Early Gay-Rights Writings Found
University of Manchester academic Dr. Hal Gladfelder has discovered pro-gay writings from 1749 in the National Archives in Kew, England. The five-foot-long handwritten scroll is a legal indictment of the printer of a book by Thomas Cannon called “Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify’d.”
The book—which contained stories and philosophical texts in defense of male homosexuality—disappeared immediately after it was published, but the indictment reproduces many passages from it. One surviving extract states: “Unnatural desire is a contradiction in terms; downright nonsense. Desire is an amatory impulse of the inmost human parts."
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