Noel Coward in Jamaica: The (Neo)Imperialistic “Exile” of a Queer Metropolitan

The playwright and stage actor Noel Coward enjoyed a prolific, decades-long career on the London and Broadway stages following his first breakthrough in the mid-1920s. While craftily abiding a censor-enforced closetedness on-stage, Coward in his personal life was quite open about his sexuality with his confreres in metropolitan elite social circles, and he gathered around himself a large cadre of celebrities, queer and not, throughout the remainder of his life.

Coward enjoyed all the status markers of the most elite queer metropolitans of his time: whiteness, wealth, celebrity, the right passport (British). However, profligate spending and his hatred of Britain’s postwar tax increases drove Coward in 1949 to surrender his residency status in England and ultimately declare his custom-built villa in Jamaica as his official domicile. He thereby became a fixture of a transplanted white, gay social scene in the colony—fueled by vacationing celebrities from Hollywood and Broadway—that pulsed to life every winter. The contrast with the Jamaican society beyond these North Coast hideaways was profound: the rest of the colony’s residents were largely rural, poor, predominately black, and sexually conservative.

I use Coward’s personal papers pertaining to Jamaica to examine how this queer metropolitan made sense of and interacted with the larger Jamaican society during his self-chosen “exile.” Of particular interest are the ways his queer private life and queer desires intermingled, even in limited ways, with Jamaica’s majority culture. Overall, Coward’s life in Jamaica generally reinforces imperialist tropes, in which he and the queer metropolitan scene he fostered on the North Coast largely eschewed and differentiated themselves from those residing in nearby communities. Coward’s entitled sense of exile, and his equally entitled sense of queerness, thereby offer an opportunity to examine the potential intertwining of queerness and (neo)imperialism, even in the supposedly deprived context of exile.