Between Worlds A Queer Boy From the Valleys by Jeffrey Weeks

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This is a highly readable account of someone who, I sense, was an accidental radical – Jeffrey happened to come of age at a moment when, despite everything, there was an opportunity to live openly and fully as a gay man in a way that hadn’t existed before. That he embraced that opportunity to the max is a token of his character and to be congratulated.

The accounts of the radical organising for gay / LGBT liberation provides the core interest – the vagaries of his academic career are a valid part of the story, even if workplace politics is not so exciting.

There is lots that is made easier by social media – but it is tempting to look back on simpler times and wish for the hand crafted movement Jeffery first encountered.

He is, unsurprisingly, insightful on his own experience and the experience of “the community”.

He is honest about the challenge of the fractious nature of the claim to community – he reflects that “There was no natural unity based on a given orientation. For me, how you saw yourself and described yourself was a preference, not a given orientation, a choice rather than a destiny. People could make their identities and ways of life to fit different desires, even if their sexual needs seemed fixed...” (p114) What you do in bed and your identity are not unrelated but they are not co-determinate – your desire/need to have sex with men is not going to go away, your decision to live as a Gay Man is not fixed (if it was then the closet could not exist).

Part of the importance of books like this is the making visible of role models – as Jeffrey puts it “In my early days as a gay man, I had no way of linking to a living past, a possible present or a hopeful future because I had no ease of access to memories of people like me. I had to find and make those connections for myself.” (p251) To make those links, and support people by avoiding the need to constantly reinvent the wheel – whilst also creating an openness to new patterns – will have a massive positive impact on the mental well being of so many LGBT people.

Linked to this is his reflection of the diversification of expressions of LGBT identify “Others have recently come out in their sixties, seventies or even eighties. For me it represents what the LGBT community has become: a density of identities, desires and needs, experiences, problems, possibilities and hopes… LGBT experiences have gone global.” (p240)

I was pondering this in the Yumbo Centre – gone are the days of the clones – there is such a range of shapes and styles visible there, even within its overwhelmingly white cis gay male population. That there is diversity but also narrowness in the Yumbo is a hard question – but I think I need to make other blog posts about that.

Jeffery’s concluding paragraph is …

“Yet it is difficult too not to listen to the memories of the people, peoples, I identify with, often across difference, who have made me, without a stirring of hope. Writing this memoir has allowed me to piece together a mosaic of struggles, endurance, aspirations, care, friendship and love that convinces me the waters do not, cannot, entirely cover our heads: not drowning, still waving. It remains possible, indeed necessary, to straddle different worlds and find a viable sense of belonging, all the way home.” (p253)