Publications

‘Reticence and the Queer Past’, Oral History, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring 2020), pp. 45-56.

This article uses a moment of discomposure and reticence within an interview with an openly gay Church of England priest about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in England to discuss ‘queer reticence’, namely the extent to which a mutually imagined ‘queer past’ shaped the interview. I question why my interviewee was reluctant to speak about the death of a monk in his care, and of my unwillingness to question him further. I then discuss how the building up of a public queer image and the construction of a queer past, especially around the HIV/AIDS epidemic, can result in silences, discomposure and moments of reticence which are anchored in a personal and political deference to an imagined and highly desirable queer history, one which was especially difficult to broach intergenerationally.

LGBTQ+ lives: history, identity and belonging’, Oral History, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring 2020)

Special issue of Oral History co-edited with Dr Amy Tooth-Murphy, Dr Emma Vickers and Prof Christine Wall.

‘The ‘obnoxious mobilised minority’: homophobia and homohysteria in the British National Party, c. 1982-1999’, Gender and Education, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2017), pp. 165-181.

This article examines the British National Party (BNP)’s opposition to gay men during the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on the sociological concept of ‘homohysteria’, it examines written material from BNP publications during those decades, looking specifically at the AIDS crisis, the party’s belief in a ‘queer conspiracy’, and the role which homosexuality played in the decline of the National Front and the birth of the BNP. The first study dedicated to British fascism’s anti-gay prejudice, this article argues that the existing scholarship fails to understand the degree and nature of anti-gay sentiment in the BNP, concluding that the party was homohysteric from its inception.

Reprinted in Nigel Copsey and Matt Worley (eds.), ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Us’: The British Far Right since 1967 (London: Routledge, 2018) and in Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Hilary Pilkington (eds.), Gender and the Radical and Extreme Right (London: Routledge, 2018).