Warm Homes in a Cold Climate: Rex Batten and the Queer Domestic

Abstract

‘Home’, writes Richard Hornsey, was ‘one of the most contested sites in the concerted drive for social reconstruction and renewal’ in Britain in the 1950s.² As a material place and as an ideal, it represented what could go right for the nation. It alluded to a companionate and nuclear form of family to which men and women brought their respective and highly gendered skills, and to a coming generation reared with a clear set of values aligned with respectability and good citizenship.³ The new welfare state was based on presumptions about the tight form and functioning of this unit, further ingraining it as the obvious and ideal base for domestic life.⁴ Home had long held this pivotal status in British culture, but it was given a fresh impetus in this period in ways that we can trace through novels, films, the media, popular psychology and the words of politicians, lawyers, medics and more.⁵ Those without a home, those who did not take care of it, or who took care of it a little too frivolously, meanwhile, boded ill. The upsurge in discussions about the homosexual, the prostitute and the immigrant conjured these figures especially as the threatening ‘others’ to the ‘normal’ home and ‘normal’ family. Whilst the latter were figured as intrinsic to a civilised, modern and forward-looking culture, this threatening triumvirate was an apparent link to primitive realms and/or to earlier scandals borne of a supposedly very different city and era.⁶

Home is the basis of the family, just as family is the basis of the nation

British Prime Minister Harold Macmillian, 1952¹