Bachelors of a Different Sort ― Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain

The bachelor has long held an ambivalent, uncomfortable and even at times an unfriendly position in society. This book carefully considers the complicated relationships between the modern queer bachelor and interior design, material culture and aesthetics in Britain between 1885 and 1957. These bachelors of a different sort created spaces that were centres of community, creativity and companionship, since long forgotten. The seven deadly sins of the modern bachelor (queerness, idolatry, askesis, decadence, the decorative, glamour, artifice) as the author has identified them, comprise a contested site freighted with contradiction and reveal in their respective ways the distinctly queer twinning of shame and resistance. All the bachelors whose aesthetic lives comprise this book were men of the creative arts, whether as writers, collectors, playwrights, actors, designers, antiquarians, sculptors, painters, photographers and/or illustrators. The first book to explore queer sexualities and the modern interior beyond the urban bias of most scholarship, this book tackles a wide range of significant analyses of some of the period's best-known figures whose city and country interiors have largely gone unnoticed and unanalysed. As a result it pays close attention to particular homes and domestic interiors of Lord Ronald Gower, Alfred Taylor, Oscar Wilde, Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts, Edward Perry Warren and John Marshall, Sir Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, Noel Coward and Cecil Beaton. Richly illustrated and written in a lively and accessible manner, Bachelors of a different sort is at once theoretically ambitious and rich in its use of archival and various historical sources.

John Potvin is Director of the Humanities PhD Program and Associate Professor in Art History at Concordia University