Abstract
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.
Orton would have relished the solemn fakery of sodomite domesticity embodied in the spectacle of Jenny cuddling brain-soaked teddy between Ken and Joe’s own prick-proud, severed body.1
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Notes
John Osborne, ‘The diary of a somebody’, in The Spectator (29 November 1986), p. 3. For further discussion of Osborne’s comments in relation to John Lahr’s editing of Orton’s diaries, see Matt Cook, ‘Orton in the archives’, History Workshop Journal 66 (2008), 163–80.
John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, 1999).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990).
Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (New Haven, 2006).
For more on this shift in queer identity, see especially Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Pleasures and Perils in the Sexual Metropolis 1918–1957 (Chicago, 2005).
Sharon Marcus, ‘At home with the other Victorians’, in South Atlantic Quarterly, 108 (2009), 120–45, 139; Matt Cook, ‘Queer domesticities’, in Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei (eds), The Domestic Space Reader (Toronto, 2010).
Randall S. Nakayama, ‘Domesticating Mr Orton’, Theatre Journal 45 (1993), 185–196, 194.
For a brief account of the debate on this tension amongst historians of masculinity, see Karen Harvey, ‘The history of masculinity, c. 1650–1800’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 296–311; Karen Harvey and Alexandra Shepard, ‘What have historians done with masculinity? reflections on five centuries of British history, c. 1500–1950’, Journal of British History 44 (2005), 274–80.
James Obelkevich, ‘Consumption’, in James Obelkevich and Peter Caterall (eds), Understanding Postwar British Society (London, 1994), p. 144.
Jonathan Dollimore, ‘The challenge of sexuality’, in Alan Sinfield (ed.), Society and Literature 1945–1970 (London, 1983), pp. 60–1. See also Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Life in Britain Since 1880 (London, 2000), ch. 9.
For the significance of ‘home’ in the formation of the Victorian middle class, see especially George K. Behlmer, Friends of the Family: the English Home and its Guardians, 1850–1940 (Stanford, 1998); Catherine Hall and Leonora Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1988); and Tosh, A Man’s Place.
On this point see Peter J. Kalliney, Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness (Charlottesville, 2006), p. 122.
Simon Shepherd, Because We’re Queers: The Life and Crimes of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton (London, 1989), p. 137.
On this point see Matt Cook, A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex between Men since the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2007), pp. 167–71. See also Patrick Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Postwar Britain (London, 1996).
Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London, 1986). See also Penny Summerfield, ‘Women in Britain since 1945: companionate marriage and the double burden’, in Obelkevich, Understanding; Houlbrook, Queer, ch. 7; Cook, Gay, pp. 159–60.
On this point see Janet E. Gardner, ‘A normal family: alternative communities in the plays of Joe Orton and Caryl Churchill’, in Francesca Coppa (ed.), Joe Orton: A Casebook (New York, 2003), p. 79.
Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York, 1991), p. 22; see also Matt Cook, ‘“Families of choice”? George Ives, queer lives and the family’, Gender and History 22 (2010), 1–20.
On the interiors of Wilde and his circle see, for example, Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (London, 1993), p. 180; Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge, 2003), ch. 4; Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man?: A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (London, 1988). On the Bloomsbury group see Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture and Domesticity (New Haven, 2004).
Richard Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London (Minneapolis, 2010), pp. 208–10.
Rodney Garland, The Heart in Exile (1953; Brighton, 1995), p. 47. For more detailed analysis of these domestic interiors and the ‘type’ of homosexual they portend, see Hornsey, The Spiv, p. 206; and also Matt Houlbrook and Chris Waters, ‘The Heart in Exile: Detachment and Desire in 1950s London’, History Workshop Journal 62 (2006), 142–66.
Gordon Westwood (pseud. Michael Schofield), Society and the Homosexual (London, 1952), p. 132.
Liz Stanley, Sex Surveyed, 1949–1994: from Mass Observation’s Little Kinsey to the National Surveys and the Hite Report (London, 1995), pp. 199–203.
John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton (Harmondsworth, 1978); Shepherd, Because.
For 1950s analysis of the ‘homosexual problem’ in Britain see, for example, J.T. Rees and H.V. Usill (eds), They Stand Apart: A Critical Survey of the Problem of Homosexuality (London, 1955); Gordon Westwood, A Minority: A Report on the Life of the Male Homosexual in Great Britain (London, 1960).
George Kateb, ‘Exile, alienation and estrangement’, Social Research 58 (1991), 138.
On this point see Alan Trachtenberg, ‘Home as place and center for private and family life’, Social Research 58 (1991), 211.
See Cook, Gay, pp. 150–58; for an autobiographical account of the Soho scene in the 60s see Peter Burton, Parallel Lives (London, 1985), esp. p. 45.
On this point see Cook, London, ch. 2; and Robert A. Nye, ‘Kinship, male bonds and masculinity in comparative perspective’, American Historical Review (2000), 1656–66.
Interview with Rex, 23 March 2009; see also Rex Batten, Rid England of this Plague (London, 2007).
John Lahr (ed.), The Orton Diaries (London, 1986), 30 December 1967, p. 45.
Kenneth Williams, The Kenneth Williams Diaries, cited in Alan Sinfield, ‘Is there a queer tradition and is Orton in it?’, in Coppa, Joe Orton, p. 91.
See Margot Finn, ‘Men’s things: masculine possession in the consumer revolution’, Social History 25 (2000), 133–55; Cohen, Domestic Gods; Hornsey, The Spiv.
See Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century (London, 2002), pp. 63–4. On the national rise in home ownership in the 1950s see Obelkevich, ‘Consumption’, p. 144.
Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (London, 2002), p. 16.
Around 1,653 of them, according to Islington library. Maurice Charney, Joe Orton (London, 1984), p. 7.
Joe Orton, ‘The ruffian on the stair’, in John Lahr (ed.), Orton: The Complete Plays (London, 1976), pp. 49–50.
Tamara Hareven, ‘The home and the family in historical perspective’, Social Research 58 (1991), p. 258.
Jeffrey Weeks, Brian Heaphy and Catherine Donovan, Same-Sex Intimacies: Families of Choice and Other Life Experiments (London, 2001). On the need for flexible understandings of kinship in our approach to the past, see Nye, ‘Kinship’, p. 1658.
Joe Orton, ‘The good and faithful servant’, Complete Plays, pp. 166–67.
Dollimore, ‘The challenge of sexuality’, p. 64. See also Chris Waters, ‘Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud and the state: discourses of homosexuality in interwar Britain’, in Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (eds), Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires (Cambridge, 1998).
Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Movement (London, 1994), p. 11. Sinfield cites Stuart Hall from ‘Deviance, politics and the media’, in Paul Rock and Mary McIntosh (eds), Deviance and Social Control (London, 1974), p. 293.
See especially: on the early modern period, Anthony Fletcher, ‘Men’s Dilemma: the Future of Patriarchy in England, 1560–1660’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 4 (1994), 61–81, and Helen Berry, ‘Scrutinising men: current trends in the history of British masculinity, 1600–1800’, History Workshop Journal 52 (2001), 283–86; on the late Victorians: Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, 2004); on the post-war period in France: Julian Jackson, ‘Sex, politics and morality in France’, History Workshop Journal 61 (2006), 77–102.
Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (London, 2000).
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Cook, M. (2011). Homes Fit for Homos: Joe Orton, Masculinity and the Domesticated Queer. In: Arnold, J.H., Brady, S. (eds) What is Masculinity?. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307254_15
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