The deadline for registering is 1pm on the day before the event (23/02/2022).

This years Southampton Stonewall Lecture will be given by Professor Matt Cook, University of London.

Portable closets: Secrets and lives since gay liberation

The double life and the closet tend to be associated with a time before the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 and the Gay Liberation Front call to ‘come out’ in the early 1970s. Though the social and cultural terrain in Britain has certainly shifted, this lecture shows how and why various kinds of secret have continued to matter to many queer people and have made their lives liveable. Based on new research and interviews for his recent ‘Queer Beyond London’ project, Matt Cook looks at how people’s backgrounds, families, and the places they live have often made a portable closet a necessary or desirable queer accessory in the years since gay liberation.

Matt Cook is Professor of Modern History at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a social and cultural historian specializing in the history of sexuality and the history of London in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Organisers

The University