Events

Historian Alison Oram will examine how queer desire challenged the heart of the heterosexual marriage and the postwar home. Followed by a poetry workshop with Cherry Smyth.

Programme:

1.00 Talk with historian Alison Oram, author of "Her Husband Was a Woman!" Women's Gender-Crossing and Modern British Popular Culture (2007).  She explores gay lives on the domestic scene.

2.00 Break for tea and biscuits

2.30 Write Queer London poetry writing workshop.  Led by poet Cherry Smyth, we'll be using the Geffrye Museum's period rooms from 4 centuries of history as a jumping off point for writing your own verse and imagining your way into the gay past.

To book: Bookings and Information Officer, Geffrye Museum, Kingsland Road, London, E2 8EA. Tel: 020 7749 6024, E-mail: bookings@geffrye-museum.org.uk.  Let us know if you would like to come for the talk only, or for the poetry workshop.

Plenty of places for Alison's talk but only 15 for Cherry's workshop, so do let us know early if you would like to attend

More about Alison's talk

The comfortable settee, television and modernist furniture of the 1950s ‘ideal home’ highlighted the aspirations of the postwar years, for a nation built on stable marriage and a family-centred domestic life.  But did this ‘ideal home’ really reflect a secure family structure? In the postwar years homosexuality – both male and female – took shape as a distinct modern identity in 1950s public debate.

The sensational popular press labeled gay men and lesbians as deviants with ‘perverted passions’, and generally described them as living outside the family, rejected from normal homes. Male homosexuals might be typecast as enjoying elite cocktail parties in central London or as frequenting sleazy bars and pick-up spots. Lesbians were seen as disqualified from mainstream femininity by their rejection of motherhood and marriage, condemned to lonely bedsits at best. Yet emerging lesbian and gay identities, though strongly pathologised, certainly unsettled the normative idea of the home. This talk will examine how queer desire challenged the heart of the heterosexual marriage and the postwar home.

Anxieties about homosexuality raised troubling questions about same-sex friendship, the place of sex and love within marriage, and women’s sexual agency.

One newspaper opinion piece discussed the likelihood of husbands and wives secretly harbouring homosexual desire, such as the married women whose “real love life is spent over the teacups with their girl friends”. Husbands complained to the courts that their wives’ close female friendships amounted to lesbianism and were therefore grounds for divorce as mental cruelty. Male homosexuality was also feared as threatening the home. The British film Victim (1961) starring Dirk Bogarde, was a sympathetic portrayal of gay men’s vulnerability to blackmail in this period, and dramatized the idea that homosexuality could be found at the heart of an apparently successful marriage.

These cultural negotiations suggest an indeterminacy of desire. Lesbian and gay desires were not always clearly differentiated from either heterosexual marriage or homosocial affection in this period. Same-sex desire existed in the same suburban homes, in the frayed edges of marriage.