1. John Osborne, ‘The diary of a somebody’, in The Spectator (29 November 1986), p. 3. For further discussion of Osborne’s comments in relation to John Lahr’s editing of Orton’s diaries, see Matt Cook, ‘Orton in the archives’, History Workshop Journal 66 (2008), 163–80.
2. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, 1999).
3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990).
4. Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (New Haven, 2006).
5. For more on this shift in queer identity, see especially Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Pleasures and Perils in the Sexual Metropolis 1918–1957 (Chicago, 2005).