Literary Salon: Queer Domesticity in Twentieth-Century Fiction and Poetry

Join Dr Hannah Roche from the University of York for an in-depth discussion of houses and homes in queer fiction and poetry of the twentieth century.

In this literary salon, we’ll explore the living spaces that accommodate LGBTQ+ characters and relationships in an exciting range of queer texts. From the domestic disorder of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) to the precarity of butch and trans spaces in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993), via Amy Lowell’s intensely sapphic home and garden and James Baldwin’s tragic Giovanni’s Room (1956), we’ll consider how the places we live shape who we are. We’ll take time to reflect on what ‘home’ means for LGBTQ+ people and communities today, and we may even have a go at writing some Tender Buttons poems of our own.

Extracts, poems, and questions for discussion will be provided in advance via a downloadable link.

Audience feedback on ‘At Home with Radclyffe Hall’, a talk by Dr Hannah Roche at Queer Britain in May 2025

‘It made me love The Well of Loneliness even more. It made me reflect on my own home life as a queer person/lesbian woman and consider how far we’d come. Hannah provided very illuminating context about Hall and other queer people in the 1920s and 30s. I learned a great deal about how views of sexual orientation and gender identity changed over time.’

‘I’m an avid reader but not usually of queer fiction—this talk has inspired me to find the queer “Bibles” and I can’t wait to get started!’

‘I always thought The Well of Loneliness was not for me but this talk changed my mind.’

Image Credits: Alice and Gertrude at 27 Rue de Fleurus, portrait by Man Ray, 1922. [Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division]

London Events Queer Britain Literary Poetry Discussion Talk

The Lineup

Hannah Roche is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of York. She is the author of The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance (Columbia University Press, 2019) and co-editor, with Jana Funke, of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (Oxford University Press, 2024). She is currently co-leading a major project on 100 Years of The Well of Loneliness.