Justin Bengry UK Labour Party leadership contender Andy Burnham recently proposed automatic pardons for all men convicted of historical homosexual offences that are no longer crimes. This has been an ongoing conversation in the UK, which in 2013 granted WWII Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing a posthumous royal pardon. The issue reappeared […]
Author: Justin Bengry
The Case of the Sultry Mountie, or, We Need to Talk about Cecil
Justin Bengry I never knew my great uncle Cecil Bengry. Affectionately known as Cic’, this bachelor uncle seems to have lived in the background of other people’s lives. Even the pictures of Cic’ in old age that I found among my own grandfather’s (his brother) papers are faded and overexposed, their […]
Queer Domesticities: Matt Cook on Home Life, Family and Community in London
Interview by Justin Bengry In Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London (Palgrave, 2014), Matt Cook explores queer men’s experiences of home and homemaking in the metropolis. Peering into bedsits in Notting Hill and squats in Brixton, as well as luxurious abodes in the city’s more affluent districts, Cook offers a queer history nuanced […]
Before Grindr, or, The Dangers of the "Gay Bachelor"
Justin Bengry In June 1967, opposition Conservative UK parliamentarians encountered a new and threatening queer danger. They feared that the Sexual Offences Bill then before them — a measure that would partially decriminalize male homosexual acts — might appear to sanction, and even promote, homosexual activity. Conservative MP Sir Cyril Osborne therefore proposed an amendment […]
"Coming Out" in the Classroom: When the Personal is Pedagogical
Justin Bengry I’ve never come out to my students. I’ve never stood at the front of a classroom and told my students that I’m gay, and I’ve never told them witty anecdotes about my husband. That isn’t to say that I’m not completely out both professionally and personally (as google […]
Male Order: Tom of Finland and the Queer Iconography of Postage Stamps
Justin Bengry On April 13, 2014, Itella Posti Oy, the Finnish postal service, announced the release in September of what are possibly the most openly erotic postage stamps to appear anywhere in mainstream circulation. The series of three stamps commemorate the work of Touko Laaksonen (1920-1991), better known as Tom […]
The Erotics of Shaving in Victorian Britain
Justin Bengry Beardedness, or alternatively clean-shavenness, has long been an important signifier of manliness, inscribing crucial gender and sexual meanings onto the male body. But fashions in shaving are notoriously unstable, even in the nineteenth century, that idyll for the hirsute among us. Beardedness in nineteenth-century Britain, in fact, only […]
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