Long Before Harry Hay...

Thomas Cannon shocked the establishment with his 1749 paper, "Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify'd." From the vantage point of an imaginary (and satirical) post-gay future, Cannon examines same-sex love in all its delightful variations. According to The Guardian, the text is bawdy and ironic, but not (yet) available to the general public.

Hal Gladfelder, the treatise's discoverer, believes the document to be the first written defense of homosexuality in the English language.

Cannon's writings were so shocking, he fled Britain immediately upon publication, leaving his poor printer to suffer criminal prosecution.

Employing an argument which is basically the same as the one made by gay people today, Cannon writes: "unnatural desire is a contradiction in terms; downright nonsense. Desire is an amatory impulse of the inmost human parts."

In another passage, he relates a tale that might move Eddie Murphy to exclaim "I hear you, brotha!":

"The enraptur'd Amorio, snatching her up, speeds to the Bed, where Incumbrances quickly off, he finds in his Clasp a Body past Imagination delicate; but of Gender masculine."

To read more: run to your nearest university library and get your hands on the latest edition of the journal "Eighteenth Century Life".