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The missing ‘case’ of the heterosexual
Laura Doan

This chapter describes the genealogy of the heterosexual in relation to its counterpart by looking closely at two distinctive but interconnected systems: sexology and marital advice literature. As a great classificatory project, sexology turns an undifferentiated sexual nature into multiple essences we now term sexual identities. Practising the scientific method of 'close and careful observation', Stella Browne believes her cases 'are absolutely distinguishable from affectionate friendship' and 'episodical homosexuality'. In the closing months of the First World War, sex reformers and sex educators actively developed and disseminated a scientific knowledge of sex by drawing on the work of Havelock Ellis and others. Using the sexological framework to impose order and substance on the messiness of human sexuality, Browne uses the case study method to produce a knowable sexual subject against its nameable opposite.

in British queer history
Abstract only
Unconventionality and queerness in Katherine Everett’s life writing
Mo Moultonc

Katherine Everett's 1949 memoir, Bricks and Flowers, narrates a remarkable life. Born into the Anglo-Irish gentry in the 1870s, Everett escaped an abusive mother by moving to Britain as a teenager. This chapter provides a key to understanding a life like Everett's, which seems simultaneously to invite and to resist a queer reading. It argues that it is possible to arrive at a richer understanding of life outside the conventions of heteronormativity and, perhaps, of homonormativity as well. The chapter describes queer critical history in Everett's life-writing, of the strange-to-us category of unconventionality. Homosexuality, or the possibility of it, appears only in muted and intermittent ways in Bricks and Flowers. For Everett, however, the war put a temporary break in her unconventional career as a builder and pushed her towards more typical means of earning a living for a woman: nursing and working as a personal companion.

in British queer history
New approaches and perspectives
Editor:

This book demonstrates a fruitful cross-fertilisation of ideas between British queer history and art history. It engages with self-identified lesbians and with another highly important source for queer history: oral history. The book highlights the international dimension of what to date has been told as a classic British tale of homosexual law reform and also illuminates the choices made and constraints imposed at the national level. It embarks on a queer critical history, arguing for the centrality, in John Everett Millais's life-writing, of the strange-to-us category of unconventionality. The book aims to expose the queer implications of celebrity gossip writing. It offers a historical analysis of the link between homosexual men and gossip by examining the origins of the gossip column in the British tabloid press in the three decades after 1910. The book provides an overview of the emergence and consolidation of a number of new discourses of homosexuality as a social practice in postwar Britain. It explores a British variant on homophile internationalism before and immediately after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act by mapping Grey's cross-border connections while noting strain against transnational solidarity. The book focuses on evidence collected by the 1977 Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship to illustrate how gay men conceptualised the place of pornography in their lives and its role in the broader struggle for the freedom.

Paul R. Deslandes

This chapter describes the particular developments associated with the publication of Him Exclusive, Him International and Him Monthly and highlights the cultural work that pornography did for gay men in the 1970s. It focuses on both the prosecution of gay-oriented book sellers and publishers by legal officials in the mid-970s and critiques of pornography that were generated by members of the gay left. The chapter explores how various agents of the state, charged with enforcing British censorship laws, sought to police not only the boundaries of propriety but also the expression of queer political sensibilities and subjectivities. It also focuses on evidence collected by the 1977 Williams Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship to illustrate how gay men conceptualised the place of pornography in their lives and its role in the broader struggle for the freedom.

in British queer history
Abstract only
The making of a queer marketplace in pre-decriminalisation Britain
Justin Bengry

In 1966, David McGillivray contacted the Films and Filming editor Peter Baker asking for the opportunity to write for the magazine. Long before homosexual activity between consenting men was partially decriminalised in Britain in 1967, Films and Filming included articles and images, erotically charged commercial advertisements and same-sex contact ads that established its queer leanings. In response to Philip Dosse's financial straits, editorial decisions were consciously based in part on accessing a potential homosexual market. Dosse recognised that a nascent market of culturally literate and cosmopolitan queer men with disposable incomes was appearing in Britain and abroad. The sociologist and historian Jeffrey Weeks has written, in fact, that 'gay' was only widely adopted in Britain with the organisation of the Gay Liberation Front in 1970. Films and Filming editors and readers appear to have known and exploited the word's ambiguities.

in British queer history
Chris Waters

This chapter concerns with the various professional practices through which that world was rendered increasingly legible between 1945 and 1968. It argues that the process of uncovering, dissecting and mapping the social world of the male homosexual and his relations with the broader society took place relatively late in Britain. The male homosexual in Britain had a relatively invisible social presence prior to 1945 is also to say much about the relative invisibility of the social sciences in Britain before the Second World War. The aftermath of the war, the human sciences were called upon to deal with a number of so-called 'social problems', the declining birth-rate, divorce, anti-Semitism, race relations, juvenile delinquency and homosexuality. Gerrit Theodore Kempe's article marked something of a watershed in writing published in Britain about homosexuality.

in British queer history
Domesticity in postwar lesbian oral history
Amy Tooth Murphy

The end of the twentieth century research on postwar British lesbian life and culture has commonly focused on themes such as socialising and the creation of networks, especially the lesbian bar scene and lesbian social organisations. This chapter aims to open a small window on to the obscured area of postwar lesbian domesticity. It draws a distinction between what can usefully be termed hetero-domesticity and homo-domesticity. Analysis of case studies from across the range of experience reveals the impact of available models of hetero-domesticity on the ways in which narrators envisioned and created domestic spaces to foster and live out lesbian relationships. Penelope and Nina speak evocatively about the restrictiveness they imagined would come with hetero-domesticity. In both Laura's and Mira's cases former hetero-domesticity poses a threat to the continuity of their narrative trajectories and their presentation of themselves as out and 'composed' lesbian women.

in British queer history
Abstract only
British queer history
Brian Lewis

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with a topic of concern to all the authors: the effective interrogation of archival sources in pursuit of British queer history. It demonstrates a fruitful cross-fertilisation of ideas between queer history and art history. The book describes a meticulous reading of Katherine Everett's life-story, Bricks and Flowers. It presents dandyish world of the gossip columnist in British national newspapers and magazines between 1910 and the Second World War. The book provides one of the most significant examples of the 'altericist reaction' fomented by the new British queer history. It highlights the international dimension of what to date has been told as a classic British tale of homosexual law reform, but also illuminates the choices made and constraints imposed at the national level.

in British queer history
The homophile internationalism of Britain’s Homosexual Law Reform Society
David Minto

This chapter explores a British variant on homophile internationalism before and immediately after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act by mapping Antony Grey's cross-border connections while noting strain against transnational solidarity. In charge of Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS) day-to-day operation, Grey authored and received much of the correspondence, although his work more generally depended on HLRS's Executive Committee, office staff, affiliated professionals, honorary trustees and volunteers. While Grey forwarded lists of those he wanted to meet and contemplated a week's extension to take in Washington, DC, Dorr Legg continued to emphasise homophile divisions that Grey hoped could be overcome. According to Legg's self-serving account, trouble started when the campaigner Barbara Gittings attempted to record Grey's address to the group, prompting Legg to insist that ONE's financial investment gave it sole rights to publish Grey's speeches.

in British queer history
Henry Scott Tuke
Jongwoo Jeremy Kim

Henry Scott Tuke's career as an artist was deeply committed to the visual proliferation of youths, clad or unclad. The homoeroticism of Henry Scott Tuke's naturalism can be understood as part of his effort to contemporise what was considered to be a lost Hellenic tradition of 'man-manly love'. Paintings of fishermen and other workers were central to Tuke's efforts to bring Greek homoeroticism to his modern time. Tuke's yearning injects a subtle form of homoerotic fantasy into what is apparently a dramatic narrative of working-class men in a storm. Violating the picture plane, Tuke challenges the boundary of the pictorial illusion separated from the viewer's reality. Tuke's naturalistic portrayal of Cornish working-class lads and their lives, with its 'sexless' 'view of labour', is animated by this complex homoerotic desire.

in British queer history