“It’s where drag in the UK took hold in the queer community.” Luke Wintour speaks about his new short film, ‘Sweetheart’

Imagine the scene – it’s London in the 1700s and Molly Houses are doing a roaring trade. These queer underground clubs were coffeehouses by day and secret same-sex boozers that included drag performances, sexual activity and more by night.

Molly Houses — molly was a slang term for gay men in 18th century England — are brought to life in Sweetheart, a short film about a young man (Eben Figueiredo) being introduced to London’s secret queer subculture in 1723.

Directed by Luke Wintour and written by Alastair Curtis, most of the story is based on court records of countless men who were arrested during police raids of Molly Houses. “Everything you see in the film comes from historical records,” Wintour said. “They did mock weddings and baptisms. Sometimes they would pretend to give birth to a doll but sometimes to a cheese wheel or a [fireplace] bellow.”

“There are some people who say that Molly Houses is where camp or the notion of camp began,” Wintour added. “It’s definitely where drag in the UK took hold in the queer community. It’s kind of mind blowing that it was 300 years ago.”

Wintour hopes to expand the short into a full-length feature film. “We’re working on the story around this when bribery and blackmail started to happen,” he explained. “You had these amazing queer gangs that would go around to these cruising grounds and they would try and solicit sex, but then three of their mates would come out of the bush and they say, ‘Give us £50 or we’re going to take you to court.’

“You’d have these incredible court cases starting to emerge of bribery and blackmail, and then countersuing cases because it was also illegal to extort and to blackmail at the time.”