Lawson, use that one-eye to scour my brain like a cheese grater – regale me with tales of your literary output over the years and I shall forever be your biggest suckboy.

Of the dozen or so surviving articles, squibs, and letters to the editor, the most remarkable appeared in the Whip and Satirist’s February 12, 1842, issue, and disclosed the existence of a cabal of gay men in New York's otherwise wholesome nightscape of brothels and riots. Moreover it identified the spider who minced so delicately along the wide-flung strands of the sodomitical web. There is not one so degraded as this Captain Collins, the King of the Sodomites. He was a foreigner, an Englishman, in the long tradition of blaming homosexuality on the influence of aliens. Among the syndicate of perverts, the writer announced, we find no Americans as yet—they are all Englishmen or French (the English called homosexuality the French vice and the French the English vice; for the Whip it was the French and English vice).

[…] , whom he had posed within hearing of his harang.

Probably the city government knew that without that hamstering half the city would starve and they somehow got the police to lay off. It was in the little stinky one-horse towns that you had all the trouble.