Beyond Brideshead: The Male Homoerotics of 1930s Oxford

Abstract

AbstractLooking beyond the notorious “Brideshead” aesthetes and homoeroticism of 1920s Oxford, this article explores the queer sensibilities of the university's male undergraduates and their associates through the 1930s. Steadily through the decade, Oxford's unique brand of queer aestheticism and same-sex love affairs became embroiled with wider debates about the hegemony of socialism and communism and the supposed degeneracy of standards at Oxford. At the same time, the assimilation of medicalized concepts of perversion and homosexuality increasingly made Oxford's aesthetes and same-sex love affairs objects of critical scrutiny, effeminophobia, and homophobia. For many of the university's queer male undergraduates, the Oxford University Dramatic Society provided a safe haven and a platform for queer expression both in Oxford and beyond. A group of images by the Russian émigré photographer Cyril Arapoff provides further insights into the male homoerotics of 1930s Oxford. Situated within the context of Arapoff's life in the city between 1933 and 1939, his extraordinary photographs of nude and seminude young men offer glimpses into the queer lives and loves at Oxford in a period when such experiences were rarely articulated in written form. The images include the spaces the young men inhabited and their interconnections to London's vibrantly queer dance and theater scene. Such insights help establish more firmly interwar Oxford as an important hub of queer modernism, with national and international import for the course of modern queer history.