Bright (Queer) Young Things in Interwar Oxford, Cambridge, and London

In 1933 the Daily Telegraph reacted angrily to the passing by the Oxford Union of the motion ‘That this house will in no circumstances fight for king and country’. The newspaper alleged that this was the result of the triumph of ‘wooly minded communists, practical jokers and sexual indeterminates.’ Issues of gender and sexuality had by this time become widely recognized as having a vital bearing on the future of Britain. It is well known that Oscar Wilde’s queer self-construction was closely related to his classical education at Oxford, but the attitudes of the educational elite continued to play an important role in the development of metropolitan queer cultures from the activities of the Bloomsbury group to the party people who were referred to in the media as the ‘bright, young things’. An example was provided by the predominantly homosexual Cecil Beaton who was to become one of the leading celebrity photographers: he not only enjoyed photographing ladies but also dressing up as them. His success in the Cambridge University student review ‘All the Vogue’ led to him being acclaimed in The Drama magazine as ‘one of our greatest living actresses’. My paper explores evidence derived from the records of student literary and drama societies at Oxford and Cambridge that can be seen as providing a backdrop to the London party circuit. I shall be exploring the roles played by daring fashions and cross-dressing in the construction of queer identities through performance (both on and off stage).