Sacrilege in the Sitting Room: Contesting Suburban Domesticity in Contemporary Gay Literature

• Published in: Home cultures Vol. 2; no. 2; pp. 175 - 194
• Main Author: Dines, Martin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 01.07.2005
• Subjects: Architecture; Cultural anthropology; Cultural studies; Domesticity; Homosexuality; Narratives; Sexuality; Space; Suburban areas
• ISSN: 1740-6315; 1751-7427
• DOI: 10.2752/174063105778053364

This article explores the significance of the recent proliferation in the anglophone West of gay narratives with suburban-domestic locations. It will be argued that instead of being a place that is swiftly abandoned but forever denigrated, suburbia has, in these stories, come to constitute a site where sexual dissidents can negotiate and contest their involvement with mainstream society. The article examines several texts with suburban settings, paying particularly close attention to Oscar Moore's A Matter of Life and Sex (1991). It will be shown that many of these novels engage with suburban space by utilizing a distinct strategy: the symbolic implantation of homosexuality into the suburban domestic interior, with the aim of destabilizing heterosexual familial order. However, such tactics fail to disrupt straight space either because these texts are themselves so strongly attracted and attached to domestic environments, or because symbolic subversion is itself little able to alter social relations that enjoy substantial material and political support. James Robert Baker's novel Tim and Pete (1993) instead suggests an alternative, more productive response to suburbia: the recovery and recuperation of specifically gay imaginary investments in the suburbs.