A Room in Chelsea: Quentin Crisp at Home
Quentin Crisp's 1968 autobiography The Naked Civil Servant was adapted to considerable success in Jack Gold's 1975 television film, with John Hurt in the role. Crisp would identify himself as ‘bohemian’ as much as queer, and in his writings he traces a life in which London bedsits and rooming houses are home to those, like himself, whose wilful social otherness meant a rejection of domestic mores. Crisp's anarchic attitude towards domesticity and homemaking would become highly quotable, and the image of his Chelsea room enculturated as a quite singular provocation of ‘good’ domesticity. Crisp's room would correspond with cultural representations of the bedsit as a marker of liminal identity, and the media fascination to which it was subject reveals not only the political motivations of journalists often blind to the very rich life of The Naked Civil Servant, but also that they were oblivious to Crisp's performative tendencies and his own hyperbole about his room as a place of exile.
Sexual Revolution(s) in Britain
The period commonly associated with sexual revolution in Britain — roughly between 1965 and 1970 — saw what historian Hera Cook calls an ‘astonishing’ ‘pace of change’.1 Joe Orton was upending sexual and relationship norms in the theatre, television was broaching sex as never before and Mick Jagger was (paradoxically) getting ‘no satisfaction’. Government ushered in a raft of liberalising measures — partially legalising abortion and homosexuality in 1967 and introducing no-fault divorce in 1969. The initial stipulation that the pill be available only to married women (from 1961) was lifted in 1966.2 After pacifist Dr Alex Comfort’s reissue of Sex in Society in 1963 and his appearance in a BBC TV debate in the same year (giving the book a much higher profile than the original 1950 edition) came William Masters and Virginia Johnson’s Human Sexual response (1966) and David Reuben’s Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex (1969). They each in different ways emphasised what Comfort subsequently dubbed ‘the Joy of Sex’ in his 1972 classic. San Francisco’s infamous 1967 summer of love crossed the Atlantic and played out piecemeal in London’s Soho, Kings Road and Notting Hill. It brought hippies, free love and psychedelic drug culture into clearer view. Different — and certainly wider use of — recreational drugs marked a distinction between the generation.
Crossing Borders: Time, Memory, and the Construction of Identity in Song of the Exile
This article analyzes the construction of memory in Ann Hui's Song of the Exile as it intersects with issues of cultural identity, national allegory, and women's autobiographies.