Homes Fit for Homos: Joe Orton, Masculinity and the Domesticated Queer

Abstract

In his 1986 review of the diaries of Joe Orton (1933–1967), fellow British playwright John Osborne used Orton’s murder at the hands of his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, to underscore the patent absurdity of gay parenting and ‘sodomite domesticity’. ‘Jenny’ was the protagonist of the children’s book Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin (1983), which represented a happy but also queer domestic unit. The book caused a storm and was used by Margaret Thatcher’s conservatives to indicate the dangers posed by a permissive society and to attack the ‘political correctness’ of ‘loony left’ local councils which stocked this and similar books in their libraries. By imagining Jenny cuddling teddy alongside the bloodied and brain-splattered bodies of ‘Ken and Joe’, Osborne was keying into a familiar story of the anti-domestic and anti-familial homosexual whilst also conjuring for Orton an embodied and ‘prick-proud’ masculinity.2 He stumbled in this way on the under-examined intersection of cultures of homosexuality, of domesticity and of masculinity, and unwittingly presented Orton as an apt case study.