"The first gay activist".

This is how the BBC described one Thomas Cannon, who wrote a defense of "pederasty," published in 1749, that recently came to light. What University of Manchester scholar Hal Gladfelder discovered was not the work itself, but instead a legal indictment of the printer of a book called "Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify'd." The indictment, a handwritten scroll, suggests that the book was an anthology of stories and philosophical texts defending male homosexuality. Cannon's piece homed in on the argument that the Catholic Church had been using since the Middle Ages, namely that same-sex relations are somehow "unnatural" or a violation of "natural law." Allowing for some lapses in his knowledge of anatomy, Cannon's defense of pederasty sounds surprisingly modern: "Unnatural desire is a contradiction in terms; downright nonsense. Desire is an amatory impulse of the inmost human parts," he wrote in one extract, foreshadowing the Freudian "id." All traces of the book quickly disappeared, but the legal indictment quotes lengthy passages by Cannon, preserving his words for posterity. Noted Gladfelder: "[T]he 18th-century courts--who were trying to suppress this--unwittingly helped publicize it 258 years later." Cannon fled to the Continent to avoid punishment--a move that's strikingly reminiscent of Oscar Wilde's flight to Paris a century and a half later. Sometimes history repeats itself as tragedy.