Molly House

English

Noun

Molly House (plural Molly Houses)

1. Alternative form of molly house
   • 2001, Western European Stages - Volume 13, page 46:

     The London party ends with the guests departed and the disillusioned Will casting a dispirited eye over the dregs of the hollow revelry, and the final scene returns to the Molly House, where Mrs. Tull, her fortune made, gives up her new name and her new business to retire to the country to apparent heterosexual happiness with her long-time admirer, the Princess.

   • 2007, Ken Gelder, Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice:

     'Molly Houses' — places where homosexual men gather— may have been around as early as 1700: this is where the historian Rictor Norton in fact locates the origins of a gay subculture in England (Norton 1992).

   • 2009, Dan Cruikshank, The Secret History of Georgian London, Random House, page 77:

     [I]n a Bow Street Runners raid on a Molly House called the White Swan, twenty-seven men were arrested for sodomy and attempted sodomy.

   • 2013, Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd:

     Lady Cleland, the Doll's friendly rival, ran a Molly House in Gun Street.