This years Southampton Stonewall Lecture will be given by Professor Matt Cook, University of London.

Portable closets: Secrets and lives since gay liberation

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 his recent 'Queer Beyond London' project, Matt Cook looks at how people's backgrounds, families, and the places they live have often made a portable closet a necessary or desirable queer accessory in the years since gay liberation.

Matt Cook is Professor of Modern History at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a social and cultural historian specializing in the history of sexuality and the history of London in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to four edited collections on LGBTQ histories, he is author of two books: London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885 - 1914 (2003) and Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London (2014). Queer Beyond London (his co-authored book with Alison Oram) will be out in 2022.

This lecture will be chaired by Professor Mark Cornwall, Professor of Modern European History.

PLEASE NOTE: This lecture is currently planned to be in person, further information will be forwarded via email a day or two before the lecture.

The deadline for registering is 13:00 GMT on Wednesday 23/02/2022 (the day before the event).