Memoirs of a Sodomite
As part of my ongoing Doctoral Dissertation, I am storying the life and writing of Thomas Cannon, an eighteenth-century queer author whose uniquely sodomitical writings were, until recently, lost to history, censured after his prosecution for sodomy in 1750
Thomas Cannon’s Ancient and Modern Pederasty investigated and exemplified (1749), an infamous but institutionally effaced pamphlet containing three short stories interspersed with erotic vignettes and academic treatises “in defense of Sodomy,” has recently been unarchived by literary historian Hal Gladfelder, quoted at length within the legal indictment against John Purser, Cannon’s printer. This discovery of what may potentially represent a collection of shared stories within a queer “subcultural milieu” has “exploded the moralistic lexicon of antisodomite writing” and created a space in which to renegotiate understandings of queer historiography in England’s Long Romantic Period [1]. Taking up the aim creatively, I intend to story Cannon’s incessant push to publish his pamphlet against the wishes and advice of family, printers, laws, and, most integrally, John Cleland, his authorial mentor and, as some scholars have suggested potential lover. I will dramatize key scenes inspired by the public and institutionally recorded feud between Cannon and Cleland to position the couple as a prefiguration of contemporary debates around queer visibility and activism.
“The queer act of remembering is an act of resistance, and through my resistance I will probe the depths of the question “what does it mean to be queer?” through what it has meant, a collective history leading and giving definition to the present.”
[1] Gladfelder, Hal. Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland. Johns Hopkins UP, 2012.