Out of the 1950s: Cultural History, Queer Thought

‘Historian’s Notebook’ is one of HWJ’s occasional features. It first appeared in issue 4 (1977) with a piece by Jill Liddington on suffrage history; its latest outing was in issue 75 (2013) with Mary Chamberlain’s memoir of anti-apartheid activism. ‘Notebook’ offers historians a space to consider their historic passions and allied political commitments in a variety of formats. Alan Sinfield’s reflections on the queer cultural inventiveness of the 1950s and its reverberations through subsequent decades is quintessential ‘Notebook’. He creates a network of interconnected thoughts which together suggest the fragmentary nature of queer cultural, historical and artistic endeavour. Those thoughts are sometimes elusive; the links between them fragile and tentative. They allude to and condense aspects of Sinfield’s lifelong passion for queer history-making and politics and his pioneering work in cultural materialism and new historicism. But they refuse closure and conclusion, instead pushing us hard to consider the dimensions of the ‘failure of vision’ he associates with contemporary queer politics and culture – and what we have made (or failed to make) of the queer inheritance from the first full postwar decade.

Matt Cook

I have been coping with queer and the 1950s, literally, for the whole of my life. I made it through the 1950s without diptheria or polio, thanks to the National Health Service, and through HIV/AIDS thanks to gay subculture. Now I am living with Parkinson’s, a disease whose steady physical and mental debilitation is not dissimilar to HIV/AIDS. The series of separate but linked excursions into the queer past and its politics that follows will be my last attempt, short of a medical miracle, to grasp the reverberations of what queer signifies.

1. The playwright Somerset Maugham (like Noël Coward) was not averse to teasing his audiences with a Wildean queerness. His play Jack Straw (1908) opens on a bachelor figure, Ambrose Holland – ‘a well-dressed, elegant man of five-and-thirty’. Holland wants to choose a retired corner of the restaurant so he and Lady Wanley ‘can gossip in peace’. She prefers a table where she will be seen; but the other would be better, Holland says: ‘The waiter’s rather a pal of mine’. ‘What queer friends you have’, opines Lady Wanley.¹ Such a modern use of queer, only a few years after the Wilde trials, is perhaps surprising, especially from Maugham, the most discreet of authors.

Two types – virtual stereotypes – of queer were in play in the wake of Wilde. One type was mildly self-deprecating, sensitive; the other was camp, defiant. Each group might use its own words, but both nominations could remain hostile – to the self, within the group, and more widely.² These anxious images were superseded in the 1970s. What happened was that gays (believed they) had chosen gay. Queer became the old-fashioned opposite – uncool, soiled with the decades of the closet. Soon after, though, queer became a radical counter discourse, turning ideology back upon itself. It became the generic term for deconstructive, abstract, philosophical thought – in literary and performance studies especially. Gay was briefly hegemonic in a gentler time, but it was seized by some and elided with economic and political treachery and ideas of assimilation. Queer was meant to signal a more thoroughgoing radicalism.

2. This aggregate of queer manoeuvres is not just a gay matter. It keys into every tendency in the long 1950s. Margins are central: they are where the cultural work is done, securing the centre by allowing those who occupy it to assume they can be self-determining. This is axiomatic in new historicism and cultural materialism – the two programmes that have claimed social and political study in art and literature. Our main narrative tells of success. Inspired by the Stonewall Inn’s drag queens and leathermen in 1960s New York, we triumphed over irrational prejudice. They tried to silence us, but we blew our whistles at Pride marches until we made them listen. By the power of our campaigns and the inventiveness of our camp protest, we won through. Now we could ‘relax’, as Holly Johnson...