"O My Poor Arse, My Arse Can Best Tell": Surgeons, Ordinary Witnesses, and the Sodomitical Body in Georgian Britain

A r e p o r t p u b l i s h e d i n 1 7 4 3 informed readers about a recent sodomy trial in Kingston upon Thames.1 One night early that summer, a London waterman had received a tip from a woman selling gingerbread that two “mollies” had just sneaked into Pepper Alley, in Southwark. Mollies were members of an underground queer subculture, mostly workingand lower-middle-class men notorious for their effeminacy and predilection for that “worst of crimes,” sodomy. The waterman understood what the woman was suggesting, and he followed the tip. He stalked the two until they entered a house of office, a lavatory. He spied on them as they whispered together and “talk’d in a very ludicrous manner.” Soon, “he was very well assured, they were Sodomites.” The door could not shut fully with them inside, and through the gap that remained he saw that “they were b——g one another.” In the criminal law, “buggering” had a precise meaning: phallic penetration of the anus. It was a grievous offense, carrying a mandatory capital penalty. But there was no doubt: he “saw them in the very Fact.” The waterman was not satisfied merely with visual inspection. He went to investigate manually but found that the two “were so close that he could not put his Hand between them.” Only “with Difficulty” did he force it in. He grasped the penis and drew it from the other’s anus. (The report renders this action as taking “Hunt’s —— out of the other’s ——.”) In court, the waterman told what he had found. The offending phallus “was wet, and wet his Hand very much.” Some courts and jurists believed that evidence of ejaculation inside the body was necessary to prove this felony.