On the simplest level the molly houses offered a relatively safe way of making sexual contacts, far safer than engaging someone in conversation at a dissenting meeting-house, or at work or in the streets. But they also offered something more. Firstly, sexual contacts or not, you were no longer alone. And this meant more than friendship, although no doubt that was important; what it gave the individual was the support of an aggressive and resilient culture. 'They...swore they would massacre anybody that should betray them' was the response of one molly house to the possibility that they were indeed in danger. These were not idle words. When a molly house in Covent Garden was broken up in 1725, the crowded household, many of them in drag, met the raid with determined and violent resistance.

Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (96)