Portable closets: Secrets and lives in queer Britain since gay liberation

IHR Friends and Fellows Lecture 2024 | Portable closets: Secrets and lives in queer Britain since gay liberation

The double life and the closet tend to be associated with a time before the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 and the Gay Liberation Front call to ‘come out’ in the early 1970s. Though the social and cultural terrain in Britain has certainly shifted, this lecture shows how and why various kinds of secret have continued to matter to many gay men and have helped to make their lives liveable. Based on research and interviews for the AHRC-funded ‘Queer Beyond London’ project, it looks at how people’s backgrounds, families, and the places they live have made a portable closet  a necessary, comforting and even enjoyable place to retreat to in the years since gay liberation.
 
 
Matt Cook is Jonathan Cooper Professor of the History of Sexuality at Oxford University. He is a member of the HWJ editorial collective and was formerly Professor of Modern History at Birkbeck University of London, and director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre. He is the author of  London and the Culture of Homosexuality (2003),  Queer Domesticities (2014) and – with Alison Oram – Queer Beyond London (2023), and co-editor of  five other queer-themed books.