heptagrammaton’s Reviews > Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History > Status Update

"The community finds its self-representation in the continuity which is these men’s [Daie Rylands', J.T. Sheppard's, etc.] transformations. The stories about them, told by themselves and others, become a collective memory of the institution and its space for relationships, its topography of desire, inhabited over time. The fading pictures of the era are part of this constructed memory. "

"As the language and recognition of homosexuality are under construction, a key trajectory of its formulation ishow and whether there is a politics of homosexuality. [...] we can see the grounding of what will become by the 60s [...] a demand that the politics of (homo)sexuality is transformed not just for personal fulfilment but for the sake of society. [... A] politics of homosexuality under construction."

"Beyond the exaggeration, the student showing-off and the gestures of knowing transgression, recognising a gay community was a bold and desired aim; breaking the silence in shared disclosure a relief; challenging disavowal and secrecy a self-recognition of a modernity to set against Victorian demands."

"This was a period that was searching for its experts. How was sexuality to be understood and regulated[?] . . . What were the lineaments of self-understanding to be? The fostered, intimate connections of college life became part of the public life of the broader national scene, as the search to find the map of desire became part of how modernity came to undestand itself as modern."

"The presence of public (and private but
known) displays of differing forms of affection and desire
came hand in hand with a certain social and intellectual
porosity or fluidity or openness – the conditions for a
genuine shared generosity (with enough argument to
make it all feel critical and pressing). [...] Potential
breeds potential: seeing otherness becomes a way of
exploring otherness within yourself."