Freak to chic: 'gay' men in and out of fashion after Oscar Wilde
Janes, Dominic (2021) Freak to chic: 'gay' men in and out of fashion after Oscar Wilde. Bloomsbury, London. ISBN 9781350172609
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For a period during the interwar years queer styles were in fashion. People who had been regarded as freaks became seen as chic. This book provides a new interpretation of the origins of ‘gay’ culture from a time when that word typically meant happy but was starting to mean homosexual. It explores the ways in which men who were sexually attracted to other men were able visually and creatively to express same-sex desires in the first half of the twentieth century in London seen in the context of New York and Paris. This was a time when openly homosexual sexual expression was illegal, but the worlds of glamour, fashion and art provided rich opportunities for the construction of queer spectacle such that the interwar period saw the appearance of startlingly new fashions for androgynous ‘freak chic’.
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