Dominic Janes's Picturing the Closet reminds me of Modest Mussorgsky's celebrated piano suite, Pictures at an Exhibition. To be sure, Mussorgsky provides a connecting promenade theme as the viewer/listener wanders from painting to painting, but the overall impression is of a series of startling close-ups rather than a fully integrated and satisfying composition. So, too, with Picturing the Closet. The book weighs in at fewer than two hundred pages, and yet, within that short compass, Janes takes us on a tour through three centuries of history, focusing mainly on Britain but straying into France and the United States as well. Inspired by the influential work of Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick on the epistemology of the closet, he treats us to a succession of brilliantly observed case studies: on Proust; Quentin Crisp; William Hogarth's painting, The Gate of Calais; Edmund Burke's treatise, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful; Horace Walpole's house at Strawberry Hill and his gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto; William Beckford's Fonthill Abbey and his novel, Vathek; William Holman Hunt's paintings, The Scapegoat and The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple; Charles Kingsley; Edward Carpenter; Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians; homosexual activity in Britain's public schools; Francis Bacon; Cecil Beaton; Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears; Derek Jarman and his garden at Dungeness; and much else besides.

The promenade theme connecting all of these case studies is a desire to know how the sodomite/homosexual/gay/queer might have appeared at key moments between 1700 and the present. Janes is seeking answers to two quite substantial questions. First, if, as is often assumed, “the modern homosexual” as we know him today was conjured into being sometime in the late nineteenth century, chiefly through new sexological understandings, then what would an “obvious” sodomite (if such a being existed) have looked like in earlier periods? And, second, since the notion of “the closet” only became widespread in the second half of the twentieth century, did similar strategies of secrecy and denial before that recent adoption protect the “normal” from suspicion and only reveal “self-evident” mincing queens?

Janes begins with the eighteenth century because it is only then, he claims, that precursors to the closet can be identified, when the image of the flamboyant, effeminate male began to deflect any suspicion of sodomitical desire from normal, manly men. He then proceeds through the rest of the book to give snapshots “of the presence of a wide range of states beyond a simple binary divide of being, physically or metaphorically, in or out of the closet. These included varying degrees of self-recognition, self-identification, display, concealment, and even the queering of the ‘normal’” (170). The (pre-)closet could be, in other words, and as he demonstrates, just as much a site of creative opportunity as of oppression. The picture he paints is complex, erudite, rich, and suggestive. Amid the vivid glimpses, there is much to give pause, stimulate debate, and provoke discussion.

But has Janes succeeded in his broader quest? How insistent and compelling is that promenade theme? Do we come closer to an integrated history of the pre-closet/closet? Yes and no. The book is as frustrating as it is challenging. Janes's selection of case studies is not explained. The book is too short and too opaque to do the work that he wants it to do in making coherent links between very disparate material. It is not always an easy read: though generally lucid, some of his writing—“Bacon stepped, in his imagination, into the space of the Burkean sublime and painted his own ecstatic terror in the face of reconstitutive dissolution by scopic authority” (160–61)—can be migraine inducing. And, as Janes acknowledges in a footnote (16n 59), broad claims to be able to read everyday sexual behavior and understanding through the analysis of selected high art and literature are liable to rub humble social historians, such as myself, the wrong way. I suspect the book will receive a more unequivocal welcome from art historians, literary theorists, and scholars of visual and cultural studies. Perhaps the most extreme example of this disconnect between disciplinary approaches is Janes's final chapter on the fate of Derek Jarman's garden and “how sexual and economic nonconformity has been progressively erased from what had been the outcast landscape of Dungeness” (180). He uses this case study to “exemplify many of the wider, and not necessarily encouraging, developments in the evolving dynamic between politics, commerce, and expressions of sexual deviance” (190) and, from there, to reflect on the possible “reconfiguration rather than the disappearance of the closet in the context of new patterns of cultural and economic respectability” (192). Thought provoking? Maybe. Stimulating? Perhaps. But it doesn't come close to clinching the case.

All these caveats aside, if readers linger on each painting/vignette in Janes's display, they will learn a great deal of value: tantalizing fragments, sharply observed. Despite its flaws, or clash of approaches, Picturing the Closet is an important addition to the literature on British queer history.