Abstract
In 2004 Darren Brady, founder of gay lettings agency Outlet, told the Independent newspaper that gay men ‘are more imaginative and more aesthetically minded with our homes — we also tend to be cleaner. Just look at gay men’s obsession with grooming, which applies to our homes as well as our bodies’.1 Brady signals a particularity in gay men here whilst also reflecting a broader cultural ‘fetishisation of the home, its possessions and its decoration’.2 The rise in individualism and disposable income had by this time contributed to an extension of what was already an intensely home-focussed culture.3 Many more people had their own homes or their own space within a shared home,4 and they ‘gained the space, comfort and stimulation indoors that they had previously encountered only by going out’.5 This had knock-on effects for the conduct of sex lives and relationships — and in ways which accelerated ‘the privatisation of gay life’.6 The increase in personal space meant something too for the way homes were styled and organised — more often now according to one person’s preferences. Gay men gained a particular profile in this respect and gave further visibility to the tendency and identification I explored in the preceding chapters.7 In 1982 The Economist noted the greater disposable income of gay couples and cited a Gay News survey which had found that gays were more likely to buy household consumer goods than the average.8
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Notes
Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People (London: Vantage, 2008), 156
see also John R. Short, Housing in Britain: The Post-War Experience (London: Methuen, 1982), 232.
James Obelkevich, ‘Consumption’, in Understanding Post-War British Society, ed. James Obelkevich and Peter Catterall (London: Routledge, 1994), 143.
White, London in the Twentieth Century, 309; see also Alison Ravetz, The Place of Home: English Domestic Environments, 1914–2000 (London: Spon, 1995), 3–4.
H.G. Cocks, Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column (London: Random House Books, 2009), 183
see also: Weeks, The World We Have Won, 160. On the impact of the internet in this, see: E.R. Merkle and R.A. Richardson. Cocks, Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column (London: Random House Books, 2009), 183
see also: Weeks, The World We Have Won, 160. On the impact of the internet in this, see: E.R. Merkle and R.A. Richardson, ‘Digital Dating and Virtual Relating: Conceptualizing Computer Mediated Romantic Relationships’, Family Relations 49, no. 2 (2000): 187–192
G. Valentine, ‘Globalizing Intimacy: The Role of Information and Communication Technologies in Maintaining and Creating Relationships’, Women’s Studies Quarterly 34 (2006): 365–393.
See: R. Hennessy, ‘Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture’, Cultural Critique 29 (1994): 31–76.
See: Tim Butler and Garry Robson, ‘Social Change, Gentrification and Neighbourhood Change in London: A Comparison of Three Areas of South London’, Urban Studies 38 (2001): 2145–2162.
Deborah Bright, ‘Shopping the Leftovers: Warhol’s Collecting Strategies in Raid the Icebox I’, Art History 24, no. 2 (April 2001): 278–291
see also: R. Meyer, ‘Mapplethorpe’s Living Room: Photography and the Furnishing of Desire’, Art History 24, no. 2 (2001): 292–311.
White, London in the Twentieth Century, 65; on New York loft living — and the shift from ‘arts production to housing market’ — see: Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), chap. 3–5.
Fellows, A Passion to Preserve, 27; Richard L. Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (London: Routledge, 2005)
Richard L. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Halperin, How to Be Gay, 10.
Ibid.; see also: J. Binnie, ‘Quartering Sexualities: Gay Villages and Sexual Citizenship’, in City of Quarters: Urban Villages in the Contemporary City, ed. David Bell and Mark Jayne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 163–172.
See: K.P.R. Hart, ‘We’re Here, We’re Queer — and We’re Better Than You: The Representational Superiority of Gay Men to Heterosexuals on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’, The Journal of Men’s Studies 12, no. 3 (2004): 241–253
E.M. Ramsey and G. Santiago, ‘The Conflation of Male Homosexuality and Femininity in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’, Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 353–355
Andrew Gorman-Murray, ‘Queering Home or Domesticating Deviance?’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 9, no. 2 (1 June 2006): 227–247
K. Pearson and N.M. Reich, ‘Queer Eye Fairy Tale: Changing the World One Manicure at a Time’, Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 2 (2004): 229–231; on this sense of queer superiority see also: Halperin, How to be Gay, 226.
Buck Clifford Rosenberg, ‘Masculine Makeovers: Lifestyle Television, Metrosexuals and Real Blokes’, in Exposing Lifestyle Television: The Big Reveal, ed. Gareth Palmer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
For an indicative sense of the debate on this see: Lisa Duggan, ‘The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism’, in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (London: Duke University Press, 2002)
Steven Seidman, Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life (London: Routledge, 2003), chap. 4 & 5
Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999)
S. Reimer and D. Leslie, ‘Identity, Consumption, and the Home’, Home Cultures 1, no. 2 (2004): 187–208; Hennessy, ‘Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture’.
See: G.A. Dunne, S. Prendergast, and D. Telford, ‘Young, G.y, Homeless and Invisible: A Growing Population?’, Culture, Health & exuality 4, no. 1 (2002): 103–115
S. Prendergast, G.A. Dunne, and D. Telford, ‘A Story of “Difference”, a Different Story: Young Homeless Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual People’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy $121, no. 4/5/6 (2001): 64–91.
As Daniel Miller has it: Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).
On the concept of the uncanny and of the familiar made strange see: Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2003).
Martin F. Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 3.
Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man: A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1988)
Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (London: Cassell, 1994), 11
Dick Hebdige, ‘Subculture: The Meaning of Style’, in The Subcultures Reader, ed. Ken Gelder (London: Routledge, 2005).
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Cook, M. (2014). Epilogue. In: Queer Domesticities. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316073_4
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