Abstract
Derek Jarman was, his biographer Tony Peake suggests, ‘acutely sensitive to changes in the fabric of society’:
On many levels, his life is a litmus paper which reflects the major stages of Britain’s social history in the second half of the twentieth century, from post-war austerity to the dying days of Thatcherism. The despairing and angry mood of the mid seventies, of a country facing economic recession, virtual war with the IRA and an uncertain post-imperial future — a mood epitomized by punk — awakened Jarman’s passion and instinct for keeping abreast of the times.1
Jarman was himself cited in and drawn into the bigger debates and controversies about (homo)sexuality, and his obituaries clearly suggested his status as both pariah and saint by the time of his death in 1994.2 In published diaries, interviews and some of his films he laid out his domestic life for public consumption and gave a vivid sense of how art, London counterculture, sexual radicalism, love, and friendship were woven through it.
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Notes
Tony Peake, Derek Jarman (London: Abacus, 2001), 243.
Derek Jarman and Howard Sooley, Derek Jarman’s Garden (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995).
Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk: A Saint’s Testament (London: Hutchinson, 1992), 134.
Derek Jarman, Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman (London: Century, 1991), 196.
Richard Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
See: Chapter 7; Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People (London: Vantage, 2008), 248.
On the subcultural dimensions of street markets see Angela McRobbie, ‘The Role of the Ragmarket’, in The Subcultures Reader, ed. Ken Gelder (London: Routledge, 2005).
Matt Cook, ‘Words Written Without Any Stopping’, in Derek Jarman: A Portrait, ed. Roger Wollen (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996).
Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge (London: Quartet, 1984), 78; Peake, Derek Jarman, 125. On Ives see: Chapter 3.
On Johnson’s house see: Alice Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), chap. 4
Aaron Betsky, Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (New York: William Morrow, 1997), 114–117.
Derek Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion (London: Century, 2000), 260.
Deborah Bright, ‘Shopping the Leftovers: Warhol’s Collecting Strategies in Raid the Icebox I’, Art History 24, no. 2 (April 2001): 289.
Jarman, Smiling, 259; for an incisive account of this privatisation process see: Jeremy Black, Britain since the Seventies: Politics and Society in the Consumer Age (London: Reaktion, 2004).
Peter Burton, Parallel Lives (London: GMP, 1985), 52.
See: Chapter 5 and Matt Cook, A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex between Men Since the Middle Ages (Oxford: Greenwood World, 2007), chap. 6.
John Grube, ‘“Native and Settlers”: An Ethnographic Note on Early Interaction of Older Homosexual Men with Younger Gay Liberationists’, Journal of Homosexuality 20, no. 3 (1990): 119–136.
For a detailed examination of each of Jarman’s films see: Rowland Wymer, Derek Jarman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
Juliet Gardiner, The Thirties: An Intimate History (London: Harper Press, 2010), 312.
Alison Ravetz, The Place of Home: English Domestic Environments, 1914–2000 (London: Spon, 1995), chap. 9.
Sasha Roseneil, ‘Why We Should Care About Friends: An Argument for Queering the Care Imaginary in Social Policy’, Social Policy and Society 3, no. 4 (2004): 409–419
Robert B. Hays, Sarah Chauncey, and Linda A. Tobey, ‘The Social Support Networks of Gay Men with AIDS’, Journal of Community Psychology 18, no. 4 (1990): 374–385
Barry Adam, ‘Sex and Caring Among Men: Impacts of AIDS on Gay People’, in Modern Homosexualities: Fragments of Lesbian and Gay Experiences, ed. Kenneth Plummer (London: Routledge, 1992).
On Ives’ scrapbooks see: Matt Cook, ‘Sex Lives and Diary Writing: The Journals of George Ives’, in Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. David Amigoni (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006).
On family photo albums see: Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London: Verso, 1995).
Oscar Moore, PWA: Looking AIDS in the Face (London: Picador, 1996), 62.
Edmund White, ‘Esthetics and Loss’, in Personal Dispatches: Writers Confront AIDS, ed. John Preston (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989).
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2003).
On the idea of hospital as home in the context of HIV and AIDS see: Stephen Mayes and Lyndall Stein, eds., Positive Lives: Responses to HIV: A Photodocumentary (London: Cassell, 1993), 128.
Rob Imrie, Disability, Embodiment and the Meaning of the Home’, Housing Studies 19, no. 5 (2004): 745–763.
Judith Stacey, ‘The Families of Man: Gay Male Intimacy and Kinship in a Global Metropolis’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30, no. 3 (2005): 1914.
Neil Bartlett writes movingly about this in: Neil Bartlett, ‘That’s What Friends are For’, in High Risk Lives 2: Writings on Sex, Death and Subversion, ed. May Scholar and Ira Silverberg (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1994), 87–90.
Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media (London: Comedia, 1986), 7.
Interview with Patrick Gale in: Richard Canning, Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations with Gay Novelists (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 425.
Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).
Alison Oram, ‘Going on an Outing: The Historic House and Queer Public History’, Rethinking History 15, no. 2 (June 2011): 189–207.
Jarman, Smiling, 26; Eve Sedgwick had problems with the quilt too. See her essay: Eve Sedgwick, ed., ‘White Glasses’, in Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994).
Richard Maguire, ‘The Last of the Queer Romantics: Mourning and Melancholia in Gay Men’s Autobiography’ (PhD, King’s College, London, 2011), 52–55.
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Cook, M. (2014). Derek Jarman’s Domestic Politics. In: Queer Domesticities. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316073_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316073_11
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