Matt Cook

Homes Fit for Homos: Joe Orton, Masculinity and the Domesticated Queer

In his 1986 review of the diaries of Joe Orton (1933–1967), fellow British playwright John Osborne used Orton’s murder at the hands of his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, to underscore the patent absurdity of gay parenting and ‘sodomite domesticity’. ‘Jenny’ was the protagonist of the children’s book Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin (1983), which represented a happy but also queer domestic unit. The book caused a storm and was used by Margaret Thatcher’s conservatives to indicate the dangers posed by a permissive society and to attack the ‘political correctness’ of ‘loony left’ local councils which stocked this and similar books in their libraries. By imagining Jenny cuddling teddy alongside the bloodied and brain-splattered bodies of ‘Ken and Joe’, Osborne was keying into a familiar story of the anti-domestic and anti-familial homosexual whilst also conjuring for Orton an embodied and ‘prick-proud’ masculinity.2 He stumbled in this way on the under-examined intersection of cultures of homosexuality, of domesticity and of masculinity, and unwittingly presented Orton as an apt case study.

Nurses and subordination: a historical study of mental nurses' perceptions on administering aversion therapy for 'sexual deviations'

Nurses and subordination: a historical study of mental nurses’ perceptions on administering aversion therapy for ‘sexual deviations’ This study aimed to examine the meanings that nurses attached to the ‘treatments’ administered to cure ‘sexual deviation’ (SD) in the UK, 1935–1974. In the UK, homosexuality was considered a classifiable mental illness that could be ‘cured’ until 1992. Nurses were involved in administering painful and distressing treatments. The study is based on oral history interviews with fifteen nurses who had administered treatments to cure individuals of their SD. The interviews were transcribed for historical interpretation. Some nurses believed that their role was to passively follow any orders they had been given. Other nurses limited their culpability concerning administering these treatments by adopting dehumanising and objectifying language and by focussing on administrative tasks, rather than the human beings in need of their care. Meanwhile, some nurses genuinely believed that they were acting beneficently by administering these distinctly unpleasant treatments. It is envisaged that this study might act to reiterate the need for nurses to ensure their interventions have a sound evidence base and that they constantly reflect on the moral and value base of their practice and the influence that science and societal norms can have on changing views of what is considered ‘acceptable practice’.

Review Article: Twentieth-Century Masculinities

Brad Beavan, Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men in Britain, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2005; pp. xii + 258; ISBN 0 7190 6027 3 Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh, (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004; pp. xv + 325; ISBN 0 7190 6521 6 Paul Jobling, Man Appeal: Advertising, Modernism and Menswear, Oxford, Berg, 2005; pp. xi + 161; ISBN 1 84520 087 X Jennifer Travis, Wounded Hearts: Masculinity, Law and Literature in American Culture, Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 2005; pp. x + 222; ISBN 0 8078 2974 9

Sexual Revolution(s) in Britain

The period commonly associated with sexual revolution in Britain — roughly between 1965 and 1970 — saw what historian Hera Cook calls an ‘astonishing’ ‘pace of change’.1 Joe Orton was upending sexual and relationship norms in the theatre, television was broaching sex as never before and Mick Jagger was (paradoxically) getting ‘no satisfaction’. Government ushered in a raft of liberalising measures — partially legalising abortion and homosexuality in 1967 and introducing no-fault divorce in 1969. The initial stipulation that the pill be available only to married women (from 1961) was lifted in 1966.2 After pacifist Dr Alex Comfort’s reissue of Sex in Society in 1963 and his appearance in a BBC TV debate in the same year (giving the book a much higher profile than the original 1950 edition) came William Masters and Virginia Johnson’s Human Sexual response (1966) and David Reuben’s Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex (1969). They each in different ways emphasised what Comfort subsequently dubbed ‘the Joy of Sex’ in his 1972 classic. San Francisco’s infamous 1967 summer of love crossed the Atlantic and played out piecemeal in London’s Soho, Kings Road and Notting Hill. It brought hippies, free love and psychedelic drug culture into clearer view. Different — and certainly wider use of — recreational drugs marked a distinction between the generation.

Domestic Passions: Unpacking the Homes of Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts

In 1924, Country Life magazine featured a home made in the Keep of Chilham Castle in Kent. Such unusual landmark properties were standard fare in this and similar publications from the late nineteenth century onwards. 1 They detailed domestic histories and interiors that seemed to perfectly frame and reflect the character and distinction of the inhabitants — in this case, the artist couple Charles Shannon (1863–1937) and Charles Ricketts (1866–1931). The author of the piece, historian of domestic architecture Christopher Hussey, waxed lyrical about the ‘two painters [who] now imitate the way of Montaigne and dwell in a tower: two painters whose long and productive friendship is scarcely less “perfect, inviolate and entire” than that of Michel de Montaigne and Etienne de la Boetie’.2 The pair had preserved and ‘beautified’ ‘one of the most ancient habitations in Britain’, and in these surroundings, were to be ‘left in their tower overlooking the fat meadows of the Stour, among the peacock bowers and ilex [holly tree] shade of their field, at peace to raise castles of canvas and weave tapestries in paint’.3

Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History / Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939–1945: Queer Identities in the Second World War

collection worked to highlight the importance of gathering as diverse a recollection of experiences as possible while we are fortunate enough to still have the Vietnam generation amongst us. New Perceptions of the VietnamWar is successful in highlighting the importance of diversifying our scholarly interpretations of the Vietnam War, but a worthy expansion of Nguyen’s project to broaden our perceptions of Vietnam may be a collection of such memoir essays from the very subject positions explored in this collection, such as the South Vietnamese, presented with minimal scholarly intervention.

At home with Derek Jarman

Home is never only of the present. A sense of personal robustness and sometimes political resistance can emerge through a tacking back and forth between homes past and present—especially for those who felt and feel socially or culturally marginalized. We see this vividly in the way the filmmaker Derek Jarman created his home and garden at Prospect Cottage at Dungeness on the Kent coast in the context of his failing health. In this piece I show how formative homes, homes of early adulthood, and aspirations for a different kind of home life inflect the way Jarman lived at Prospect in his here and now. This is about the rolling together of different ages and experiences in ways that can give a sense of endurance in uncertain times.

Remembering Bedsitterland: Rex Batten, Carl Marshall and Alan Louis

This chapter looks at the ways in which three gay men tell their stories of coming to London penniless in the 1950s and finding ‘home’ there. Their testimonies suggest ways in which the city and particular areas within it could accommodate and shape queer lives in different ways. They also suggest shared concerns about making home which relate to the social and cultural positioning of homosexual men in the postwar years. Rex Batten (b.1928) gathered his memories of the 1940s and 1950s in a fictionalised memoir, Rid England of this Plague (2006). There he describes his rural working-class upbringing and his first love affair with a middle class man called Ashley; his move to London to take up a scholarship at RADA; and his life in a bedsit in Camden, where he and his boyfriend John experienced a frightening brush with the law. I contacted Rex after reading his book and interviewed him at his current home in East Dulwich which he shared with John until his death in 1994. The novel, he told me then, was 90 per cent autobiographical.1 Alan Louis (1932–2011) got in touch with me after I advertised for project participants with older gay men’s groups in London, and I interviewed him in 2010 in the common room of his sheltered accommodation in Hackney. This for him did not feel like home and he reminisced chiefly about his ‘camp’ life in various houses in Notting Hill in the 1950s.

‘Gay Times’: The Brixton Squatters

Soon after arriving from Ireland in the mid-1970s David got off the bus in Brixton, south London, and wandered along Railton Road. There was this group of black men standing around and I remember going up to them and saying ‘excuse me, could you tell me where the Gay Centre is in Brixton’. This black man said ‘sure, I’m just going home. I can take you up there’. [… I] waited there and about a minute or two afterwards this vision in purple and red and diamonds walked past. He flashed his eyes at me and swished around the corner and up the stairs. […] It was Alistair. He took me to 159 Railton Road and it was liberation because I looked around at all these people who looked like me […] we were going to change the world tomorrow — overnight and there as going to be gay liberation in a year’s time. Marvellous. (David’, 1983)1 This was David’s introduction to what became known as the Brixton Gay Community. The first house in this community — the one visited by David — was squatted in 1974; the gay centre he mentions opened in squatted premises just along the street at 79 Railton Road in the same year. Nine more houses were subsequently squatted on Railton Road (between 153 and 159) and the parallel Mayall Road (between 146 and 152), and were home for between 50 and 60 men for anything from a week to almost ten years.

Queer Interiors: C.R. Ashbee to Oliver Ford

Shannon and Ricketts’ contemporary, near neighbour and sometime collaborator, Charles Ashbee (1863–1942) was making his way at the start of the period covered by this book. Interior designer Oliver Ford (1925–1992) died towards the end, just two years before Derek Jarman, my final case study. Ashbee was motivated in his architectural and design work by his romantic socialism and the homosocial comradeship he associated with it. Ford, interior designer to ‘HM the Queen Mother’ (as he always respectfully called her in his diary) had an eye to tradition which endeared him to the establishment and allowed him to endure even after his prosecution for ‘indecency’ with two guardsmen in 1968. These men are connected by their strong ethic of friendship, their professional prominence, and their serious missionary zeal which was aligned with ideas of social or personal and royal service. They each underscored the developing association between queerness and a flair for interior styling, but I argue here that this assodation could mean very different things personally and politically. The chapter is in three distinct parts — looking at the pre-World War I, the interwar, and then the post World War II periods. I look first at Ashbee and in particular his interior work in the late 1890s. Using the interwar ‘amusing’ style and the words and work of designer Ronald Fleming (1896–1968), I then survey the growing queer resonance of modern, stylish, individualised interiors and a shift in awareness about queer lives in the period between Ashbee and Ford’s respective professional practice.