Appraising the ‘portable closet’: Matt Cook’s Annual LGBTQ+ History Month lecture
Kaveri Qureshi discusses Professor Matt Cook’s impactful Annual LGBTQ+ History Month Lecture, which was co-hosted by the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology and GENDER.ED earlier this month. Matt’s lecture brought out delicate play of secrecy and revelation in the lives of queer men before, and after gay liberation and the injunction to ‘come out’ since the 1970s.
On 3 March 2025, the Meadows Lecture Theatre was chock-full as a voluble audience gathered to hear Professor Matt Cook, the Jonathan Cooper Professor of the History of Sexuality at Oxford University, deliver the Annual LGBTQ+ History Month lecture. Matt’s lecture was titled ‘Portable closets: secrets and lives since gay liberation’, and drew together strands from across his work but particularly his research and interviews for the AHRC-funded ‘Queer beyond London’ project.
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 the UK has certainly shifted, the lecture showed how and why various kinds of secret continued to matter to many gay men and helped to make their lives liveable.
Where do the terms ‘coming out’ and ‘in the closet’ come from in the first place? Matt traced the term ‘coming out’ to drag balls in New York during the inter-war years, and similar balls in London around the same time. By contrast, ‘the closet’ started to be used in the 1960s, and carries shameful connotations of the WC and the skeleton in the closet, as well as the closet being the wardrobe in which to store fabulous costumes with which to create the self. These twin ideas bring with them core assumptions about sexuality and about being gay: sexuality being core to identity, and coming out of the closet being a revelation of who you really are. Into this language is embedded a binary of sexuality, which is being policed or insisted upon. You are either gay or straight; normal or abnormal. By leaving the closet, you enter marginal or minority status. Hence to be out is to be in the realm of the visible, the speakable and the culturally intelligible. From a Foucauldian perspective, coming out is not then liberation but in some sense its reverse: constraining the self within a social identity.
After the partial decriminalisation in 1967, homosexuality was tolerated so long as gay men kept themselves behind closed doors. Accommodation ads in gay periodicals in the 1970s, 1980s and beyond often stated ‘no camp, no femmes’ lest the landlord be provoked by their visibility.
In this context, Matt stitched together the stories of oral history interviewees who described a delicate play of secrecy and revelation, capturing the pleasure and erotics of risk and evasion of scrutiny. He described how resisting, or sidestepping the call to visibility could make life safer and more pleasurable, in spite of the overall call to openness. This was not only to do with individual circumstances, but also wider circulating ideas about race, gender and health.
And so we met oral history interviewee Ajamu, an African-Caribbean man who described negotiating Manchester city centre weaving between the National Front on the one hand, and gay bars where he felt himself objectified. Instead, he would frequent Black venues, which were more diverse, bigger, convivial spaces in which the word gay would not be used, but through subtle cues and rumours he could connect intimately to other men. So, not being visible, and not being visible on others’ terms isn’t necessarily about oppression and hypocrisy. It was the same with Dennis, a white British man who described how you couldn’t be gay in Plymouth, certainly not in the camp, flamboyant Brighton sense. He welcomed the shift to greater visibility but also felt torn, lamenting the loss of homosocial camaraderie twinged with homoeroticism. We also met Kevin, an HIV positive man who described the secrecy and angst over sharing information about HIV status, both with other gay men and with other family and acquaintances. Through all these oral history interviews, and others, Matt showed us the secrets and silences that might also follow coming out; in different domains of men’s lives. One older interviewee described having been happy to come out in London in the 1950s, being camp and happy to live with other marginal people. Upon recently moving to an old age home in Hackney, he felt confined to a closet he had never previously occupied.
Matt’s lecture provoked a fascinating Q&A which unpacked the focus on gay men, asking about the different issues that might be at stake in coming out for men and women, and for trans or non-binary people. What felt particularly impactful in the lecture, was his demonstration of the looseness of identity and the sense of ambivalent loss at putting names and categories. For this reason, the ‘portable closet’ has remained, in Matt’s words, an important place to retreat to even in the years since gay liberation. In this context, Matt ended with some important provocations for histories of sexuality. How should we treat people from the past who spent their lives trying to hide this aspect of their lives? How is queer history skewed by focusing on those who made themselves visible? What happens in renditions of lives past, and in our lives, when secrets get revealed?
Author Bio:
Kaveri Qureshi is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Social and Political Science, and an Associate Director of GENDER.ED.