The third section explores what happened in working-class homes, as well as ideas of what you would do in terms of domesticity if you had no money. This is centred around the ’50s and ’60s, in spaces like boarding houses and bedsits, and the section looks into homelessness and the idea of home, mostly pulling from oral history. I interviewed various people, now rather elderly, who described their home lives in those years.

The final section is about self-conscious alternative living, with the emergence of the Gay Liberation Front and the squatting movement. It examines the idea of creating a rupture from domestic and familial norms.

Why was this research important to you?
We tend to think about queer home and family in a very contemporary sense, post-adoption and co-parenting, supported by the debates around home normativity that emerged in the ’90s and 2000s. But it seemed obvious to me that queer people had been making a home and families of choice before that. I was keen to capture that because it seemed to me that this historical dimension had been lost.

It’s happening right now with the trans debate too. People seem to see it as just something contemporary but there’s a deep, long history, which I think could truly help the debate because the trans identity isn’t going anywhere and it’s always been around.

I’m intrigued by these ideas around collecting, design and “the beautiful home”—what were your findings?
There are some really key ideas around respectability and legitimacy. I was trying to track in two paths, and on the one path, I looked at Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts, who were a couple in the late 19th and early part of the 20th century, and, strangely, lived relatively openly as an acknowledged pair. I think they partly managed it because they were artists, so they were quite respected and seen as “bohemian”.

One of the things they did was they created a beautiful home and they collected exquisite objects and art. In a period when queerness was seen as degenerate and depraved, usually out on the streets, here was a couple who made something extraordinary, and more than that, suggested that it was their very queerness that allowed them to make these exquisite choices—which of course is bollocks. But it gave them a kind of cultural elevation in a moment when queerness was seen as debased and degenerate.

I was very interested in the idea that queer people could find a space socially and culturally in mainstream society and culture through the home. Because the home is a totem of respectability and civic membership (in Britain, it historically gave one the right to vote), there were all these ways in which home really mattered. And if queer people could say, yes, we understand what home is about, we understand how to decorate a home beautifully, it gave them a social position. And if you could excel in that, if you could be the best homemaker, then you were almost outdoing the straight middle classes.

This was also part of the development of interior design as a profession, which attracted a lot of queer people. Some of the first prominent interior designers were lesbians, who found in interior design a way to earn their own keep without having to marry a man, which was what they usually had to do.

I did a case study on Oliver Ford, who was the interior designer for the Queen at the time. He was very interested in what they called the “amusing style” in the interwar period, which was the conjunction of the improbable. Historically, interiors had been unified in style, such as regency or baroque, but Oliver Ford enjoyed putting the antique against the modern, which in the interwar period they called “amusing”. It was a sign of high taste and high camp.

Something is interesting as well about how interior design allowed queer men and women into other people’s homes. There are some interesting letters that suggest that husbands of elite women were quite happy about this because their wives were spending time with men who weren’t a threat.

But of course, in the latter part of the 20th century, this kind of flipped and became a point of ridicule, the fact that they were into soft furnishings and interior design was a way of belittling men, seen as frivolous and domestic. It wasn’t seen as manly like the hard work of engineering and architecture, so there’s an interesting way in which their way into the social and cultural world also became a way to berate them as effeminate.

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Another strand of that interiors section of the book is how queer men framed their interior style as a statement. If Victorian design had been a lot about pretension and fancy woodwork, men like Charles Ashby and Edward Carpenter were interested in honesty in relation to design; they associated their straightforward, honest craftsmanship with honesty in desire.

It was their preference to have a kind of honesty in the way they design and furnish a home, not disguising a light bulb for what it is, but letting things appear as what they are. In that sense, in the late 19th and early 20th century, the home had already become a place where one could make social statements.

Furthermore, there is this idea of accumulation in the home, of assembling a kind of queer bricolage, something I examined by looking at Derek Jarman. Nobody else was cataloguing queer lives, so one of the ways you would do it is by accumulating stuff that might be valueless if you took it to a market but had some cultural meaning and resonance. In a way, this is part of the amusing style, this eclecticism.

Derek Jarman in the late 20th century employed it in a much less affected way, it was just stuff that was important to him. He kept it on the mantelpiece, on the walls, on the shelves, and it wasn’t about unity of design, it was about saying, here is my life all around me.

Did you find in your research that queer women had a different approach or different difficulties when they were trying to make a home?
Completely. The main issue is that they didn’t have any of their own money so it was very difficult for women to forge a home independently. Middle-class women had some power when it came to the décor, and things like deciding where the children slept and how the house was managed. But they were expected to do that in line with respectable norms, and certainly with either the explicit or tacit permission of the husband. So they were in a difficult position.

I think what’s really interesting is when the moment comes when women are no longer seen as the property of their husbands, when divorce becomes more accessible and common, and you begin to see lesbians, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, start to forge their own domestic lives and shape homes in the ways that they want to. Often with much pain, because a divorced woman who was then in a partnership with a woman would often lose her kids. In that sense, there is something more fraught and heartbreaking about many of the stories associated with lesbian homemaking historically.

Still to this day, because women often aren’t paid as much as men, their domestic choices are limited. So two women have a much lower purchasing power for a home than two men. There’s an economic reality to this; not everybody has the financial scope to make a home.

On a separate note, there’s a really interesting sense in which gay men are both seen as exiles from home and family—they’re the pariah and they undermine family—and yet at the same time, they’re meant to be great at making quiche and running up a pair of curtains. So they’re both deeply domestic and deeply anti-domestic.

In a way, the same can be said of lesbians. They’re meant to be natural homemakers yet they were rejecting that role. That rhetoric matters; how people are stereotyped affects the way that people try to challenge some of those ideas. There’s a real queer trend in macho design, in exposed brick and wood. You have to associate this with a kind of overdetermined refusal to be effeminate, along the lines of, “I’m a proper man, I use brick and wood!”

Can you share a little bit more about how your book explores class in relation to queer homemaking?
Homelessness is a particular problem for queer people, because, historically and in many places around the world, they have been the ones thrown out of home. But just because you don’t have a home, it doesn’t mean home is meaningless to you. Homeless people will have had an experience of home and will often aspire to have a home.

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I was interested in “home” as this mobile concept. It’s interesting, the number of people I spoke to who said, "Oh, actually, this cinema I used to go to every week, that was home to me”. So I was quite interested in how public places become a kind of home in the absence of a place that feels safe.

And that was especially true, I think, for men who didn’t have money to purchase a private space, because, historically, privacy was defined differently. A bedsit or boarding house, for example, wasn’t seen to be a private space, and most queer men in London were living in bedsits or boarding houses. Under the law at the time, they had no privilege, no private space in which to have a domestic relationship with another man. If you’re in that class and financial position, changes to the law that only apply to private spaces would be irrelevant to you.

Very elite men, on the flipside, often didn’t have privacy either, because there were other people in the house, such as servants. In some ways, it was the middle class that was able to have some sense of queer domesticity, because they didn’t have the servants, but they also had the space and the privacy. There’s something interesting about how class influences homemaking in that respect.

In your research, did you come across any secluded homes or abodes that were used as a kind of “safe haven” for their queer homemakers?
There was often a sense of safety in an escape from London, culminating in places where the pressure around queerness was released.

A really good example is Derek Jarman buying the coastal Prospect Cottage; this became a retreat for him as he was ill and dying, a haven away from life in London. Because he was an activist and a fairly well-known artist and filmmaker by that point, he was getting a lot of abuse through his letterbox in the city. So this place and the garden he created became a place of safety for him.

There are other similar examples of writing retreats and artistic retreats in queer circles, which I discussed a bit in a guidebook I wrote for the National Trust, which includes several of these kinds of places which allowed for some sort of release.

There’s a famous lesbian ménage a trois in the interwar period who lived in a small hide, a type of farmhouse in Kent. In a way, that three-way relationship was possible because they didn’t have neighbours, they were removed. It changes the narrative that queerness is and has always been all about city life.

How do you feel this research into homemaking contributes to queer history, as opposed to just looking at public spaces?
It felt like there was a gap, because we’re made at home—the way we’re brought up, our need to live somewhere, the connections and families we make and choose. All of those things are a large part of queer life and existence. Not talking about it or not going there in research terms left a real gap.

But this isn’t just fringe research for a group of marginalised people; looking from these margins helped me understand the wider instability of social norms and ideas of respectability. This research tells a broader history of family and domesticity, but from the margins.

I don’t see it as a marginal history; I see it as a history of home and family via queer men, and I hope the book helps other people see it that way too.

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