Traje Macaroni

Fashion Theory
The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture
ISSN: 1362-704X (Print) 1751-7419 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfft20
“That Doubtful Gender”: Macaroni Dress and Male

Sexualities
Peter McNeil
To cite this article: Peter McNeil (1999) “That Doubtful Gender”: Macaroni Dress and Male
Sexualities, Fashion Theory, 3:4, 411-447
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“That Doubtful
Gender”: Macaroni
Dress and Male
Peter McNeil Sexualities1
Peter McNeil has published articles This essay examines the sexual charge of the macaronies, a group of
relating to gender and design in
English men who adopted a particularly ostentatious and fashionable
journals including Art History and
The Journal of Design History. He mode of dressing and deportment in the 1760s and 1770s.2 It was an
was recently awarded his PhD urban style, coined to describe the wealthy youth of the clubs of St. James’s
from the Department of Art History
in London, and was current also in fashionable provincial centers like
and Theory, The University of
Sydney, for a thesis entitled Bath and York. Initially restricted to members of the aristocracy and
“Fashion Victims: Class, Gender, gentry, the behavior and its appellation spread to include men of the
Sexuality and the Macaroni, circa
middle and servant classes who wore versions of this lavish clothing, or
1765–1780.” He is Lecturer in
Design History and Theory in the who styled their hair to accord with macaroni modes. The macaronies
Department of Art History and used their dress and their bodies in a war of style, asserting their right to
Theory, College of Fine Arts,
wear clothing traditionally reserved for courtiers, or to wear it in spaces
University of New South Wales.
412 Peter McNeil
where such clothes were not normally worn in England. Macaroni dress
was based on contemporary French and Italian fashion, retaining pastel
color, pattern and ornament, at a time when their use was being displaced
by more sober dressing in England. The macaronies adopted accessories
such as swords, which were traditionally the preserve of the nobility, and
which in England were fading from general usage. The macaroni persona
was activated as much through a mannered and performative behavior
as through expensive garments, with an emphasis upon Francophile
artifice in posture, gesture, speech, cosmetics and hairdressing. Motives
for adopting such attire were numerous, inflected by the class interests
and personal motivations of the wearers.

The macaronies upset preconceptions both of gender—“a Macaroni
renders his sex dubious by the extravagance of his appearance” (Town
and Country 1772: 243)—and of sexuality. Many eighteenth-century
texts, verbal and visual, responded to the macaroni stereotype with a
sexual frankness that was only obliquely observed by nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century historians of the caricature, and has been generally
ignored by late twentieth-century historians. At most, the latter have
indicated in a rather guarded and discreet manner the suggestion of
homosexuality through terms such as “effeminate.” As soon as the
macaroni stereotype entered the middle-class press the character was
interpreted as sodomitical. “Lord Dimple,” “Sir William Whiffle,”
“Marjorie Pattypan” and the other fictional macaronies of eighteenth-
century satire extend what is known of eighteenth-century sexual
subcultures and stereotypes. The discourse of a neutral or unnatural
gender revolved around the matching of concepts of “inappropriate”
feminine attributes to male appearance, dress and behavior. Such behavior
did not merely revolve around sinful or unlawful sexual acts, but was
now written on the body of the macaroni protagonist. Macaroni dress
may have functioned at times as a badge of recognition for an English
variant of the homosexual subcultures that had emerged in urbanized
Western Europe by the late seventeenth century. These subcultures
exploited the same spaces in which fashion was made and disseminated:
the Royal Exchange, the piazzas and parks, and the modish masquerade
venues.
From Mollies to Macaronies
A profound paradigm shift reconfigured connections between the

seductive allure of English male dress and sexual desire during the
eighteenth century. Whereas in the early years of the century the foppish
paraphernalia of court dress was held to attract women and enhance
heterosexual allure, by the era of the macaronies such dress was frequently
read as an irritation to women and could connote a lack of interest in
heterosexual desire. The period from the late seventeenth to the eighteenth
century saw a realignment of sexuality and gender roles in the West, in

which a system of theorizing women as incomplete men was replaced by
a bipolar system operating on a set of oppositions. The seventeenth
century recognized two genders—male and female—and three sexes—
man, woman, hermaphrodite. Sir Edward Coke, in his seventeenth-
century commentary on common law, wrote that “every heir is either a
male, or female, or an hermaphrodite, that is both male and female”
(Trumbach 1994: 119). Men who had sex with men were labeled
sodomites but were not assigned to a third gender—both sexes were
considered capable of having sex with either sex. Randolph Trumbach
argues that a paradigm of two genders based on two biological sexes

began to predominate in England only in the early eighteenth century.
At this time there developed also a “third illegitimate gender, namely, the
adult, passive, transvestite and effeminate male, or ‘molly,’ who was
supposed to desire men exclusively” (Trumbach 1994: 111). These
men were interpreted differently from sodomitical rakes; of the latter
Trumbach argues they were “secretly held in awe for the extremity of
their masculine self-assertion, since they triumphed over male and female
alike” (Trumbach 1991b: 131). The eighteenth century began to evoke
the notion of a third gender to describe homosexuality, a trope that would
remain current until the 1970s. Horace Walpole, quoting Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu and referring to John, Lord Hervey (courtier and
politician, 1696–1743), noted that “there were three sexes: men, women
and Herveys” (Higgins 1993: 93).
Metropolitan subcultures existed in European cities by at least the
early eighteenth century in which men sought out male partners for
relationships that could no longer be framed in the passive/active, younger/
older models. A detailed body of writing is available that theorizes the
history of homosocial relationships in terms of the shifting meaning of
effeminacy, from the seventeenth-century rake to the eighteenth-century
sodomite. This research, available for close to twenty years, has only
recently been considered by fashion history, and few conclusions have
been drawn. An exception is Christopher Breward’s study of fashion,
which notes the rise of gay studies and research into the homosocial
subculture of the eighteenth century; he concludes that it problematizes
the general picture of eighteenth-century dress. Breward comments that
it “is more than coincidental that self-identifying groups of sodomites,
choosing to express their difference through dress and the body, should
emerge at a historical moment of material progress, expansion and
diversification” (Breward 1995: 140). Historians have researched
London’s, Paris’s, Utrecht’s and Rotterdam’s eighteenth-century homo-
social subcultures, and discovered a thriving discourse in documents
including letters, diaries, pornographic prose, plays, poetry and court cases
(Huussen 1991; van der Meer 1994; Trumbach 1988, 1990, 1991, 1994,
1998; Weeks 1991). They provide evidence of complex homosexual
subcultures operating in urban centers as early as the seventeenth century.3
414 Peter McNeil
There has been little analysis of the place of dress as sign, however, within
these rapidly changing sexual systems.
Trumbach argues that in the early eighteenth century male homosexual
relations underwent a profound change in the industrializing countries
of England, France and the Dutch Republic (Trumbach 1991). Before
1700, Europeans had presumed that men might desire both men and
women, but that this sinful craving would be checked by Church and
patriarchal prescriptions. Sexual relations with adolescent men did not
necessarily mark those who undertook them as effeminate, but were a
sign of manly assertion, so long as the adult male took the active role.
Trumbach records two meanings of the word “effeminate.” In the late

seventeenth century it meant either the “smooth-faced Ganymedes who
might even be transvestite to attract their adult male partners; or the adult
male obsessed with women—‘thou call’st me effeminate,’ wrote Donne,
‘for I love women’s joys’” (Trumbach 1991b: 134). Waves of arrests after
1700 in London and Utrecht document the existence of what appeared
to contemporaries as a new subculture of passive effeminate men who
desired only men, whether adult or adolescent. This state was not clearly
defined, but terms such as “neuter” or “amphibious” evoked the behavior.
When Horace Walpole was publicly “outed” by a detractor in 1764 he
was described as “by nature muleish, by disposition female, so halting
between the two that it would very much puzzle a common observer to
assign to him his true sex” (Mowl 1996: 179). Such expressions were
precisely those used to lampoon the macaroni at this time.
Theo van der Meer provides another historic model for changes in
attitude towards effeminacy in his case study of Amsterdam’s homosexual
subculture. He bases his research on detailed court cases, which increased
after 1730 in the Netherlands, when the existence of sodomitical networks
came to the attention of authorities. Until the late seventeenth century,
van der Meer writes, the effeminate man, the aristocratic “fop,” was a
womanizer, moving in female circles in order to secure sexual conquests
(van der Meer 1994: 149; Trumbach 1991b: 134). For instance, in 1732
Justus van Effen wrote on effeminate men wearing long curly wigs. He
called them “hermaphrodites in mind,” but noted they did this to impress
women (van der Meer 1994: 166). This is similar to the construction that
applied to the male aesthete of the nineteenth century, who until the Oscar
Wilde trial ruptured this polite misconception, was often portrayed as
adopting feminine interests in order to make himself alluring to the
opposite sex. At the exposure of sodomitical networks in the 1730s
authorities believed the vice had not existed before this point, and
attributed it to a newly prosperous and hedonistic Dutch culture following
the Eighty Years War with Spain (1568–1648), a culture that included
excessive dressing and feasting (van der Meer 1994: 182). Similarly, the
attacks on the macaronies emerged after the Seven Years War (1756–63).
Van der Meer writes that as a result of the effeminacy/sodomite equation
in Amsterdam, “men in general became more and more anxious to avoid
effeminacy so as not to be suspected or accused of engaging in unnatural

behavior” (van der Meer 1994: 149). This is a conclusion that van der
Meer does not verify, although the evidence presented by Weeks and
Trumbach tends to support this claim. Trumbach notes, for example, that
elaborate clothes and elaborate greetings were eschewed as a consequence
of the cultural linkage of extravagant male appearance and sodomitical
behavior; and that the 1740s was the period in which English men gave
up the habit of kissing each other, much to the confusion of Continental
visitors (Trumbach 1991b: 134). A more sober mode of English dress
was noted by some foreigners as early as the 1720s.4
The macaronies represent the possibility of studying the confluence of

dress and (homo)sexuality. No study exists of the significance of sartorial
styles within eighteenth-century sexual subcultures, and most of the
observations regarding dress relate to working-class cultures, which were
more prone to prosecution and subsequent recording. The most rich and
detailed account of English sodomites and their appearance appears in
the Mother Clap trials of 1727. These trials provide a link with the
macaroni through the masquerade, as many of those arrested were dressed
in female masquerade costumes, indicating the significance of these events
for the public airing of otherwise private identities. They also have a
bearing on the macaroni, as their parodic and hyperbolic air also
characterized the macaronic pose. The nature of the molly identity is worth
studying in some detail here, as the macaroni does not represent so much
a novel departure, as a continuity with older sexual systems.
Mother Clap’s Molly House
In his extraordinary encyclopedia of human sexuality, the sexologist

Havelock Ellis wrote: “one gains the impression that homosexual
practices were more prevalent in London in the eighteenth century, bearing
in mind its population at that time, than they are today” (Ellis 1901: part
4, 46). An impossible position to maintain: Ellis is probably referring to
the large number of court documents from the early eighteenth century
that chronicle same-sex desire. The evidence of molly-house culture that
survives is the result of raids held in 1698, 1707 and 1726–7. Most of
the evidence comes from the latter raid, organized by the Society for the
Reformation of Manners, following which sodomites were executed on
the basis of information given in return for the informants’ immunity from
prosecution. In early eighteenth-century London, the more visible core
of sodomitical subculture was a working-class one based in houses and
taverns called molly houses. The molly house was contemporary slang
for a venue that was a cross between a homosexual brothel and a drinking-
place. The mollies had been examined before the arrests and subsequent
trials within the framework of a genre that sensationalized male clubs
and gatherings. A report of 1709 described: “a particular gang of wretches
416 Peter McNeil
in town, who call themselves Mollies, & are so far degenerated from all
Masculine Deportment or manly exercises that they rather fancy them-
selves women, imitating all the little vanities that custom has reconcil’d
to the female sex, affecting to speak, walk, tattle, curtsy, cry, scold, &
mimick [sic] all manner of effeminacy” (Ward 1709: 28).
Similar descriptions were repeated in court evidence in 1726. Margaret
(Mother) Clap’s molly house in Field Lane, Holborn was, according to
the evidence of an habitué, the meeting-place of “commonly 30 or 40 of
such kind of chaps every night, but more especially on Sunday nights”
(Select Trials 1742: vol. II, 362). Here there were dances downstairs and
bedrooms upstairs, and a clientele that ranged from blacksmiths to

gentlemen. There was a high degree of parody and performativity about
the proceedings: “Then they would get up, dance and make curtsies, and
mimick the voices of women. O, Fie, Sir!—Pray, Sir,—Dear, Sir,—Lord,
how can you serve me so?—I swear I’ll cry out.—You’re a wicked Devil,—
and you’re a bald face.—Eh! ye little dear Toad! Come, Buss!” (trial of
Mother Clap, July 1726, Select Trials 1742: vol. III, 37). Even the sexual
relations had an air of jest: “making Love (as they called it) in a very
indecent manner” (trial of Gabriel Lawrence, April 1726, Select Trials
1742: vol. II, 363). Ironic female names were also popular, recalling
the habit of today’s drag queens of naming themselves with a pun.
There were Moll Irons and Molly, butchers, and their “bridesmaids”;
Mary Magdalen; Garter Mary, a man who sold garters; Judith; Princess
Seraphina; and Plump Nelly; Nurse Ashcroft and Fish Hannah were
fishmongers. Martin Mackintosh “sold oranges, and for that reason he
went by the maiden name (as they call’d it) of Orange Deb” (Select Trials
1742: vol. III, 36). Mock marriages in fine clothes, births with jointed
dolls, and christenings took place at these gatherings, which indicates links
to older forms of the carnivalesque. At an alehouse kept by Whittle in
Pall Mall, at the corner of St. James’s Square, there was a back room for
mollies, the “room for marrying thye [sic] call that room, The Chappel
[sic] ... He has helped me to two or three husbands there” (trial of George
Whitle [sic], April 1726, Select Trials 1742: vol. II, 370). The mollies
greeted each other as “Madam” or “Your Ladyship”: “calling one another
my dear, hugging and kissing, tickling and feeling each other, as if they
were a mixture of wanton males and females; and assuming effeminate
voices, female airs” (Trumbach 1991b: 137). Thomas Orme, a silk-dyer,
kept another molly house at the Red-Lyon [sic], in Crown Curt [sic], in
Knaves-Acre (trial of George Kedger, April 1726, Select Trials, vol. II:
366). Mollies also used the spaces of the modern city to cruise for
admirers. Such spaces, which included parks and the Royal Exchange,
the latter also noted for its displays of heterosexual desire and display,
were the very ones where fashionable goods were procured. The anony-
mous pamphlet, Hell upon Earth: or the Town in Uproar (1727), said of
mollies:
They also have their Walks and Appointments, to meet and pick
up one another, and their particular Houses of Resort to go to,
because they dare not trust themselves in an open Tavern. About
twenty of these sorts of Houses have been discovered, besides the
Noctural Assemblies of great numbers of the like vile Persons, what
they call the Markets, which are the Royal Exchange, Lincoln’s Inn
Bog Houses, the south side of St. James’s Park, the Piazzas in Covent
Garden, St. Clement’s Churchyard, etc. It would be a pretty scene
to behold them in their clubs and cabals, how they assume the Air
and affect the name of Madam or Miss, Betty or Molly, with a
chuck under the chin, and ‘Oh, you bold pullet, I’ll break your eggs’;
and then frisk and walk away (Higgins 1993: 93).
In distinction from macaroni culture, molly behavior was connected

with cross-dressing, a feature of sodomitical subcultures in other parts
of Europe. In the late eighteenth century a Frenchman walking the streets
of Rotterdam in drag was mugged by street boys. It is claimed they cried
out, “It is not a bitch, it is a Frenchman!” (van der Meer 1994: 168). In
an earlier incident, mollies returning from a ball in London were arrested
and their garments were described in evidence. These indicate that they
were in female masquerade dress: “gowns, petticoats, headclothes, fine
laced shoes, furbelow scarves, masks and complete dresses for women;
others had riding hoods; some were dressed like shepherdesses; others
like milkmaids with fine green hats, waistcoats, and petticoats; and others
had their faces painted and patched and very extensive whoop petticoats
which were then very lately introduced” (Trumbach 1991b: 138). Histor-
ians of the masquerade have indicated that contemporary moralists
disliked these events for the opportunities they offered for both men and
women to cross-dress, and have suggested that there was a homosocial
charge to some of this behavior. A description of molly Princess Seraphina
or John Cooper makes this apparent. [S]he: “commonly used to wear a
white gown and a scarlet cloak with her hair frizzled and curled all around
her forehead; and then she would so flutter her fan and make such fine
curtsies that you would not have known her from a woman: she takes
great delight in balls and masquerades” (Trumbach 1991b: 139).
Comparing descriptions of a molly house with that of a “beau’s club”
in the early eighteenth century we can draw some conclusions about
the shift that has occurred when the macaronies emerge in the 1760s.
Described in the same source as the 1709 description of mollies cited
previously, the beau’s club refers to a more affluent club with men drawn
from wealthy backgrounds. The account draws on tropes of Francophilia
and foppish behavior in order to malign the assembled: “This finikin
society or Lady’s lap-dog club is now kept at a certain tavern near Covent
Garden where, every afternoon the fantastical Idols, assemble themselves
in a Body, to compare dresses, invent new fashions, talk bawdy, and drink
health to their mistresses” ([Ward] 1709: 26). Although it is claimed that
418 Peter McNeil
they dust off their swords, fix their wigs and patches, use tooth-pickers
and tweezers, “with all the artful implements Woman can invent to turn
men into monkeys ... dizening [sic] their ill shap’d carcasses and apes [sic]
faces,” unlike their molly contemporaries they are not portrayed as
sodomitical. Rather, they gather so that “their wigs may be continually
new scented, and evry [sic] stragling [sic] hair that has been ruffled by a
storm of their mistresses [sic] breath, may be carefully put into orders”
([Ward] 1709: 26). The tropes of vanity and self-adornment—the
feminized toilette, the appearance of apes—would be applied fifty years
later to the macaroni, indicating the resonance of these tropes in English
culture. Even their affected speech is sketched in, as with the macaroni:
“they sit down to Champaigne [sic], Burgundy, & Hermitage, pull out
their gilt snush-boxes [sic] ...” ([Ward] 1709: 27). Unlike the mollies,
however, their objective remains the pursuit of the opposite sex: “when
they are thus scented, down goes a delicious health to some celebrated
harlot, play-house punk, or court courtezan [sic]” ([Ward] 1709: 27). A
profound paradigm shift occurred between the early and the middle
eighteenth century in England. While cross-dressing was plainly indicative
of the sodomite, extravagant “male” dress in the early years of the century,
no matter how “feminine” in its focus on adornment and affectation,
was read as potentially alluring to women. Fringed gloves, red heels, the
open waistcoat and affected behavior were seductive until at least the
1740s; they were the props of the ladykiller:
Many a lady has fetched a sigh at the toss of a wig, and been ruined
by the tapping of a snuff-box. It is impossible to describe all the
execution that was done by the shoulder-knot while that fashion
prevailed, or to reckon up all the virgins that have fallen a sacrifice
to a pair of fringed gloves. A sincere heart has not made half so
many conquests as an open waistcoat; and I should be glad to see
an able head make so good a figure in a woman’s company as a
pair of red heels.5
By the 1760s when the macaroni emerged, such attention to fashion

was read as evidence of a lack of interest in women, or as potentially
unattractive to women. In 1774 Fanny Burney had little patience with
coxcombs “full of affectation & airs,” “the Conceit, the half witted
liveliness,” preferring “the manly manners, solid (sense) & entertaining
Humours” of a Scottish visitor (Troide 1990: 32). Contemporary
jokebooks also rehearsed the theme: “A Macaroni who was fond of a
girl of the town, catched [sic] her lately in bed with a carman; on which
he charged her with her scandalous want of taste. The girl coolly replied,
‘You used to sleep with me for the credit of lying with a woman; and I
sleep with this carman; for the pleasure of lying with a man’” (Macaroni
Jester c.1773: 50).
Masquerade and Travesty
The macaroni and the masquerade were closely linked in the popular
imagination. Both held charges and connotations that were richly
subversive of normative gender and sexual roles. The masquerade
complicated the visual logic of dress; not only did different classes mix
at these events, but the masquerade was itself a real and a fictive event
simultaneously, at which participants might wear “costume” (imagined
or fancy dress)—or “real” costume (exaggerated fashion)—that none-
theless might be suitable only for the space of this event.6 Fashion here
filled a theatrical role, which in turn spilled over into the street if such
clothes were worn in other settings. Attendance at the masquerade had
been a fashionable diversion since the 1720s and continued to be very
popular in the 1770s. London’s masquerade venues were the perfect site
for the display of fashionable dress as well as “costume,” and thus were
an ideal vehicle for the unveiling of a new macaronic outfit. Large crowds
attended Vauxhall Gardens in the evenings, where entry was a shilling.
The site included supper-boxes, a grove, fantastic architecture, and a
cascade, illuminated to reveal rustic landscapes, imitation waterways and
a miller’s house. Ranelagh, beside Chelsea Hospital, was more respectable,
with entry of 2s. 6d. and private boxes in the impressive rotunda from
which to watch the crowd. The indoor Winter venues, the Pantheon and
Carlisle House, attempted to be exclusive, but failed to prevent the
courtesan and other disreputable characters from appearing (Wroth and
Wroth 1896; Ribeiro 1984a).
The masquerade as an event, with its connotations of performance and
fictive identities, parallels the performative attitude of male macaronies.
As Castle notes: “For the Augustans and their heirs the masquerade is
a trope not just for the corruption of taste but for ‘inanity’... Its
hallucinatory reversals were both a voluptuous release from ordinary
cultural prescriptions and a stylized comment upon them” (Castle 1986:
2, 6).7 To critics the masquerade was “a shocking cultural surprise, a
gratuitous and offensive offshoot of the modern world of ‘fashion’”; in
1724 the Bishop of London claimed that these diversions were a French
plot to enslave men in “Licentiousness and Effeminacy” (Castle 1986:
7). The events permitted a social licence that was unprecedented in English
society. The masquerade was characterized by a “relentless structural
interplay it set up between self and other, the natural and the artificial,
the familiar and the alien” (Castle 1986: 25). Masquerades by definition
were anti-natural, permitting erotic release. The mask on the face
connoted physical and moral detachment; participants at a masquerade
were also called “masks” themselves. Within caricature conventions,
masks connote duplicity. Some masqueraders wore the dress of characters
from plays and novels, emphasizing the interplay between the “real” and
the fictive.
420 Peter McNeil
Reports regarding the entertainments, decorations and dress of the

participants at masquerades were common in the middle-class press.
Masquerades were criticized by the Church and moralizing commentators
for their promotion of luxury, vanity and sexual licence and game-playing,
as well as for their dangerous social leveling, as anyone who could afford
the price of the ticket was admitted. Extravagantly dressed macaronies
are nearly always present in engravings of crowd scenes at masquerades.
Many macaroni caricatures place the figures in this context: From the
Haymarkett [sic] (Figure 1), for instance, in which a florid-faced fop with
extraordinarily high hair lifts his chin back to cope with a massive cravat.
Caricatures and descriptions of macaronies at these events indicate that

combinations of patterns, spots and stripes and clashing color were
favored. The appearance of striped stockings and waistcoats in several
macaroni caricatures points to transgressive overtones: Michel Past-
oureau’s study of the history of the stripe indicates that the stripe carried
vestiges of either diabolical, sinister or ludic overtones until its use became
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARD COPY
Figure 1
P.L. de Loutherbourg, From the
Haymarkett [sic], pub. R. Sayer
and J. Bennett, 26 December
1776, colored engraving.
British Museum.
more common in clothing and furnishing textiles in the 1790s (Pastoureau

1991). To the admixture of colors and patterns in macaroni fashions can
be added the particular ocular effects of vertical and horizontal stripes,
particularly when woven with metallic threads, which often have a
disconcerting optical effect. A green striped waistcoat of the 1770s in the
Royal Ontario Museum collection produces a disconcerting effect upon
the viewer’s eye when seen under particular lighting (Figure 2). A visual
effect may have merged with the older diabolical and ludic associations
to perplex viewers. The coats of the 1760s tend to be shorter than those
of the 1750s, rising to above the knee or mid-thigh in the 1770s. This
may have given rise to some of the macaroni wisecracks regarding rumps
and rears. The Cold Rump or Taste Alamode [sic] (Figure 3) refers
simultaneously to the short coat-tails preferred by the macaroni, which
accordingly showed off more rump, and to sodomitical taste, the fire a
fairly obvious aside to sinful states. Fire tools stand erect by the figure’s
side, like the cane and sword of the macaroni.
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON
HARD COPY
Figure 2
Part-waistcoat, green striped
silk, c.1770, Royal Ontario
Museum, ROM 942.9.6. gift of
Mrs. H. Hopkirk; photo Brian
Boyle, reproduced courtesy of
Veronika Gervers Research
Fellowship.
422 Peter McNeil
Figure 3
The Cold Rump or Taste
Alamode [sic], 10 December
1776, aquatint. British Museum.
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON
HARD COPY
In May 1772 Town and Country Magazine published a very odd report
regarding the latest masquerade. In the course of its report, “Characters
of the Pantheon masquerade described,” the journal noted:
A great many of the ladies of rank and beauty chose to adapt the
male dress in domino, and appeared as masculine as many of the
delicate Maccarony [sic] things we see swarming every where, to
the disgrace of our noble patient British race. There was this
difference, that they looked lovely and charming, and were justly
admired, while every person of sense despises the ridiculous Billy
Whiffles of the present age ... the fictitious duchess of Y–k’s sister
was a very smart little fellow in appearance, and several more that
might be added, looked better than the effeminate beings, their dress
justly burlesqued (Town and Country 1772: 237).
The Pantheon was a newly opened masquerade venue in central London,

built between 1770 and 1772 as a winter Ranelagh. Designed by James
Wyatt, it had a domed hall with double-storied aisles and rounded ends,
evoking Hagia Sophia. Friezes and niches were lit with green and purple,
and the dome illuminated from gilt vases: “The Byzantine body, mantled
in Hellenistic embroideries, must have been wonderfully surprising in
1772” (Summerson 1978: 152). Multi-colored macaronies took their
place within this novel fairyland, which was appropriate to their tendency
for display.
Several examples with particularly high hair pose in the illustration
The Inside of the Pantheon in Oxford Road (Figure 4). As the Pantheon
was more élite than Vauxhall and Ranelagh, the print probably mocks
aristocratic pretensions. When caricaturists deride men of lesser social
standing as macaroni they generally present them as lumpish, deformed
or wearing an odd mixture of middle-class and court dress. Whether the

Town and Country account is apocryphal or not is impossible to ascertain;
its effects however, are clear. This passage clearly attributes the macaroni
to the realm of the sexually suspect. “Whiffle” was slang for penis, and
“Billy Whiffle” appears as an effeminate epithet in other contexts
discussed below. Did this episode really take place? Did a group of cross-
dressed women lampoon the exaggerated appearance of the macaronies
present? Why would they need to? The influence of the theatre is the first
consideration. Breeches roles for women were amongst the most popular
performances: engravings of Peg Woffington in the 1740s and Dorothy
Jordan in the 1780s in cross-dressed roles played on their fine legs, delicate
hands and gestures, and fashionable male costumes (Thomas 1989: 385).

Figure 4
Richard Earlom after Charles
Brandoin, The Inside of the
Pantheon in Oxford Road,
L’Interieur du Pantheon de
Londres, pub. Robert Sayer,
30 August 1772, mezzotint.
British Museum.
424 Peter McNeil
The theatrical convention would have sanctioned a female performance

of the macaroni behavior at the masquerade; it was not inconceivable
that women might rent or borrow such costumes and wear them to the
event. Other contemporary images and accounts contribute to an
understanding of the episode and place it in the context of a wider cultural
framework. Women are frequently characterized by a trope in which they
take revenge on and attack homosexuality as an affront to women, not
to other men. These accounts demonstrate the futility of applying post-
nineteenth-century taxonomies of sexuality to eighteenth-century culture,
which deployed different language and conceptual frameworks to
understand desire and non-normative sexualities.

How d’ye like me (Figure 5), a mezzotint of 1772, could almost have
been drawn to illustrate the story carried by Town and Country. The image
is a paradigm of the macaroni persona, and is frequently reproduced in
costume histories to illustrate the type. It is a brilliant caricature that fuses
the real and the fictive, suggesting that the viewer has just come across
the macaroni in his dressing room. It is also one of the more overt
representations of the sodomitical overtones of the macaroni. The subject
stands in the feminized space of the boudoir or dressing-room, framed
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON
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Figure 5
How d’ye like me, pub.
Carington Bowles, 19
November 1772, hand-colored
mezzotint. British Museum.
by a mirror, the symbol of vanity. The dressing-room was often associated

with the masquerade; thus, even without the title, a connection to vanity,
luxury and the masquerade is made. As Stephens noted in the British
Museum catalog, the left hand of the macaroni “trifles” at his chin: “his
right hand being in his breeches pocket, while he is tripping, as if about
to dance. Smiling, he asks the question of the title” (Stephens and Hawkins
1883: 714). He sports an enormously tall club-wig, with side-curls and
huge solitaire. Tucked under his arm is a tiny hat, called a “Nivernois”
after the French ambassador; as in Paris, the macaroni’s hat was often
held, rather than worn, and thus functioned as an affront to English
practicality. He wears the tiny high-heeled shoes, tightly-cut silk suit, light
silk stockings and dress sword associated with macaroni dressing. The
print survives in two different colorings; in one example with crimson
coat and vest, gold lace trim, striped fawn breeches, white stockings, black
shoes and a light-blue and silver sword-knot. The femininity of this
macaroni is reinforced by the simpering pose, the dainty feet and the
suggestion of a vulva in the folds of his breeches. His phallus is
transformed into a mere decoration: the sword-knot and tassel at his side.
The proliferation of color and pattern was frequently remarked upon as
a characteristic of the macaroni, who retained ornament and polychromy
at a time when the decorative was being reinscribed as feminine. P’sha
You Flatter Me (1773) is the companion to How d’ye like me. A lady
wears equally extravagant clothing with a very high toupée. As the
companion print creates the impression that the figures address each other,
the images work to suggest that the macaronies inhabit a feminized world
of complementary fashion, flattery and vanity.
The following year a similar image was produced: Dawe’s Pantheon
Macaroni (Figure 6). Dawe’s print plays on the disjunction between the
“real” character of the macaroni with the “fancy” dress of the other
revellers he appears among; its subtitle “A real character at the late
Masquerade” is significant. This cleverly suggests that the macaroni is a
figure so ludicrous that his costume is a type of disguise: fictive clothing
beyond the realm of the real. The viewer knew, of course, that the
repertoire of sartorial signs exhibited here were exactly the ones sported
by macaronies on a daily basis. They include a hugely tall wig with side
curls, an elaborately trimmed coat, striped stockings, dotted breeches,
large paste buckles, a huge corsage of flowers and a painted and patched
face. Here the dress, although exaggerated, is consistent with descriptions
of fashionable dress as worn by the famous macaronies Richard Cosway,
the miniature painter, and Soubise, the black favorite of the Duchess of
Queensbury. Dawe’s Macaroni, encrusted with make-up, smiles with a
grimace: the wrinkles around his lips suggest an attempt to mask age.
The suggestion of a painted mask meshes with the papier-mâché masks
commonly held by participants at these events to mask true identity.
Placing him in an enclosed feminized space reinforces the effeminate
subject-matter. A dressing-table swagged in gauze and lace, similar to the
426 Peter McNeil
Figure 6
Philip Dawe, Pantheon
Macaroni pub. John Bowles,
3 July 1773, mezzotint.
British Museum.
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON
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ones in contemporary prints of ladies dressing, topped by a dressing-set

of make-up pots, is evidence of his complete feminization. The mirror
and four gilded frames that surround him underline the theme of vanity.
The cat’s head on the crest of a chair, ignored by the Victorian cataloger
of the image, is emblematic, intimating the catamite. It makes overt what
the other signs imply.
In 1771 Darly had published The Masquerade Dance (Figure 7), a
remarkable image that the nineteenth-century cataloger of the British
Library collection provided with a very scant explication. Eschewing his
normally accurate and detailed description, Stephens notes, “An engraving
of characters in a masquerade ... The costumes include that of a bishop,
who is dancing with a Turk; a Greek monk (?) [sic] dances with a quaker,
and a Jew with a monk. The Devil plays on a pipe” (Stephens and
Hawkins 1883: 761). He neglects to mention that there are no women
present; this is an all-male masquerade. Terry Castle used the image as
part of her argument that there was a homosocial potential to masquerade
activity, which contemporaries noted. Sodomy was commonly believed
to follow from cross-dressing: “These Sallies of Gallantry, I fear, will soon
metamorphose the Kingdom into a Sodom for Lewdness” (Castle 1986:
Figure 7
The Masquerade Dance, pub.
M. Darly, 8 December 1771.
Engraving. British Museum.
46). Some men may have used the events to effect same-sex assignations:
“those whom the anti-masquerade propagandists most often accused of
masquerade debauchery—women certainly, but also, in more coded ways,
homosexuals—seem to have had at the masquerade unusual opportunities
for erotic experimentation and release ... the masquerade may have
provided for such men and women a singular escape from large-scale
sensuous deprivation (Castle 1986: 41). Grown Gentlemen Taught to
Dance (B. Clowes after John Collett, mezzotint, 1768), on one level a
satire on fashionability, might also have been read in this context.
Many contemporaries reported a peculiar speech pattern adopted by
some men at these events, a falsetto squeaking. Castle suggests that the
use of a masquerade falsetto by men denoted comic emasculation; the
figure of the castrato may have been parodied here (Castle 1986: 36).
These descriptions can be compared with reports of macaroni speech
patterns, with peculiar pronunciations and unusual words, to suggest that
the macaronies may have projected an alternative identity through speech
as well as dress. French-style wit and jeux d’esprit, also associated with
the earlier “fribble” type, were often referred to: “Masculine Sense and
Wit are rejected as obsolete and unfashionable Talents; and better supplied
by the more engaging Charms of the contrary Qualities. Nothing is
now heard, but sweet Chit-chat, and tender prittle-Prattle, Shreds of
Sentiments, and Cuttings of Sentences,—all soft and charming, elegant
and polite” (“Philautus” 1747: 17). The use of camp parody, documented
earlier in the century in the molly house scandal, was a tool that could
unsettle social conventions. Betsky’s comments on the modern nightclub
have a relevance here:
428 Peter McNeil
this theatricality points to one of the central strategies deployed

by gay men for claiming space in the city. They regularly sought to
emphasize the theatricality of everyday interactions and to use their
style to turn The Life and other locales into the equivalent of a stage,
where their flouting of gender conventions seemed less objection-
able because it was less threatening. The public equivalent of the
private exaggeration of grand styles made the city come alive with
a pageant of colors, clothes, and gestures (Betsky 1997: 157).
Despite the considerable evidence that suggests the presence of a homo-

sexual subtext within both some macaroni circles and the masquerade,
there has been little speculation from costume history as to the sexual
meaning of the macaronies. Colin McDowell has stated that towards the
end of the eighteenth century certain hairstyles and cuts of clothing led
to a new suspicion of associated sexual proclivities (McDowell 1997: 44–
5). He positions the macaroni within this framework, but does not provide
further detail. If late-twentieth-century commentators generally fail to
recognize the prominence of a sodomitical subtext in representations of
macaronies, this was not always the case. That something sexual is at
stake in part of the macaronic repertoire was noted more than a century
ago in the section of the Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British
Museum (Stephens and Hawkins 1883) that was compiled by the artist
Frederick George Stephens. Though his catalog in general is astonishing
in its detail, Stephens finds it difficult to enunciate what we might read
as sodomitical stereotypes. The more suggestive prints are provided with
scant, sometimes embarrassed explication, and he declines to print the
bawdy retort of a woman appended to an engraving, which he notes
referred to the “alleged vice of the macaronies” (Stephens 1883: 742). In
describing another macaroni as “evidently of a feeble habit of body” he
resorted to the standard trope of degeneration that was applied to the
newly pathologized figure of the homosexual–criminal in the late-
nineteenth century by Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso (Stephens
1883: 770). Amid all the fine detail of the catalog, Stephens is forced
to confront the obscenity of the macaronies; however, for the more
“obscene” images he generally neglects to spell out the detail that is
provided for other prints.
Stephens ventured the following thesis regarding the macaronies, which
is partly incorrect, but is extremely revealing in its emphasis:
The Macaronies were much disliked by the popular party, and

therefore they became obnoxious to the attacks of satirical
draughtsmen, because they belonged to the wealthier orders of
society, were somewhat demonstratively affected and refined in
their costume and manners, and, above all, because they were,
politically, on the side of the Court. Horace Walpole and the Earl
of March, George Selwyn’s friend, the afterwards notorious “Old
Q.” or Duke of Queensberry, and Selwyn himself, were leading

Macaronies (Stephens 1883: cviii–cix).
This is an intriguing paragraph, as it masks what Stephens was really

describing. All the figures he names were either libertine or completely
homosexual in their tastes, and constituted a well-known coterie formed
at Eton. The well-informed reader could read between the lines; it was
no secret that Horace Walpole was homosexual in outlook. However,
none of these men was considered macaroni in his day. Walpole was not
caricatured as a macaroni, and apart from a great devotion to masquerade
balls, neither dressed nor affiliated himself with macaroni taste. As a

youngster he was very stylish; on his Grand Tour he chose to be drawn
by Rosalba Carriera in a gorgeous waistcoat—but this was twenty years
earlier, when such elaborate clothing was de rigueur. In the 1760s and
1770s Walpole mocked the more excessive macaroni affectations in
London, which he associated with the very young. Walpole was not a
macaroni, and this is an odd mistake for Stephens to have made; what
Stephens is really proposing is that macaroni is synonymous with queer.
By the 1930s Dorothy George’s contribution to the extraordinarily
detailed catalogue of the satirical prints of the British Museum uses words
more appropriate to her period, such as “mincing” and “simpering,” to
suggest politely rather than to state overtly what occurs in some of these
images (George 1935). The founding histories of the eighteenth-century
British caricature were able to notice and describe, albeit coyly, what
subsequent historians of dress have generally ignored, or have recently
attributed instead to the problematic notion “effeminate” without interro-
gating how these tropes function culturally. In a rather dismissive passage,
Aileen Ribeiro describes macaronies as “the latest in the long line of
fashionable empty-headed young men” (Ribeiro 1984b: 142). Ribeiro
has recently made clear her lack of interest in the study of the “bizarre
and the banal” within contemporary cultural studies (Ribeiro 1998: 318).
Eighteenth-century culture registered a (homo)sexual charge associated
with the macaronies in a considerable number of literary and visual
representations. Once the conventions are understood, a large number
of them can be recognized. Scholars have uncovered copious evidence of
homosexual friendships, relationships, and love affairs, of meeting-places
and criminal prosecutions in the eighteenth century. Contemporary
scholarship debates, however, whether a homosexual subject could exist
at all in this period. Post-Foucauldian gay history and theory have argued
that there is neither an identity, nor a recognizable appearance for the
homosexual before the Oscar Wilde trials, and that late-nineteenth-
century taxonomies inscribed the figure of the homosexual in medical,
criminal and psychiatric discourses (Sinfield 1994). Philip Carter’s
unpublished D.Phil. thesis, ‘Mollies, fops and men of feeling: aspects of
male effeminacy and masculinity in Britain, c.1700–1780’ (1995) includes
a section that engages with the macaronies and sexuality. Carter argues
430 Peter McNeil
that eighteenth-century writers “viewed fops primarily as social deviants,”

not sexual ones, and suggests that the focus from historians of sexuality
on the molly type has led to a misreading of the fop in which the
(homo)sexual case is overstated. I would agree with Carter that “It would
be incorrect to see fops as synonymous with the effeminate molly ... or
to see fops as necessarily homosexual” (Carter 1995: 2). However, some
of the new evidence regarding the macaroni presented in Carter’s thesis
supports my argument that they were a new type more likely to be
connected with sodomitical practice than the earlier rake or fop. As well
as coinciding with the well-known scandal of Isaac Bickerstaff and
accusations against David Garrick, Carter notes that the macaroni episode
also included the case of Captain Roberts Jones, convicted of sodomizing
a thirteen-year-old boy in 1772. This incident was reported in the press
as explicitly macaronic; a result of “shocking vices ... imported from
France and Italy,” wrote the Middlesex Journal; the “Macaroni tribe”
was responsible “for the frequency of a crime which modesty forbids me
to name,” insisted The Public Ledger. Referring to both the macaroni
body and sexual act, it was regrettable, continued the latter, that the
“vengeance of heaven” did not destroy “every Macaroni Sodomite’s
erectness of stature.” There followed a description of army macaronies
cruising the sodomite meeting-place in Bird Cage Walk, to meet with a
male “cara-sposa,” to “Practice those infernal rites for which Jones this
day is to make his military exit” (Carter 1995: 58). Carter is perfectly
right to point out that terms such as “effeminate” need to be interrogated
carefully and appropriately, linked to changing notions of politeness and
sensibility, and not merely conflated with twentieth-century notions of
homosexuality. However, his claim that “popular discussions of male
conduct defined their subject more in terms of social rather than, as much
existing historiography suggests, in terms of sexual activity” would seem
to be undermined in that the sexual is always the social and vice versa
(Carter 1995: abstract). Carter criticizes historians such as Trumbach for
“reducing the history of eighteenth-century masculinity to a parade of
sexual practices,” yet provides many intriguing accounts of just such acts
harnessed to the macaroni stereotype (Carter 1995: 328).
My reading of the macaronies both confirms and contradicts aspects
of Carter’s position. The material makes it very clear that people exper-
ienced and understood desire and sexuality in very different ways than
nineteenth- and twentieth-century subjects. The Foucauldian position
argues that same-sex desire was experienced as an act, rather than as the
identity understood by many in modern society. As Haggerty has argued,
in a study of Gray’s poetry, male relations in the eighteenth century were
not necessarily merely practice-oriented, as Foucault suggests (Haggerty
1996: 82). In the case of the macaronies, it would be inappropriate to
ignore the copious discussion of their alleged (homo)sexuality. Macaronies
provide an opportunity to analyze material that also sometimes implies
rather than insists upon homosexual behavior and to examine a related
sartorial system. They also cast light on the cultural construction of
masculinity. Haggerty notes of the eighteenth century: “as various feminist

critics have argued, moreover, only gradually did feminine behavior
become the exclusive domain of the female; even less obviously, I would
argue, did notions of masculinity become the property of individual males,
and not without a great deal of unresolvable conflict about what con-
stituted masculinity and how it could function culturally most effectively”
(Haggerty 1996: 83).
The eighteenth-century literary and visual representations of the macar-
oni use the language and concepts available at the time to describe the
sodomite and same-sex desire. The theme of emasculation and unsexing
was very prominent. The alleged impotence of the macaroni is indicated

in a contemporary magazine cutting attached to a caricature entitled The
Scavoir [sic] Vivre, a portrait of a macaroni in red, blue and buff. Consider
the overt sexual nature of the following:
A Correspondent who dates from the Star and Garter, Pall-mall,

informs us, that a Club of a new order of Maccaronies is just
instituted there, under the title of The Scavoir Vivre. These gentle-
men have thought fit to decorate themselves with a Uniform of
scarlet Cloth, with Velvet Collar and Sleeves of Bleu Celeste. This
Society applied one Day last Week to the College of Heralds for a
Set of Arms to be made out for them, but received for Answer, that
they must first be erected into a Corporation. It is feared they will
not be able to carry their Point ... (Stephens and Hawkins 1883:
783–4).
The notion that the macaroni represents an indeterminate, neutral or

ambiguous gender is also common:
I am going to speak of that wretched thing, called a Macaroni. To

the Naturalists I leave it to determine, whether it is masculine,
feminine, or neuter—whether it belongs to the species of beasts,
or—whether it is of the reptile kind ... it is neither a Christian, nor
an ass, nor a four-footed beast, nor a woman. Perhaps it is a species
of the butterfly ... I have more sense than to call it masculine: But
I shall call it he for my own convenience (Macaroni, Scavoir [sic]
Vivre, and Theatrical Magazine. March 1774: 241).
Similarly, “A new description of a macaroni,” asked:
Is it a man?—’Tis hard to say—

A woman then?—A moment, pray—
So doubtful is the thing, that no man
Can say if ’tis a man or woman:
Unknown as yet by sex or feature,
It moves—a mere amphibious creature (Universal Magazine
October 1772: 173–4).
432 Peter McNeil
How widespread the macaronic appearance and persona was in

eighteenth-century England it is impossible to conclude, as the lives of
the aristocracy are chronicled in much more detail than those of the
middling and lower orders. Contemporary barbs in the newspapers
suggested that it had spread from the circles of the court to the artisanal
classes. A periodical article provided the following detailed description,
often cited within fashion history:
The infection of St. James’s was soon caught in the city, and we
now have Macaronies of every denomination, from the colonel of
the Train’d-Bands down to the errand-boy. They indeed make a

most ridiculous figure, with hats of an inch in the brim, that do
not cover, but lie upon the head, with about two pounds of fictitious
hair, formed into what is called a club, hanging down their
shoulders as white as a baker’s sack: the end of the skirt of their
coat reaches the first button of their breeches, which are either
brown striped, or white, as wide as a Dutchman’s; their coat-sleeves
are so tight, they can with much difficulty get their arms through
their cuffs, which are about an inch deep; and their shirt-sleeve,
without plaits, is pulled over a bit of Trolly lace. Their legs are at
times covered with all the colors of the rainbow; even flesh-colored
and green silk stockings are not excluded. Their shoes are scarce
slippers, and their buckles are within an inch of the toe. Such a
figure, essenced and perfumed, with a bunch of lace sticking out
under its chin, puzzles the common passenger to determine the
thing’s sex; and many a time an honest laboring porter has said,
by your leave, madam, without intending to give offence (Town
and Country Magazine 1772: 243).
The article was supported by a crude unsigned woodcut, one of the early
visual representations of a macaroni, with cane and hanger (sword). His
sullen frown belies the title The polite Macaroni. Stephens in his catalog
entry for this plate cited a long section of the text quoted above, but
excluded the final section concerning gender and sexuality. It is perhaps
for this reason that subsequent historians of costume and manners have
neglected to explore this dimension (Ribeiro 1978; Steele 1985). If they
relied on the generally very detailed and accurate entries of Stephens’s
catalog they would be unaware of the frequency of the (homo)sexual
nuance.
The macaronies also played into older and familiar tropes of the anti-
podean world, of gender and natural law usurped. The Macaroni Jester,
and Pantheon of Wit includes witticisms such as:
The following articles of News are such as may appear in the News-
papers fifty years hence, if the present Macaroni taste should
prevail; as, in that Case, the Women will become the best Men.
...Yesterday the Rev. Mrs. K—— preached before their Majesties

at St. James’s, the Archbishop, her Husband, being violently
afflicted with a Fit of the spleen.—The sword of State was carried
to and from Chapel by the Honorable Lady Charlotte G ...
Sir Richard P—— is dangerously ill of a fright, occasioned by
the sight of a mouse, which casually ran into the room, while he
was drinking coffee with Consellor Fribble ...
Yesterday died of a Consumption, occasioned by the use of paint,
Sir William Whiffle, who has long been deemed the first-rate
Macaroni of the Age (Macaroni Jester c.1773: 7–8).
Fribble and whiffle were older terms interchangeable with macaroni,

and refer to effeminate men with delicate sensibilities; Whiffle is an
effeminate—and sodomitical—sea-captain in Tobias Smollett’s The
Adventures of Roderick Random (1748).8 The joke book also contains
numerous comments concerning the lack of potency of such men, or
indeed, their lack of interest in women: “Lord H—— one day signifying
his suspicions to his lady that her children were not his, she replied,
‘Indeed, my Lord, you may make yourself easy on that head, for I vow
to Heaven I never injured your bed—till after I was pregnant’” (Macaroni
Jester c.1773: 9). The most telling anecdote that highlights the position
of the macaronies as confounding gender stereotypes follows: “A
Macaroni being told that none of his Franity [sic] could keep a secret;
‘yes (cried he) but we can for no one yet knows whether we are Male or
Female’” (Macaroni Jester c.1773: 79).
Other caricatures and accounts in the popular press are very specific
regarding the issue of (homo)sexuality. In their first suite of macaroni
images the print-sellers and engravers Matthew and Mary Darly included
an image entitled Ganymede (Figure 8), which George argues refers to
Samuel Drybutter, a bookseller convicted of unnatural offences in that
year. One wonders whether an individual with such a name is not the
figment of the press’s imagination. In the engraving he is represented as
a man of pretension, with hand placed in jacket, a traditional sign of
nobility, a fashionable flared suit coat, ruffled shirt and cane. George noted
that his “shoulders are round, almost to deformity” (George 1935: cat.
no. 4915). Darly spelt out the crime in another crude print entitled
Ganymede & Jack-Catch (1769) which refers to both sodomy and the
subsequent punishment. Jack-Catch states “Dammee Sammy you’r [sic]
a sweet pretty creature & I long to have you at the end of my String.”
Ganymede replies “You don’t love me Jacky.” Jack-Catch is dressed
soberly; his name (later more often “Jack Ketch”) was slang for the hang-
man (Moore 1998: 22); Ganymede’s dress is distinguished by lace ruffles
at the shirt front and a neatly styled wig. The association between the
two engravings is strengthened in that Ganymede has the same physio-
gnomy in each case.
Also relevant to readings of macaronic sexuality is the story of Billy
434 Peter McNeil
Figure 8
Ganymede pub. M. Darly,
Caricatures by Several Ladies,
Gentelmen [sic], Artists &
c. [v.1], no. 15, 1 March 1771.
British Museum.
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON
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Dimple and his valet, published in The Macaroni Scavoir [sic] Faire, and
Theatrical Magazine, 1773. The recirculation of eighteenth-century text
is indicated, in that a plate illustrating this story appeared several years
later in Oxford Magazine, 1776. My Young Lord Dimple, alias Toupee
[sic], decides to visit his uncle in the west country, taking with him his
valet de chamber [sic], “a most exquisite French frizeur, being afraid that
his delicate locks would suffer grievously from the rude hands of country
hairdressers.” The pair suffer many affronts and jokes along the way,
but continue to dress in their best macaroni clothes. “In this gallant trim”
they ride on, “but they had not gone far before two young lads, standing
at the door of a little alehouse, hallowed out, there are two French bougres
going by.” As bougre was one colloquial expression for sodomite, there
is nothing ambiguous about this text; Frenchness adds extra piquancy
to the barb. Enraged at so grievous and horrible an affront the master
horsewhipped the boys. Hearing their screams, their companions arrived
and unhorsed the foppish pair. In retribution they were tied back to back
and lowered into a coal pit where men were at work. Here they terrified
the miners: “They all stood aghast for some minutes, not knowing what
species of animals to take them for, and still less what gender they belonged
to.” One declared they were two cockney barbers, as he had been to
London and “zeen zuch like varmin there.” On calming down, the colliers
offered them a glass of gin and Monsieur cried out “Begar, me lord, it
burns my guts out,” further innuendo that would not have been lost
on the eighteenth-century reader (Macaroni, Scavoir [sic] Vivre, and
Theatrical Magazine, December 1773: 89–90). This imagery of a black
pit, a passage to sodomitical hell, appears later in this journal: “Were
you to see a group of them together, you would swear, that the sepulchres
had disgorged their nauseous contents—Such a stench! and such figures!
lean, disjointed carcases, with shrill and dying voices!” (Macaroni, Scavoir
[sic] Vivre, and Theatrical Magazine, March 1774: 241).
The relevant engraving, Lord Dimple & his Man in the Coal Pit
(Figure 9), shows the moment Lord Dimple and his hairdresser are
lowered into the pit to be met by the miners. Dimple flays his fingers in
fright; his man has one of the more hideous noses invented in the period.
One group of miners gesture in shock or surprise; others smile, point and
smirk, with the coarse faces beloved of Darly. Other prints survive that
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON
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Figure 9
Lord Dimple & his Man in the
Coal Pit, in Oxford Magazine,
xiii, 1 February 1776, p. 418.
British Library.
436 Peter McNeil
also permit a sodomitical reading of the macaroni type. A French Petit

Maitre and his Valet (Figure 10) depicts a grotesque and aged fop shuffling
down the Rue d’Enfer (“Street of Hell”), bedecked with a huge corsage
and wig-bag and tightly fitting court dress, the coat brocaded with hearts.
Underlining his depravity, his face is also poxed. The formal elements of
this enigmatic print, ignored politely by early catalogers, suggest a cock
and balls leaning against the wall in the center; the drain or sewer to the
left connotes the back-passage, a common analogy in eighteenth-century
texts.
The model of the hysteric, so central to late-nineteenth-century defin-
itions of the pathology of the homosexual, is present in some macaroni

caricatures of the 1770s. In this the process is to demonize men who may
have projected some of the characteristics associated with the domain of
women. Certain City Macaronies drinking Asses’ Milk, an illustration
to the Oxford Magazine (1772), shows men being handed asses’ milk by
a fat old woman. The accompanying text describes the advantages of
drinking this milk “in nervous cases, and even in hysterics” by “delicate
men such as we—beings of superior clay, whose fine feelings are sensible
of the slightest pressure.” One was “terrified for fear it should rain”;
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON
HARD COPY
Figure 10
C. Grignion after Brandoin, A
French Petit Maitre and his
Valet, pub. Robert Sayer and
J. Smith, 1 November 1771,
British Museum.
Figure 11
The Maccaroni Sacrifice,
frontispiece (folding) to anon.,
The Vauxhall Affray; or, The
Macaronies Defeated: Being a
compilation of all the Letters,
Squibs, & c. on both Sides of IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARD COPY
that Dispute, 2nd edn, London,
J. Williams, 1773. British

Library.
another notes “a shower of rain would be the death of me,” a third carries
an umbrella, then considered a French affectation, “for fear of the worst.”
The Maccaroni Sacrifice (Figure 11) refers to the traditional practice
of burning convicted sodomites at the stake. The engraving is a frontis-
piece to An Appendix to the Vauxhall Affray or Macaronies Defeated ...
1773. Subtitled “This incence [sic] shall revive degraded Manhood,” the
caricature depicts Parson Henry Bate, “the fighting parson” (afterwards
Sir Henry Bate Dudley, Bart.) sacrificing three macaronies before the
classical building inscribed “Temp. [sic] of Virtue.” He points a feather
at them, possibly referring to the taste for feathered hats. Significantly,
the fire is being stoked by a near-nude man. The print refers to an incident
which took place in Hyde Park on 23 July 1773, when three men of
fashion threw insults at a woman. They were the hon. Thomas Lyttelton,
known as “the wicked Lord Lyttelton,” George Robert Fitzgerald,
“Fighting Fitzgerald,” and Captain Crofts. The incident concerned a
quarrel when Bate resented the attentions paid to his companion, Mrs
Hartley, the actress. Bate accused Fitz-Gerall [sic] of meddling in the initial
dispute and of being the leader of a second attack upon him in Vauxhall
Gardens. This was followed by a fight between Bate and “Captain Miles,”
who was really the footman of Fitzgerald. The incident generated a huge
438 Peter McNeil
number of reports and squibs in journals such as The Morning Post,

competing versions of which were collected into the book, The Vauxhall
Affray; or, The Macaronies Defeated, a substantial 120-page text on the
incident (Vauxhall Affray 1773). The macaronies in the caricature are
illustrated linked together; one is chained around the leg to the sword of
the other, and by extension to the third. They say, in turn: “I owe this
infamy to you two”; “If I had been advised by Mother”; “D–n I had not
got in this damned Scrape”; and “Oh! Save my Miniature Picture.” This
suggests that the third one is the guilty party who led the others astray;
one is a mother’s boy, the third cares only for his miniature, of himself or
a friend.
The sodomitical inference of one newspaper report concerning the
Vauxhall Affray makes the cultural connotation of this incident clear. The
Whitehall Evening Post published a poem, The Macaroniad, which in
calling Fitzgerald “Fitzgiggo” referred to a famous sodomitical satire by
David Garrick, The Fribbleriad (1761). The relevant section of the poem
is as follows:
Fitzgiggo foremost let’s describe,

Memento mori of the tribe,
A thing so meagre and so thin,
So full of emptiness—and sin,
There’s nothing comes before—behind
But stinks on wings of his own wind;
And yet the things so hung with rings,
With buckles, baubles, tambour-strings,
And so baptiz’d with milk of roses,
Which, with his smells, so strike our noses,
That ev’ry gentle air that blows,
Brings something new unto the nose;
As if young Zeph’rus was turn’d pilot,
To wast [sic] the sweets of some poor vi’let,
By some unkind mis-hap disgrac’d,
And on a putrid dunghill plac’d;
So let Dan Zephyr do his best,
The dunghill makes his sweets a pest.
Thus did Fitzgiggo gay advance,
Like dismal Death dress’d out to dance ...
... But Macaronies are a sex

Which do philosophers perplex;
Tho’ all the priests of VENUS’ rites
Agree they are Hermaphrodites (Vauxhall Affray 1773: 58–9).
The compilation included this fictional conversation between the Parson

and Fitzgerald:
Bate to F-G: “You judge of the fair sex as you do of your own
doubtful gender, which aims only to be looked at
and admired” ...
Mr Fitz-Gerall: “I love the ladies, for the ladies love me.”
Mr Bate: “Yes, as their panteen, their play-thing, their harm-
less bauble, to treat as you do them, merely to look
at ...” (Vauxhall Affray 1773: 100).
This extract indicates that the episode was read as an affront to women,
with the macaronies uninterested in the pursuit of female delights. Women
are observed like works of art; the macaronies have made themselves into
objects of the gaze. Many subsequent commentators ignore this nuance
and describe instead an episode that makes little sense, in which the
perpetrators “made a deliberate attempt to stare the beautiful actress out
of countenance” (Wroth and Wroth 1896: 307).
Eighteenth-century culture read the sodomite as offensive and threaten-
ing primarily to women, not men. The macaroni, too, was often positioned
in this way. Contemporary accounts of the ordeals of convicted sodomites,
placed in the stocks, indicate that they most feared the torrent of verbal
and physical abuse hurled at them by working-class women, affronted
by behavior that turned its back on conventional sexual outlets. Whores,
in particular, were depicted as outraged at the potential loss of business
an increase in male-to-male contact might produce. An episode in John
Cleland’s Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–9) makes
clear the despised femininized status to which the detected sodomite was
relegated in eighteenth-century England. In a book of otherwise out-
rageous libertinage, Fanny observes male-to-male coupling and reports
this indignantly to Mrs Cole. The latter comments:
for that among numbers of that stamp whom she had known, or
at least were universally under the scandalous suspicion of it, she
could not name an exception hardly of one of them whose character
was not in all other respects the most worthless and despicable that
could be, stripped of all the manly virtues of their own sex and
filled up with only the very worst vices and follies of ours, that,
in fine, they were scarce less execrable than ridiculous in their
monstrous inconsistency of loathing and condemning women, and
all at the same time aping their manners, airs, lisp, skuttle, and, in
general, all their little modes of affectation, which become them at
least better than they do these unsexed male misses (Cleland 1748–
9: 196).
This passage, with its metaphor of “stripping” and “filling up,” makes
clear that the sodomite was associated with a performance of femininity
that usurped that of masculinity, producing a type of neuter—“unsexed
male misses.” This characterization is the same as the dominant cultural
440 Peter McNeil
construction of the macaroni. Indeed, the theme of the outraged working

woman affronted by effeminate dress and behavior informs many
macaroni images. The large number of caricatures in which a laboring
woman—generally the Billingsgate fishwife or a fruit seller—harrasses
and attacks effeminate macaronies (or French tourists) indicates that this
theme had a potency that reflected aspects of everyday street life. Philip
Dawe’s The Enraged Macaroni (1773, mezzotint, Library of Congress,
Washington) is an image of castration in which a fishwife shoves one of
her wares in a macaroni’s nose whilst another woman cuts his pig-tail
from behind. As well as issues of class and nationality, the theme of a
combat between perturbed English women and an effete Francophile

macaroni explores the notion that such men must be symbolically
castrated, as they are useless in that department anyway. “Real” women
will always outdo the macaronies’ sexual performance. Many satirical
poems and stories of the period claimed that the macaroni had nothing
active in his pants, that he was of no use to women at all: “Nor forget
that his breechs be roomy between ’em: ’Twill shew that a great deal is
wanting within ’em” (Universal Magazine, May 1772: 269). Passivity is
his sexual position: he receives rather than gives.
The macaroni stereotype was constitutive rather than merely reflective
of a social reality. Just as “evidence” at court cases might be said to have
invented the identity of the “molly,” historic material uncovered in this
chapter shows that the macaroni, invented in caricature and performed
in reality, was invoked in the context of contemporary sodomitical
discourse. With that in mind, it would hardly be surprising if some
macaronies used this reading of their attire to signal to other men their
willingness for homosexual encounter. Indeed, there is little doubt that
such clothing was deployed sometimes by individuals who wished to send
out signals to like-minded men. A case exists a little later, in Amsterdam,
that supports this view. A man arrested for sodomy in Utrecht in 1798
wore “a light frock with brown stripes, a white vest with red little dots,
dark trousers, white stockings and shoes with ribbons [and] a triangular
black shining hat with a black little rose, a black lus [sic] with yellow
button attached to it” (van der Meer 1994: 167).9 That the costume was
recorded in such detail indicates that it was considered significant. In its
clashing components this dress corresponds very closely to that of the
London macaroni, particularly in the set of contrasting patterns and
colors. Perhaps it was through the clash of excessive parts that certain
men made themselves known to others. The popularity of the color green,
beloved of macaronies in the 1770s, extends forward to the circle of
Oscar Wilde, and further still to urban gay subcultures such as late-1930s
New York, when green suits were the badge of open “pansies” (Chauncey
1995: 52). How this transmission occurs is beyond the scope of this essay;
but it should be noted that Wilde was well versed in eighteenth-century
letters, and may have read Horace Walpole on the macaroni and his color
choices.
Performing Gender
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) has been enormously influential

on cultural and gender studies, and has profound ramifications for the
way we might theorize dress (Butler 1990). Butler argues that all gender
is performance, structured through repetition, and that we act out the
signs of gender, which are socially sanctioned and inculcated from birth.
Her thesis has been taken up by other scholars such as Gaylyn Studlar,
who examine masculinity “as a process, a liminal construction, and even
a performance” (Studlar 1996: 4). The macaroni put into practice a
different notion of identity, through his exaggerated performance of dress,

from modern sexual subjectivity. This performance repudiates dress as
the simple assertion of some inherent character. The macaronies high-
lighted the artificiality of aristocratic dressing in their dress and extended
this excess to celebrate artificiality in speech and mannerisms. All these
characteristics emphasized performativity in the formation of identity,
repudiating the construction of speech, action and dress as expressions
of an innate and stable subjectivity. They revealed it as a process rather
than a natural system. Such a tension had always been in-built in noble
behavior; the body of the noble was meant to be socially superior, yet it
had to be trained in equitation and fencing and molded by dance in order
to produce the appropriate bearing. Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl
of Chesterfield’s letters to his son (on the Grand Tour in Paris) reveal that
clothing was inadequate without a training in how it was to be worn
(performed): “It seems ridiculous to tell you, but it is most certainly true,
that your dancing master is at this time the man in all Europe of the
greatest importance to you. You must dance well, in order to sit, stand,
and walk well; and you must do all these well, in order to please” (3
January 1751, in Chesterfield 1929: 190). Contemporary discussions of
the macaroni often refer to the sense of a pose or performance and make
a useful analogy between the macaroni and the masquerade, in which
the masquerade is both an event and an act. As acting method made use
of aristocratic technologies of the body—poses and gestures—there is a
further link to the theater that emphasizes the notion of performativity.
The word “macaroni,” after all, as a reference to appearance and
character predates Walpole’s letters of 1764 (generally given as the first
source) and appears in a play; a foppish character called the Marchese di
Macaroni features in David Garrick’s play, The Male-Coquette in 1757;
a “maccaroni” [sic] is also included in his Bon Ton (1775).
The eighteenth-century focus upon artifice and performativity as
aristocratic ideals fed into a set of camp behaviors that are associated
with a certain type of modern homosexual. Susan Sontag, in Notes on
Camp argued that the genesis of camp was in ancien régime manners.
Although rejecting the apolitical stance this essay adopted, many of the
writers in Moe Meyer’s anthology The Politics and Poetics of Camp
(1994) rework the lineage she establishes from the eighteenth-century
442 Peter McNeil
aristocrat to Oscar Wilde to the twentieth-century urban homosexual.

Wayne Koestenbaum recently put it thus: “By the twentieth century,
homosexuality already meant more than just sex acts or desires shared
by bodies of the same gender. It implied a milieu and a personality—
flamboyant, narcissistic, self-divided, grandiose, excessive, devoted to
decor” (Koestenbaum 1994: 85). Oscar Wilde may have based aspects
of his behavior on eighteenth-century models. His system of “posing,”
based on an interest in the Delsarte actor system, and his sartorial props—
cane, rings, scent—refer to the male courtier (Meyer, “Under the Sign of
Wilde,” in Meyer 1994: 79-83). Meyer argues that camp is a body of
performative practices used to enact an identity, that camp is not irony,

but intercontextual manipulation of multiple conventions, queer parody:
“queer performance is not expressive of the social identity but is, rather,
the reverse—the identity is self-reflexively constituted by the performances
themselves” (Meyer, “Introduction,” in Meyer 1994: 4). The macaroni
persona played with the conventions of court dress in different ways: some
macaronies may have utilized aspects of high fashion in order to effect
new class identities, but others may have asserted what we would now
label a queer identity. It seems all the more significant that the macaronies
appeared at a time when modern gender identifiers were being consol-
idated in mainstream society, to become, as Nancy Armstrong contends,
the mainstays of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century middle-class
hegemony (Armstrong 1989).
The macaroni images are significant because they mark an emphasis
upon men as vain fashion consumers that matches if it does not exceed
attacks on female vanity. Such an attack is found at other times, as in the
reign of James I, where it was also grafted to a concern about a potentially
sodomitical court. The macaroni formed a bridge connecting ideas of
effeminacy, luxury and display with corruption and homosexuality, an
ancient idea that had been revived in seventeenth-century England by
those who wished to attack aristocracy and the court. It fed forwards
into late-nineteenth-century conceptions of the homosexual as a third sex,
a woman trapped in a man’s body, with the attributes of femininity,
including a type of hysterical instability. In conclusion, the macaroni is a
departure from the ruggedly bisexual restoration rake, who was also a
figure of fashion, noted for his random couplings. The caricature of the
macaroni extended the territory of the rake to create a new type of
potentially sexually deviant figure. Homosexuality was understood less
as an affront to men than as an attack upon women, for it made women
redundant. Some macaronies may have constituted themselves as a new
type of sodomitical character, and they considerably extend what is known
about the representation of sodomitical stereotypes in eighteenth-
century England. Although he was occasionally described as a whoring
debaucherer,10 within the representations of the periodical press he
was nearly always defined as effete and homosocial. His pursuits and
interests—fashion, appearance, diversions, wit—were cast as feminine,
and had the effect of condemning the slavishly fashionable to the side of
the sexually suspect, in the Anglo-Saxon world at least.
Acknowledgements
I wish to particularly thank Dr. Michael Carter, Mr. Ian Henderson, Mr.
Martin Kamer, Mr. Edward Maeder, Dr. Jennifer Milam, Dr. Alexandra
Palmer and Ms. Kaye Spilker for their assistance with my doctoral
research; the research also proceeded with the assistance of the Veronika
Gervers Research Fellowship in Textiles and Costume History, Royal

Ontario Museum, November–December 1998. I also wish to thank Dr.
Christopher Breward, Dr. Gillian Russell and Dr. Valerie Steele for their
helpful comments.
Notes
1. This essay is drawn from my Ph.D. thesis, “Fashion Victims: Class,

Gender, Sexuality and the Macaroni, circa 1765–1780,” Department
of Art History and Theory, The University of Sydney, 1999. Parts of
the paper were presented as the seminar “The Waist-coat as Erotic
Field,” Department of Textiles and Costume, Royal Ontario Museum,
Toronto, December 1998. All prints mentioned in the article are in
the collection of the British Museum.
2. The spelling of the term was very varied in the eighteenth century;
“macaronies” was the most common, with macarony, maccaroni,
macaronie, and macoroni also found.
3. I use the word “homosexual” with caution; coined in the 1860s
within a medical discourse, many theorists of sexuality argue that it
should not be projected backwards. The use of the word “gay” is
similarly problematic, referring to a post-Stonewall homosexual
identity. Although many historians argue that a homosexual identity
(as opposed to acts) was brought into discourse in the late nineteenth
century, the research of Trumbach suggests that the molly-house
culture of the early eighteenth century constitutes a proto-homosexual
identity. The problem is finding the appropriate word with which to
describe it; “sodomitical” is perhaps most useful for the eighteenth
century.
4. “The dress of the English is like the French but not so gaudy; they
generally go plain but in the best cloths and stuffs ... not but that they
wear embroidery and laces on their cloathes on solemn days, but they
dont [sic] make it their daily wear, as the French do”: [1722], in Willett
and Cunningham 1972: 15.
5. “The Unhappy Consequences of Women’s Love of Finery,” The Tatler,
c.1710 (McDowell 1995: 23). A similar sentiment is expressed in: “A
444 Peter McNeil
sincere heart has not made half so many conquests as an open waist-
coat,” and “The Levellers: A Dialogue,” Harleian Miscellany, 1744–
46 (McDowell 1995: 27).
6. Burke notes that in European carnival, special and best clothes were
worn, often exaggerated (Burke, 1978: 178).
7. Betsky’s comments on the role of dance and the modern disco in the
creation of queer identity are valuable here: “The queer man could
dance himself alive in space in a continuous performance that created
a community of such appearances” (1997: 160).
8. Whiffle is described thus: “a tall, thin, young man, dressed in this
manner: a white hat garnished with a red feather, adorned his head,
from whence his hair flowed down upon his shoulders, in ringlets
tied behind with a ribbon.—His coat, consisting of pink-colored silk,
lined with white, by the elegance of the cut retired backward, as it
were, to discover a white sattin [sic] waistcoat embroidered with gold,
unbuttoned at the upper part, to display a broch [sic] set with garnets,
that glittered in the breast of his shirt, which was of the finest
cambrick, edged with right mechlin [i.e. genuine lace from Mechlin,
now in Belgium]. The knees of his crimson velvet breeches scarce
descended so low as to meet his silk stockings, which rose without
spot or wrinkle on his meagre legs, from shoes of blue Meroquin [i.e.
morocco leather], studded with diamond buckles, that flamed forth
rivals to the sun! A steel-hilted sword, inlaid with figures of gold,
and decked with a knot of ribbon which fell down in a rich tossle
[sic], equipped his side; and an amber-headed cane hung dangling
from his wrist:—But the most remarkable parts of his furniture were,
a mask on his face, and white gloves on his hands, which did not
seem to be put on with an intention to be pulled off occasionally,
but were fixed with a ring set with a ruby on the little finger of one
hand, and by one set with a topaz on that of the other ... surrounded
with a crowd of attendants, all of whom, in their different degrees,
seemed to be of their patron’s disposition; and the air was so impreg-
nated with perfumes, that one may venture to affirm the clime
of Arabia Foelix was not half so sweet-scented” (Smollett 1748:
194–5).
9. “Frock” refers to a male coat; “lus” possibly to a particular weight
of taffeta often associated with female dress.
10. I would not argue that macaroni status precluded a vigorous
heterosexual interest; there are the examples of Richard Cosway and
Sir Joseph Banks, and engravings such as The Libertine Macaroni,
regarding Thomas, the second Baron Lyttelton (George 1935: 132).
Nonetheless, the very word libertine connotes a polymorphous
sexuality that does not contradict my argument.
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Fashion Theory

The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture

ISSN: 1362-704X (Print) 1751-7419 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfft20

“That Doubtful Gender”: Macaroni Dress and Male

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/136270499779476081

Published online: 21 Apr 2015.

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Fashion Theory, Volume 3, Issue 4, pp.411–448

and personal motivations of the wearers.

From Mollies to Macaronies

A profound paradigm shift reconfigured connections between the

century saw a realignment of sexuality and gender roles in the West, in

argues that a paradigm of two genders based on two biological sexes

Trumbach records two meanings of the word “effeminate.” In the late

effeminacy so as not to be suspected or accused of engaging in unnatural

The macaronies represent the possibility of studying the confluence of

Mother Clap’s Molly House

In his extraordinary encyclopedia of human sexuality, the sexologist

bedrooms upstairs, and a clientele that ranged from blacksmiths to

In distinction from macaroni culture, molly behavior was connected

By the 1760s when the macaroni emerged, such attention to fashion

Masquerade and Travesty

Reports regarding the entertainments, decorations and dress of the

Caricatures and descriptions of macaronies at these events indicate that

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more common in clothing and furnishing textiles in the 1790s (Pastoureau

The Pantheon was a newly opened masquerade venue in central London,

or wearing an odd mixture of middle-class and court dress. Whether the

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The theatrical convention would have sanctioned a female performance

understand desire and non-normative sexualities.

by a mirror, the symbol of vanity. The dressing-room was often associated

ones in contemporary prints of ladies dressing, topped by a dressing-set

this theatricality points to one of the central strategies deployed

Despite the considerable evidence that suggests the presence of a homo-

The Macaronies were much disliked by the popular party, and

Q.” or Duke of Queensberry, and Selwyn himself, were leading

This is an intriguing paragraph, as it masks what Stephens was really

balls, neither dressed nor affiliated himself with macaroni taste. As a

that eighteenth-century writers “viewed fops primarily as social deviants,”

masculinity. Haggerty notes of the eighteenth century: “as various feminist

was very prominent. The alleged impotence of the macaroni is indicated

A Correspondent who dates from the Star and Garter, Pall-mall,

The notion that the macaroni represents an indeterminate, neutral or

I am going to speak of that wretched thing, called a Macaroni. To

Similarly, “A new description of a macaroni,” asked:

Is it a man?—’Tis hard to say—

How widespread the macaronic appearance and persona was in

the Train’d-Bands down to the errand-boy. They indeed make a

...Yesterday the Rev. Mrs. K—— preached before their Majesties

Fribble and whiffle were older terms interchangeable with macaroni,

also permit a sodomitical reading of the macaroni type. A French Petit

itions of the pathology of the homosexual, is present in some macaroni

J. Williams, 1773. British

number of reports and squibs in journals such as The Morning Post,

Fitzgiggo foremost let’s describe,

... But Macaronies are a sex

The compilation included this fictional conversation between the Parson

construction of the macaroni. Indeed, the theme of the outraged working

combat between perturbed English women and an effete Francophile

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) has been enormously influential