Picturing the Closet
Male Secrecy and Homosexual Visibility in Britain
Dominic Janes
Reviews and Awards
"Janes maps out new areas of study...This book should be valued by scholars in the fields of history, art history and critical history. It is also a valuable contribution to comparative studies...In nine beautifully illustrated and highly accessible chapters, Janes examines the works, representations and contexts of queerness." --Sean Brady, Literature and History
"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...Picturing the Closet in an important addition to the literature on British queer history." --Brian Lewis, Journal of British Studies
"a suggestive attempt to bring together a wide range of material and to see the queer/gay/sodomitic past in a new way." --H. G. Cocks, Cultural and Social History
"Janes seems to be constructing a more expansive queer male canon: one more generous to visual culture, and in which Burke can sit alongside Bersani as a pre-eminent queer theorist. It may not be a project which hews closely to how historians currently conceptualise the construction of sexual identities, but it is an intriguing one that makes for compelling reading." --Emily Rutherford, English Historical Review
"Far from simply illustrating a pre-existing history of the closet, this fascinating study exploits the potential of visual culture to reveal patterns of expression and obfuscation that exceed the verbal. The result is a compelling argument that the closet pre-existed the articulation of homosexual identity, and offered its own spectacular forms of 'self-fulfillment and expression.'" -- Christopher Reed, author of Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas
"In this wide-ranging, lucid and informative book, Dominic Janes explores the complex visibilities and invisibilities of the male homosexual 'closet' in Britain from the eighteenth century to the present day. His immense range of sources and examples, his nuanced explications, and his sophisticated method will be useful to specialists, and his narrative brio will draw in readers new to the subject. A major achievement in queer cultural history." --Whitney Davis, author of Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond
"This is an ambitious and impressively broad study that reminds us of the importance of aesthetics in considerations of same-sex desire in Britain in the modern period. Janes not only traces the history of the closet, noting its eighteenth century origins, but also reminds us that this literal and metaphorical space was more than a site and symbol of oppression. It was also a space of enormous creativity that produced vitally important ideas and images about both male homosociality and subversive queer subjectivities." --Paul Deslandes, author of Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850-1920
"Picturing the Closet offers a compelling and nuanced history of the border zones in which men's desires for each other were signaled and recognized. Dominic Janes's illuminating and wide-ranging assessment of the structuring roles of desire, dissemblance, and disclosure is an important contribution to the study of British visual culture since the eighteenth century."-David J. Getsy, author of Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture
