Escape of a Half-Naked Sailor

P.N. Furbank

  • Three Queer Lives: An Alternative Biography of Fred Barnes, Naomi Jacob and Arthur Marshall by Paul Bailey
    Hamish Hamilton, 242 pp, £14.99, October 2001, ISBN 0 02 411345 X

I used to have a homosexual friend who puzzled over the phenomenon of the homosexual ‘queen’. The performance – screams, limp wrists, hand on hip etc – was a very familiar one, many of one’s friends would occasionally indulge in it: the puzzle was that it was reputed to suggest a woman, whereas one never saw women behave in the least like it. The impersonation, though a deliberate breaking of the rules of orthodox ‘masculine’ behaviour, engendered a freak, a monster, unknown to the species or to ordinary human society.

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[*] The term ‘queer’ cam in, I think, in the late 1920s, and ‘gay’ in the late 1940s or early 1950s.