LGBTQ+ History Month: '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 partly 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. 

Organised by the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, co-badged by GENDER.ED.

Professor Matthew Cook

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.

Click here to register via Eventbrite. (This event has now sold out, but you can still be added to the waiting list.)