GLR May-June 2026

BOOKS

The Queerness of the Age of Reason

I N 1836, British immigrant George Wilson was arrested for vagrancy after he was found drunk and disorderly in what is today Lower Manhattan. The first-time offense usually wouldn’t have prompted much concern, but according to newspaper reports the magistrate became suspicious about “the softness of [the pris oner’s] voice,” which led to probing ques tions. The magistrate requested that a doctor examine Wilson and confirmed he

often went by playful nicknames. Some re ferred to occupations, such as “Orange Deb,” “Dip-Candle Mary,” or “Old Fish Hannah.” Others alluded to one’s home, such as the “Duchess of Camomile,” who lived on Camomile Street. Some names were more obscure, such as “Susan Guz zle,” though Delaney encourages readers to imagine its source. We also encounter Stephen Fox and John, Lord Hervey, who set up a domestic

J AMES P OLCHIN

QUEER ENLIGHTENMENTS A Hidden History of Lovers, Lawbreakers, and Homemakers by Anthony Delaney Atlan ti c Monthly Press 352 pages, $30.

relationship while both men were married to women. The two were part of an aristocratic circle of men whose sexual rela tionships and social encounters played out behind closed doors, where their reputations were safely untarnished. Delaney is sen sitive to the larger social realities of Empire and how such en claves of wealthy queer men were dependent on the riches of the British colonies, slavery in particular, though that context is not explored deeply. What comes through more clearly are the era’s class differ ences and the lines between public and private life. Unlike the threats working-class men might have encountered in the mollie houses, the upper class relied on privilege and money to foster a sense of safety from public disdain and arrest in their private, do mestic spaces. And while this history contains scandals, the sense

was female. Wilson confessed that his given name was Jane Walker and claimed to have taken to wearing men’s clothing while searching for a lover who’d immigrated to America. That was a lie. Wilson had immigrated fifteen years earlier with his young Scottish wife Elizabeth Cummins. When Cum mins inquired about her husband at the magistrate’s office, Wil son’s story changed again as he claimed he’d been born George Moore Wilson in Brighton, England (George being a common name for both boys and girls at the time), and had married Cum mins in 1821 in Glasgow. Not long afterward the two sailed for America, where Wilson found factory work. Wilson was con victed of both drunkenness and posing as a man. The length of his sentence is lost to the historical record, as is what happened to Wilson and Cummins after the conviction. But Wilson’s case stands as one of the first known instances of a “female husband” (a term historian Jen Manion coined) in 19th-century America. Wilson’s story is one of many compelling accounts of the complexities of queer lives that Anthony Delaney uncovers in Queer Enlightenments . Focused on what he terms “the long 18th century,” extending from the early 1700s until the reign of Queen Victoria in 1837 (known in England as the Georgian Pe riod; the book was titled “Queer Georgians” in the UK), De laney convincingly makes the case for this era’s importance in shaping modern sensibilities of sex and gender. This was the period of revolution and empire, of great social and political change unhampered by the Victorian moralities that would fol low. Delaney, who hosts a history podcast, sees echoes of our own time in the 18th century. “People in this era,” he writes, “were asking many of the same questions about gender, sex and sexuality,” such as “What makes a man? What is a woman? What exactly was the ‘Third Sex’? And what did that mean for the other two sexes?” The book is filled with a diversity of characters, from milk men to aristocrats. Margaret “Mother” Clap ran a secretive “mollie” house in London in the early 1700s. “Mollies” was a term for working-class queer men, and Clap’s establishment of fered them a relatively safe space to socialize and, if desired, to rent a private room for sex. Delaney explains that the mollies James Polchin is the author of Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall and Shadow Men: The Tangled Story of Murder, Media, and Privilege That Scandalized Jazz Age America .

Portrait of Lord John Hervey, by John Fayram, ca. 1737.

May–June 2026

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