Bachelors of a Different Sort; Queer aesthetics, material culture and the modern interior in Britain

摘要

John Potvin begins Bachelors of a Different Sort on an intimate note. He has just got married, he tells us, in the home in which he now lives with his husband. They have ceased to be bachelors. Let me make a confession of my own. I winced when I read that introduction. Not because it was infelicitous, but because I too have made a home with a man, and we remain bachelors of a different sort, because we are not married. It confuses people quite as much as if we were; but it was so different for so long that, for my boyfriend (we still call each other that, deep into middle age), the promised land of marital bliss seems like too alien a Canaan for us to enter. Bachelors of a Different Sort tells the story of men who did not have the choices Potvin or I enjoy today. Instead they described themselves (without the contemporary scholarly baggage around the word) as 'queer'.