Black Migrants, White Queers and the Archive of Inclusion in Postwar London

Abstract

This essay examines the historical concurrence of massive West Indian migration to Britain and the explosion of discourses around British homosexuality in the mid-twentieth century. Examining unpublished archives, including an oral history by a queer Jamaican dancer who migrated to London in 1948, and juxtaposing materials from the era that are often kept separate, I work to account for, and fill in, the archival lack around black queer life in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s, when the nation was aflutter with noise about putatively ‘new’ and more visible homosexual cultures. But my research also raises questions about the stakes of archival inclusion. Reading sociologies and texts from archives of the Institute of Race Relations, the Hall Carpenter Gay and Lesbian Oral History Project at the British Library, and the papers of Edith Ramsay collected at the Lambeth Library, I argue that the legal inclusion of the male homosexual into the national body politic through the decriminalization of ‘buggery’ proceeded alongside the legal exclusion of the black colonial immigrant. This meant that in the archives and sociologies of these debates, the black homosexual could not be recognized as such (or else he would need to be included in the national body politic, too), making for a queer set of textual misrecognitions, as well as for fascinating irruptions of the queer black figure in normative and normalizing discourses.