturally, there was an uproar, and Cannon was indicted at the exact same time Cleland was for Fanny Hill. Cannon fled abroad for three years, but his publisher, John Purser, was convicted and pilloried, though pardoned from anything worse.
It’s also worth noting that the particular… phrases… that Cleland uses in his description of male-male anal sex in Fanny Hill use very similar imagery, including one identical term, as Cannon’s description in his pamphlet. And no, these weren’t common descriptors at the time.
Cleland: at length, the first streights of entrance being pretty well got through, everything seemed to move and go pretty currently on, as on a carpet road, without much rub or resistance…
Cannon: He is quickly piloted into a Streight whose potent Cling draws all the Man in clammy streams away.
Anyways, it’s no wonder that biographer Hal Gladfelter writes of Cannon and Cleland that:
It’s no coincidence that they simultaneously produced the only two explicit accounts of male same-sex desire in English before the late nineteenth century, published just a month apart in 1749.
In fact, some have even wondered if Cannon wrote that scene of Fanny Hill, though we’ll never know unless there’s another discovery.
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