Portable closets: Secrets and lives in Britain since gay liberation
When:
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Venue:
Online
No booking required
Public keynote organized by the research project The Politics of Family Secrecy at the University of Copenhagen
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 queer people and have made their lives liveable. Based on new research and interviews for the recent Queer Beyond London project, Matt Cook looks at how people’s backgrounds, families, and the places they live have made a portable closet a comforting, desirable and even enjoyable queer space in the years since gay liberation.
Matt Cook is professor of Modern History at Birkbeck. He is the author of London and the Culture of Homosexuality (2003) and Queer Domesticities (2014) and was principal investigator on Queer Beyond London (2016 – 2018).
All are welcome, the keynote will be free and available via Zoom: https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/62486953126
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This event is part of the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology's Discover the Past spring 2021 events series, open to the public and students. To see the full list of events, visit the Discover the Past web page.
The Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck has a distinguished tradition as an international centre of excellence. We are the only university department in London to include archaeologists, classicists and historians investigating every period from prehistory to the early twenty-first century. Join us to discover the past and engage with the present across continents and cultures.
Contact name:
The Politics of Family Secrecy, University of Copenhagen