sacrilege in the sitting room: contesting suburban ... - Fritz Haeg

HOME CULTURES
178
MARTIN DINES
other than “talk of sports and makes of cars/ In various bogus Tudor
bars” (in Skelton 1964: 75). C. Day Lewis decries the pelmet-high
horizons of the ubiquitous villa-dweller, taking the new availability of
luxuries—in particular mass-produced labor-saving devices and soft
furnishings—as demonstrative of suburbanites’ feminine indolence
and depoliticized self-satisfaction: they are “at bay in villas [. . .]
content with cushions” (Day Lewis 1992: 161). I will return later to
the long-established association between embourgeoisized femininity
and the suburban domestic interior as it strongly permeates certain
recent gay texts.
For most intellectuals in the early to mid-twentieth century, like
the term “the masses,” “the word ‘suburban’ [was] a sign for the
unknowable” (Carey 1992: 53). Contributors to the suburban critical
canon were typically distanced and isolated from the culture they
mistrusted and feared. By contrast, more recent suburban narratives
are much more likely to be steeped in the experience of suburbs.
Miranda Sawyer’s recent exploration of Britain’s suburbs, Park and
Ride, for instance, is avowedly inspired by the author’s suburban provenance
(Sawyer 1999). According to Mark Clapson, much the same
can be said for historians of suburbanization: an increasing number
preface their work with a declaration of their suburban background,
which apparently correlates with noticeably less condemnatory
assessments of suburbia (Clapson 2003: 9). It is of course certainly
the case the suburban origins of some cultural producers inspire
little else than vitriol: for example, almost the whole of Mike Leigh’s
cinematic oeuvre, from Abigail’s Party (BBC, 1977) to Vera Drake
(UK, 2004), constitutes a sustained and withering attack on the
aspirant pretensions of suburbia and, in particular, suburban women. 2
Nevertheless, numerous recent suburban narratives accord with
Paul H. Mattingly’s desire to wrest the cultural evaluation of suburbs
away from the suburban critical canon and for it to be taken into the
hands of those who have invested their lives there. Instead of a place
that is always alien or merely escaped from, both Mattingly (1997:
41–2) and Peter Lang wish to see more analysis of the attractions
of suburbs, their “tremendous gut appeal” (Lang 1997: 7).
Gay narratives, particularly, frequently locate in suburbia sources
of excitement and opportunity, usually sexual. By identifying sites
of sexual interest in the suburbs, however, gay stories are not mere
variants of the conventional “dual-narrative” of suburbia, where
respectable conformity—neat lawns and washed-every-Sunday cars,
nine-to-five regularity, etc.—conceals (hetero)sexual licentiousness
going on indoors. Arguably one of the most graphic and critical
renderings of this kind of sexual duplicity was the early punks’ choice
of fetish outfits and paraphernalia for everyday wear. Such a style was,
according Barry Langford, “intended as both deeply suburban and a
clear rebuke to a suburban sexuality they excoriated as hypocritical,
dissimulating and coercive” (Langford 2000: 70). 3 But if gay narratives