The publication of Matt Cook's Queer Domesticities signifies an important moment in the evolution of British queer history. By turning his readers' attention to interiority, both in terms of his subjects' frequently fluid personal subjectivities and of the domestic spaces they inhabited, Cook forces us to reconsider the subject matter of the field. Recognizing the enormous value placed on public spaces by many historians of the queer past (including Matt Houlbrook and Cook himself), he reminds us that attention to the domestic and the private must be paid in fully comprehending how men experienced intimacy, desire, and “queerness” in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To use Cook's own words, “Such strands of subjectivity come into sharper focus when we view queer lives in the context of home” (10).

In his new work, Cook is careful to note both points of convergence with and departure from two important stereotypes that were rooted in sexological and psychoanalytic discourses about same-sex desiring men: namely, that they were feminized arbiters of fashion and taste and that their relationship to both domesticity and familial intimacy was fraught, at best. While Cook points to instances where queer men conformed to these particular visions, he is primarily concerned with illuminating how London made it possible for them to carve out a variety of heterogeneous and aesthetically unique domestic spaces (that frequently spilled out into distinctive urban neighborhoods) where they could challenge conventional notions of the family. In establishing these points, Cook produces a series of instructive domestic biographies of some prominent (and not so prominent) queer men who made London their home. Beginning with the artists and collectors Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts and concluding with a discussion of the filmmaker Derek Jarman, Cook mines personal diaries, memoirs, and oral histories to reconstruct a variety of queer domesticities in modern Britain.

Cook organizes his book into four sections. The first focuses on the queer investment in the “House Beautiful” movement of the late nineteenth century. The second discusses the ways in which men created families. The third and fourth sections deal with postwar developments chronicling, respectively, the experience of queer domesticity in 1950s and 1960s bed-sits and the politicization of queer domesticity from the 1970s to the 1990s. In his consideration of beautiful homes in the late nineteenth century, Cook illustrates how artists and aesthetes used their domestic interiors to articulate a sense of queer difference and counter-prevailing associations of same-sex desire between men with homelessness or rootlessness. While in the case of Shannon and Ricketts the sexual nature of their relationship is, as Cook notes, opaque, their aesthetic bent and penchant for collecting united the couple and became a marker of their queer domestic arrangements. Similarly, Charles Ashbee and Oliver Ford used their interior designs to express queer desires and sensibilities. In the home that Ashbee created for himself and his female relatives (including, eventually, his wife Janet) in Chelsea's Cheyne Walk, for example, the naked male form was rendered in bronze door handles and painted murals, common design motifs that served as aesthetic markers of sexual difference.

While the aesthetics of domestic spaces were important to articulating queerness, equally important were attempts to define notions of family that were “malleable enough . . . to accommodate—sometimes uneasily, sometimes more comfortably—the queer difference of uncles, fathers, brothers, sons, and nephews” (89). Clearly the relationships between queer men and their families of origin were not always, as Deborah Cohen has also recently established in her important book Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain (2013), as antagonistic or oppositional as sexologists and psychoanalysts in the 1950s led many Britons to believe. In focusing on the mutability of family, however, Cook privileges not so much this point but the ways in which important twentieth-century figures like the sexual reformer George Ives sought, in the villa he occupied with servants and working-class lovers (past and present), to negotiate the idea of family by fashioning himself as paterfamilias. The memoirist J. A. Ackerley, on the other hand, attempted to trace his own queer genealogy, most notably in his 1968 book My Father and Myself, by linking his own desires to both his family history and his father's considerable predilection for sexual experimentation.

Men of relative privilege predominate in the first two sections of the book, and, while they do not disappear in the final two sections of the study (most notably Jarman and university-educated squatters in Brixton), men of lesser means make a substantial appearance in the last four chapters. In Cook's discussion he notes that, despite the fact that homosexuality was policed as a pernicious national threat during the home-centered 1950s, queer men were still able to create homes in Notting Hill and Islington bed-sits. Focusing on the life stories of three ordinary men, as well as that of the playwright Joe Orton, Cook shows how these domestic spaces allowed men to find sanctuary, engage with a larger community of boarders and sympathetic landladies, and, in Orton's case, challenge postwar conventions.

Distinctive London spaces also figure prominently in the final two chapters of the book, in which Cook discusses how sexual politics in the post-1967 world entered specific domestic spaces, most notably the Railton Road gay squatting community in Brixton, where the primacy of private property and the nuclear family were challenged in ways that appealed to a broad cross section of gay liberationists and sexual radicals, including some Afro-Caribbean artists. Cook concludes his study by examining Jarman's politicized investment in his London homes and his seaside cottage in Dungeness, Kent. Like many of the men discussed in Cook's book, Jarman found domestic life central to both private and public concerns. Home, as both a lived experience and a represented entity (especially in film), functioned simultaneously for Jarman as a place of retreat, work, and activism, particularly as he battled AIDS.

In this innovative and path-breaking book, Cook has reminded us of the longer-term precedents for contemporary debates about queer families and the politics of home. He has also reformulated the subject matter for the history of the family by reminding us that the queer-identified should occupy a prominent place within this long-established tradition of historical writing. Of course, like any good work, this study leaves one wondering about what the author has chosen not to do. While I think Cook is correct in noting that the peculiar relationship between men, masculinity, family, and home merits consideration by itself (an approach with which I am wholly sympathetic), I wonder how a study that compares male-centered and female-centered homes might push the boundaries of queer domesticities even further, merging the insights of Cook with those offered by Sharon Marcus in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2007) to produce a totally new kind of British queer history. Additionally, while reading the book, I found myself hungering for a few more biographical details about and words from Cook's subjects, particularly their perspectives on both prevailing and divergent discourses of domesticity and on the meanings of queerness or difference. These are ultimately just quibbles, nods to the obligations of critique that are de rigueur in reviews. In the end, this is a sophisticated and transformative work that reminds us of the potential of the personal in the writing of the queer past and the place of the domestic in the fashioning of queer identities in the contemporary world.